 Opportunity at Work is a one-year start-up. We were attracted to New America by Ann Marie's vision of a 21st-century think tank as a civic enterprise and, above all, the mission of connecting policy to action. A year ago, New America hosted a panel in the future of work and online talent platforms that flipped the usual question. Our focus was on how technology could enable more Americans, could be harnessed to support more Americans in succeeding and accessing the tremendous opportunities in a fast-moving and dynamic economy, how they could work and earn to their full potential. This is a critical part of a 21st-century social contract. It's not only the security in life's downsides, but also the opportunity to learn, to work, to discover one's potential and apply and to have access to meaningful work throughout a lifetime. That's opportunity at work's mission. We intend, in the next 10 years, our aim is to make the future of work brighter for at least a million Americans who are too often overlooked, like Roger, like many others, and in doing so to help create new 21st-century models of work and learning and a connective tissue across employment and education and civic life, connecting policy to action. Among our participants in that panel a year ago, Senator Mark Warner has been working actively in the past year here in D.C. and across the country to bridge divides in the gig economy. New America itself has launched the Better Life Lab to apply a wider definition of meaningful work, and New America, California, with a fabulous first class of fellows, entrepreneurs that are already making a difference on the ground. LinkedIn has developed and deployed version one of its amazing economic graph, taking all the data from LinkedIn and applying it locally. Working with the Markle Foundation, they've launched in Colorado and in Arizona, with Governor Hickenlooper in Colorado, and our own Michael Crow, New America board member and Arizona State University president, as conveners there. It's amazing work. LinkedIn has also been a great partner to opportunity to work, and over the past year, the Tech Hire Initiative, which you'll hear a bit more about, has expanded to 50 cities where there are 300,000 open IT jobs, and a tremendous amount of overlook talent, people with the ability and the desire to get into those jobs, and we're bringing that together there. Over 1,000 employers are signed up, 200 education and training institutions, 200 other community organizations, and just as we speak, part of Opportunate Works Team is in Rhode Island with Governor Raimondo signing up 80 of the largest companies in Rhode Island to hire Rhode Islanders based on skills. If they can do the job, they can get the job. They don't have to have the pedigree. If Roger succeeds in his studies, if he masters those skills he's pursuing, then nothing in Roger's history should hold him back from being able to realize that in the workplace. That's our mission. So, connecting policy to action. There was one other guy in that panel. He was the moderator, an interrogator. His name was Tom Friedman, and he's returned to lead the discussion this year. Now, Tom's a tremendously gifted moderator, and he needs no introduction as an interpreter and shaper of the big ideas of our times. But in his heart, Tom remains a beat reporter, chasing down one of the biggest, fastest-breaking news stories of our time. So, beat reporter Tom Friedman has also been out in the field this past year. So, we're looking forward to hearing what he's learned too. Welcome, Tom, and the panel. Well, Byron, thank you very much. It's great to be back a year later. Wonderful to do a neighborhood concert. The subject of our panel is the future of work. It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, because I'm working on a new book that is partly related to this subject. As I look at the labor market today, what I see is that every middle-class job is basically being pulled in four directions at once. It's being pulled up. It requires more skill. And the kinds of skill it requires are both what I would call more of the three R's, more read and write and arithmetic and coding, and more of the three C's, creativity, collaboration, communication, because all of these jobs are jobs that I like to call stempathy jobs. They require both stem and empathy. At the same time, every job is being pulled out. At the same time, more machines, robots, people in India and China can now compete for this job. And those jobs therefore require more of what I call the three M's, more self-motivation, because you are competing against more people. Every job is also being pulled down. It's being outsourced to history in the past even faster. It's being made obsolete, and that requires more of the three E's, more entrepreneurship, more innovation to invent newer jobs faster. And every job is also being pulled apart. It's being disaggregated, chopped up, farmed out in 14 different directions. That requires more of the three A's, agility, flexibility in order to adapt to that kind of world. So that's what I think is happening at the macro level. What I see happening here in this community, we're in the back, we're having a great conversation in the back room in the green room, but it's too bad you couldn't have been there. But we'll try to continue it. But I was just talking to our panelists and looking through the program here, and it's something I see all over the country when I travel now, which is just the amazing number of groups that have emerged to tackle this problem and opportunity at work in New America are just one of the many. And I was thinking to myself, imagine if we actually covered the news. If this volume of people working to solve the problem got a one-one-hundredth of the attention that ISIS gets, how actually we would look at the world differently? Because there really are so many more people working on the problem. And in my book, and if you're going to use this, please quote it, I really see these groups broken down into three categories. The first category I call Intelligent Assistance, A-N-C-E. That is, I've been spending a lot of time at companies. I'm actually profiling AT&T, human resources. And when you get inside these companies, it's amazing how much intelligent assistance they're now providing to their own employees for lifelong learning. At the same time, I'm seeing so many more intelligent assistants, A-N-T-S, where we're using technology to basically enable more and more workers to what I call live above the line. The average adaptation line goes like that. The Moore's Law goes like that. Basically, we're up here now. The average of people adapt is here. We need to enable people to jump the line. And I'm struck at how many innovations are happening around intelligent assistance, A-N-T-S. And lastly, and I think we've got a great representation here of that, the number of intelligent algorithms that are now emerging to connect people with jobs, with skills, and Byron just alluded to one of them. So that in five minutes is how I see the problem. And I'm done, and I'm going to go now. But before I do, I want to introduce our... We have an amazing panel that fits all these categories. To my immediate left is Liliana Monge, who is CEO of Sabio, a successful computer training school out of the Los Angeles area. Next to her is LaShonda Lewis. She's actually a former truck driver, a van driver, who's found her way to be a systems engineer at MasterCard in St. Louis. So therein lies the story. Next to her is my friend Alexis Ringwald, who's the CEO and co-founder of LearnUp, a venture back bay area startup to really bring people with skills that weren't certified into the labor market. And lastly, Karin Chopra, co-founder and partner in Opportunity at Work. And so I think we'll just do it in this order if we could. And if you wouldn't mind beginning, Liliana, just tell us a little bit about Sabio, how it works and how it fits into this framework. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. So Sabio started about three years ago. We are a social enterprise owned and operated by my husband and I. I like to call ourselves a mom and pop tech shop. I am the CEO and my husband is the CTO. So he's the person in the ground daily. And what we took upon ourselves as, you know, call our third baby is this new concept of kind of a modern day vocational program where we take people that are really smart, really motivated, and we help them become full-time software engineers. And it takes typically anywhere between three to six months. If you have absolutely zero, zero coding skills, if you've never seen HTML, it can take you the six months. If you have some experience, if you've already been toying around, if you're like Lashana, you've kind of been doing this for a long time, it could take you three months. So there's a flexibility there, which is really important because we have a lot of people that come to us that are unemployed or that they know a spouse has been given a notice and they've been unemployed. So it's important for us to be flexible and provide people the skills that they need so that they can enter this workforce. And, you know, it's so impressive to hear, I was here all day yesterday, and you hear the plight of the worker. And you hear, you talked about this a little bit earlier in terms of how things are becoming so binary when it comes to work and the type of talent that's needed. And, you know, these skills are so in demand and that's how we were able to become a social enterprise is because if we can get someone skilled up, trained up, they will be hired. We have about a 90% job placement rate for our job seekers and that job seeker means a very specific thing. We have a very, very detailed program that will get you into software engineering. And that's important because that's what our economy needs. Now, let me just interrupt you there for a second because I wanted to share something you shared backstage. So I show up at your place. I've been struggling, you know, in the work market. I tried this writing gig, it just didn't work out. And somebody told me I need to, you know, get up skilled a little bit. And what do you say to me? What's the first conversation we have? So our approach is that we welcome everyone and anyone that's hungry, motivated, and driven to succeed. I will give you free resources, codeacademy.com, go and complete the web track. Once you're done, do JavaScript and then do jQuery. Now, what does that mean do? What do I do actually? You go online, whether, you know, through your phone and app, you can go to your local library. These are open sites that should be open anywhere because they talked about that as well, you know, filtering the internet. So we made sure that we're using free online resources that are available to anyone. And immediately it starts telling you HTML is written this way. Try it. And you start coding. And you start learning. And I passed that core. It takes me a couple of weeks. Fantastic. When you're done, come back to me. I came back. Fantastic. Now we give you a book and then you get to come in person part-time. Part-time I come in. And what do I do? You're coding with an instructor and you're coding with other people that are in your same position. Am I paying for that? Yes, you are paying for that. How much does it cost me? It's $1,400 for the three months of part-time work. So I complete that. I'm motivated. Fantastic. The writing thing did not work out for me, but this code thing is. Then you get to sit down and have an assessment with our CTO. Uh-huh. If you pass that, then you're invited to do our full-time program, which is three months all day. So $700. $700. How much does that cost me? That's about $13,000. Uh-huh. And for about three months? Correct. And when I'm done, I really worked it out. I love this Java stuff. I passed your course. I'm in the red now for about $15,000. Uh-huh. Can I get a loan from you? Are there scholarships? There's a whole host of different financing options to work with a university. So if you are like millions of Americans that didn't complete your degree, you can enroll through Antioch University and get financial aid. If you're a GI, you may be able to get financial assistance, or you can also apply through Skills Fund. Okay. Six months later, I've graduated. I need a job. I've got to pay back my loans. What can you do for me? So two weeks before you graduate, there's a whole host of things that we do to make sure that you get hired. That includes taking wonderful headshots of you. Uh-huh. Putting you on LinkedIn. We leverage every single resource that we can. We put you on LinkedIn. We look through it. We help you craft your resume. And then we bring in recruiters to meet you and employers. How did I do in the mock interview? You didn't do that well, so you're going to have to have a second one. Yeah. It's a problem I've had. Terrific. Thank you very much. That's great. I really got to the bottom of it. So, Lashana, you... So you're driving this van and somehow you got from there to be a systems engineer at MasterCard. Could you like walk us through that? Yeah. Start at the beginning, if you would. I won't start. I got out of the van. But... But, right as I was doing the van job, I want you to go back to the beginning. Actually, where you were born before the van. Okay. I was raised in East St. Louis, Illinois. Some of you may know of it. It's also the home of Jackie Joyner-Kersie. So I'm kind of like really proud of it for that reason. But for the most part, East St. Louis is very, very poor. I grew up in the projects. My mom was poor on welfare. She had me at the age of 15. So there was like really many resources for us in the area. Growing up, I had a knack for fixing the things in the house. So I made this deal with my mom that there were things that I could definitely fix and definitely not fix. So she's like, you can fix the toaster, but don't touch the watch. So... She ended up developing stage three cancer when I was 10 years old. And I had two little sisters. So along with trying to help out with that, I was kind of like learning how to grow up very, very quickly. One of the things my mother recovered, so she's in remission. One of the things she said to me was that you need to do whatever you need to do. Life is short. You don't have that many opportunities. So if you want to do something, go for it. So I took that as seriously as you possibly can as 10 to 12 year old. And fast forward to high school I was trying to get into a couple of programs that were for boys. And so, you know, you don't want to build computers and things like that. And I said, I don't care. That's what I want to do. A computer science teacher saw me grab me and said, I want to start this programming class. Will you be in it? I decided to be in the programming class. He said, you're doing good. You're tutoring other students in the class. So I want you to go into computer science and college and seriously consider it. So I got there being the only girl in my computer science class in college still not caring still, you know, chugging along but I ran out of scholarship money. So I decided to go back home and I looked for jobs and the first job that I was able to find after looking for months was as a van driver for an after school program. I can just stop you there. And the point was, even though you had almost gotten your degree at Michigan Tech and computing because you didn't have that degree, it was like you had nothing. You were qualified to be a van driver. I was qualified to be a van driver. Most of the interviews I went to, I said, I studied computer science, I did these programming classes, these structural classes and they said, did you graduate? And I said, no. I didn't graduate. And they said, I'm sorry, we need someone with a bachelor's degree. Have you ever heard of lying? Yes. I have. But my philosophy was that I was able to catch up with you. So I said, you know, I didn't want to get halfway through the job and then they're like, you know, you're doing a fantastic job but you lied about the bachelor's degree. Yeah. So I said, you know, I would rather work somewhere that except me as who I fully am as opposed to, you know, lying my way through it. So I just kept pushing and after I left that job as a van driver because, let me back up, I ended up filling in for the computer science tutor in the after school program that ended up quitting because I was the only person that had computer science. So let me get this right. You're the van driver to the remediation school and you end up filling in for the teacher in the remediation school that's teaching computer science. Right. So I teach her classes and then I asked to have that position and they told me no because of the degree that you have, which is none. So I said, okay, well, you know, I don't know what to do with that. I'm doing the classes. I'm teaching. The kids are doing well and so I ended up leaving. The only job I could find after that was help desk. So I was resetting passwords for people for about what, 10 years and I ended up going to another job and being helped as supervisor and did that for a while. And then someone told me that the help desk supervisor job was out of university and I was taking some refresher courses in computer science and the instructors were like you should look at this launch code program. I've heard a lot about it and you seem like you'd be a great fit for it. You're on top of your programming. You know, do it. So bite the bullet. I go in June of 2014. I walk in, sit down. I'm doing some programming when the facilitators comes over says do you need any help? I said no. So then somebody else over inside needed help and I went over and I helped them and then I'm helping someone else and she sits me down and she says I have an opportunity for you. And that's where I found out about MasterCard and story kind of sets itself from there. That's great. Thank you for sharing that. So the last time I met Alexis Ringwald I was in New Delhi minding my own business walking down the street and two women come up to me and say baby would you like to ride in my solar car? And it was her and a classmate from Yale who had built a solar car and traveled around India with it with a rock band. Solar rock band. Solar rock band. We lost contact and then after this writing gig didn't work out for me I bumped into her in an unemployment line and she started interviewing me. Alexis pick up the story from there. Yeah a few years ago I went and spent six months in the unemployment lines of America on this personal learning journey. I understand why it was so hard to get a job in this country. I had been struck after living in New Delhi for three years about the tremendous growth and when I came back to the U.S. it was 2009 post financial crisis and I was like what happened here. In my listening journey across the country talking to job seekers at community colleges and unemployment offices I realized that there's this massive skills gap in the country but it applies also to the non-degree jobs of America and that 73% of jobs in this country don't require a college degree and if you look at the top 10 jobs by volume in America, nine out of the top 10 don't even require a high school degree. And what struck me was that it was still very difficult to get one of these jobs. What I saw with people applying and applying, never hearing back you put your resume out to hundreds, thousands of places, you never know what's wrong with you, you're always unqualified and no one tells you, well if you just knew these 10 things or if you just knew this you'd actually be a fit for a retail job or a customer service job. And so I ended up getting learn up, which is aiming to reinvent the whole system of how people get jobs in this country for entry level workers. What we do is we realize what if we just train people before they apply for the job, what if we tell them the skills ahead of time and they go through training and preparation and by the time they show up to the interview they're actually qualified. And so we've flipped the model and what we've done is we've partnered up with some of the biggest employers in America who have a key gap, others and we put job applicants massive volumes of applicants because these employers get millions of people hitting their career page every year, they're inundated with people and they're turning them away unqualified. They funnel them into learn up, we put them through training on how to be a cashier or a sales clerk Let me just stop you there. So I mean I can't I can't just show up and get a job as a sales clerk like at the gap and look at that. The skills are more complex than what people have today even to get a job at the gap they want you to know customer service and how to greet people in the fitting room and the cash register and somebody who's 19, not in school doesn't have that background and doesn't know what these skills are and so it's easy to not be qualified for it and they're easy to train for and that's what I saw the system was just so it was broken but easy and so by kind of going through this you know training on how to operate the cash register or how to greet people or how to welcome people into a store you come in, you now know what these things are and tell me now sort of where is the company today how many people are you serving who gets paid in all this how do you make your money, you're a for profit and what impact do you see What we found is when we put someone to learn up training it's all online how long does it take me couple hours, one to two hours it triples somebody's chance of getting the job because for these jobs just a little bit of training and coaching goes a long way to just applying for the job I'm a much better applicant if I know some of these basics yeah because right now you probably apply to a hundred places you don't even know what the job is you're just desperate for anything and you come in you don't really know what the role actually is so now you come in, you're qualified you're a job coach from our team so you come in prepared and ready you know what the job is you can speak to it, you know the skills and it triples your chances of getting the job with just a couple of hours of training and for the employer they're now getting potentially pre-qualified, highly qualified candidates delivered for interviews and what we found is when applicants pre-train not only do they get hired faster but they actually end up staying longer on the job and performing better because they know what they're getting into versus in the current model you apply, you're desperate and finally you get a job and you show up and you're like oh this is not what I wanted to do and then you bounce and then you go try and look for something else because there's nothing in the system today to empower you as an applicant to actually get the job everything is about weeding you out telling you you're not a fit nothing's about qualifying you in and saying this is how you go do it so I've never been on a job interview and I don't have any of my network to ask what do I wear who can I ask that's what we found part of our learning and building learn-up was that it's not just a skills gap but there's actually a hope gap we took our team to a town two hours from San Francisco with a 39% unemployment rate and found that even if there's all these technical tools resume.com or whatever to get a job you still need to believe in yourself and someone has to believe in you that you can actually go do it and so we added the coach to learn up and we now proactively give you advice on what to wear and when to show up and who you're going to meet with can you imagine going to an interview and not even knowing the name of the person that's what it's like for most people where to go and what confidence went to say and most importantly someone was like you can do it and so we found by tackling both the skills gap and the hope gap and do this at scale with hundreds of thousands of people I do like that hope gap with one click one touch I can get hope that's really important I think um so it's been fascinating Karn what do you make of all of this and how is opportunity at work interfacing with both these opportunities and the challenges you see out there what do I make of all of it Alexis used a word hope I think why this matters there's another word that comes to my mind which is dignity so each one of us here wants to be able to contribute to use our talents in some productive way to feel like what we're doing has value and is valued and then earn a living based on that to give us the economic security for ourselves and for our loved ones that is shared across everyone in this room everyone across the country and the stories here are stories of people who don't feel they can do that and that is fundamentally an issue of dignity and everyone has the right to dignity so that's why this matters and it also matters because it strikes me Liana talks about her students Lashana talks about her story on the employment line the scale of the problem Lashana is not alone when we add it all up this affects half the label market there are 70 to 80 million people who are in that situation so one off programs are not going to make a dent in this problem and I'll give you a few of them so there are 35 million people who started college and didn't finish and if the currency for learning is baked into the degree or if the justification for inclusion for a job is based on that what are we signaling to the 35 million people those people have learned something in their life experiences on jobs that they've been doing the college that they went to before they dropped out there was learning there but how is that learning valued in the market today and so part of what we make of all of this is in our mission statement which is how do you rewire the market so that Americans can work, learn and earn to their full potential and there are three elements to that opportunity at work focuses on one is how do you build a network of employers who are hiring based on mastery of pedigree so demonstration to do the job not based on a pedigree measure or have you done this exact same job previously and that matters because it matters for Liliana to be able to connect her students into a network like that it matters for LaShawna to know that there are jobs out there where if I went there and I took the coding test I would pass with flying colors and I would get the job I would not be trained in from what I am doing and most importantly it matters to create a signal into the market for training if you here today know that there is a massive demand for javascript and employers are willing to hire people who can show that they can do it you will have a business model as a trainer and you can go do that to then have all these people working on that so that's the first one a network of employers and there are the tech hire brand that opportunity at work is architecting that are hiring based on mastery the second is then a network of training providers and educators who are training based on the in-demand skills today and more importantly are allowing their students to demonstrate their skill and today with technology you can put your code up on github you can take a technical assessment that can show you that interview Tom your interview with her CTO when you applied and your assessment at the end is about demonstrating you demonstrating your skill and now when you connect that to the employer network you start making the match and you start closing the mismatches that exist in the market today and the third one is financing so you could do all this but if you don't have the $15,000 to go through Liliana's program you are stuck out of it and the vast majority of people who are going to the accelerated training programs today are paying either through their own savings or through family savings which underrepresented low income job seekers just don't have access to so what does a financing market look like for talent and those are the three elements but the fundamental thing if I had to boil it down to one word of what we do is if you could do the job you should get the job that you should have So it's been fantastic I think one of the things going on at the macro level in the country and the world and this is what my book is about is that I think we are in the middle of three nonlinear accelerations all at the same time with the three largest forces on the planet the market, mother nature and Moore's law so if you put mother nature, climate change on a graph we know what it looks like, famous hockey stick if you put the market that's globalization for me and not trade but globalization of flows on a graph we know what it looks like a hockey stick and if you put Moore's law on a graph we sure know what that looks like, a hockey stick and anyone who tells you Moore's law is running out has not been to Intel so we're actually in the middle of these three accelerations and I think that what is going on is it's reshaping everything including the world of work and what it started to do finally is reshape our politics because our two party system based on the New Deal and the industrial revolution basically these left, right actually can't accommodate the radical nature of the real choices we have to make in the age of acceleration and Donald Trump is many things but he will be remembered as the person who I think did the Lord's work and began blowing up the Republican party by mixing and matching things that were never part of their left right agenda now Bernie Sanders is actually doing the same thing I think both parties are blowing up same things going on with the British labor party it's actually going on all over the industrial world actually what's happening is weak states are blowing up and strong states having their politics blow up, they're imploding so I think what we're actually in the beginning of is redoing our real politics and when you just talked about what's going on there how do we finance this how do we incentivize it so my own politics is I'm actually a non-partisan extremist because I think I'm actually not for a third party I'm for a fourth party and the fourth party which I think will be the next politics is I'm actually to the left of Bernie Sanders on a lot of issues I think we need more in different safety nets for this age of acceleration I'm actually to the right of the Wall Street Journal editorial page I think we need to get radically entrepreneurial at the same time so help me fill out my agenda now on the basis of what you've all said in the world that we're talking about shouldn't all learning at any accredited institution be tax free if we're telling people that learning now is not something you do for four years and then you're armed for the rest of your life but it's got to be something you do all your life if hedge fund managers can write off their carried interest or whatever that knucklehead provision is shouldn't every person be able to write off the cost of their education if everything I'm hearing from all of you is we need to do that for the rest of our lives anybody want to take that up? I'll start if I parse that out so every individual being able to write off their learning the meta for me is talent financing at the individual level what does it mean for the individual to be able to manage their cash flow to do learning at all different stages of life in all different forms and how is that value by the market if I took that a step further I said what if every individual in this room could also pick another individual to invest in which would be the other side because you're talking about the use of capital where's the source of capital and what would that world look like if we could do it so today there's a crowdfunding platform called GoFundMe that has had 2 billion dollars GoFundMe and 100 million of it is education causes and it's completely philanthropic you could play with that a lot these are people who are just giving money away as a scholarship to someone so on and so forth do I go on there because I want to fund someone and you are matching with you who are looking for the fund that's right but it's purely as charity interesting now Liliana's students are coming in at a lot of these boot camps at like 20,000 dollars a year they graduate and they're earning 60,000 dollars a year think of the ROI on that for that individual so why are we in this capital market today that says to fund it you either need to go through some policy that was written 10 years ago that allowed you this stream of funding or a FICO system that is not based on your potential your future potential it's based on your past entirely and you will be screened out not screened in of that system or a scholarship when there actually is return on investment on what I'm doing as an individual here and the biggest checkbook actually sits with employers so the employers spend 10 to 30 times more money on training than the government does and where is that connection of how the employers on what they're spending today with billions of dollars on their balance sheet connects to a Lashana they will spend 17,000 dollars today just trying to recruit someone it will cost if she didn't have any training it will cost her 50,000 dollars to get the skill so I think to take it even a step further there are complete mismatches in the capital market today where we don't think about financing of talent in any systematic way the sources and uses of capital are mismatched and the ROI exists they don't exist for everything if you take someone and you had to give them all the support services including childcare including subsidizing their laptop including two years worth of training maybe not for that but there are millions and millions of people for whom there is an ROI they just can't get access to that capital I would add one other thing I think that if you made actually life long learning tax deductible what you'd get is an explosion of life long teaching because there's everyone in this room actually I'm a big believer in something to teach and you now have platforms where they could actually one on one get a column because it didn't work out for me as a columnist but you know whatever there's I think you'd actually meet it would actually cure some of the unemployment so maybe with that in mind let me ask everybody this question President Clinton or President Trump is here alright and you get one ask of her and maybe him and knowing what you know about the labor market and your experiences what is your one ask that you think would make the biggest difference in scaling what you started so it would definitely have to be around the financing mechanism and it would be a completely new model it'd be you know Karen and I have had a lot of conversations around this and it would definitely be a new model I wouldn't sit here and say oh you know it has to be a scholarship or because that ROI exists and if you find the right person that has the right mindset that is motivated that is dedicated and you find them you give them that dignity where they say we get people who come to us who are super bored they're just like oh my gosh I'm not doing anything in my day and I hear that so much and so you have all this untapped talent and then you harness that talent you give them you know flexible financing options and they are more than happy to pay that back to create something that's very sustainable because that's very important sustainable offering returns to the market so that everyone is invested in this type of success Great Shana what would be your ask? I would add on to that you know how do you make it reachable how do you make things like this reachable because when I was thinking about going back and refreshing my knowledge I was lucky enough that at the time I worked for a university that had tuition remission so I could go and take my refresher classes in computer science that would have cost thousands of dollars for me but I was already motivated to do that by myself I wasn't even doing a job that involved computer science I wanted to keep up with my lessons so you've got those people who are motivated and they're just looking for something reachable to say you know I want to go out there and I want to get the latest technology learning mechanism or I want to learn about whatever's going on but you know if they're blocked by something whether it be you know do you have a bachelor's degree already before you take this or you know maybe they don't have the funds how are you going to open that door for them and say this is another venue you could use to get that knowledge that you need Interesting Lex? I think more powerful than any policy change is an ask from future president for a shift in mindset I feel that today we talked about the employment sector it's a rejection business and asking employers to think about it as an empowerment a weed in a filter in mentality and looking at the ROI of getting you know qualified educated people to drive the revenue drive the GDP of the country to be a mindset shift of the workforce to lift themselves up when the Chinese president a couple years ago announced the Chinese dream I thought we need more of that to remind people that there is hope and that if they put a little bit of effort in that they actually can lift themselves up and find a way up through all these different programs so it's a mind shift that I would ask the president to push for 100% with that and maybe to add to that and then I'll sort of share another ask but to add to it would be the job market is extremely local most people they get a job very close to where they live but they're unlike the people in this room here so that's so how does the president do the mindset shift and the mobilization also to encourage the civic infrastructure that exists in cities in counties in states to have employers sign up based on skills to have educators plugged in to have the workforce system providing the set of support services that they need because to solve this problem you're going to have to solve it locally one place after the other but if you try to fix one and then move to the other you'll never solve the problem so how do you actually mobilize this from the bottom up in a multi local way would be sort of just to add to Alexis point and the second thing comes back to the Tom you mentioned you're sort of the market more slow than mother nature people often also use planet profit people as an example and we've got I think great accounting standards financial instruments ratios whether it's IRR whether it's IROIC or ONA for profit people are thinking a lot about planet right Ted Elstad sort of released you know stuff yesterday talking about climate both tax and dividends and how would you think about a market for the planet what would be the vision for for people what would be the vision of a capital market that worked for people and how could we set an agenda for that because I think we're on the path for the other two interesting let's go from the other end from the one thing that's interesting common denominator between you all is is this point about hope my friend Amy Lovins found the Rocky Mountain Institute I was interviewing a while back and I asked him if he was an optimist or a pessimist and he said I'm neither because they're just two different forms of fatalism each one says it's going to be all gonna be fine the other is all gonna be awful you know and Amy says I believe in applied hope you know and I think there's a lot a lot to that because one of the things that's clear to me you know there there has been a giant if the world had a meter on it for the last for the 50 years after World War II that meter was set to the left and the closer you were to the Soviet Union the more that meter was to the left and it pointed to a sign that says you live in a world of defined benefits and I think what's happened the age of acceleration is that thing has whipped over here and now it says you live in a world of defined contributions and by the way with big data we can identify exactly what your contribution is and so the the meta meta shift that's happened and I think part of what's roiling the country now is the fact that more will be on you that motivation and self motivation grit persistence all of those things they will matter more the system is just not set up to give you defined benefits anymore it's it's give you defined contributions and this challenge of Marina Gorba who runs the Institute of the Future and Palo Alto likes to say we used to talk about the digital divide but there's actually not going to be a digital divide in five years it'll all be taken care of but there will be another more important divide and that's the motivational divide because when everyone's wired then it's your motivation up against someone else so I think that's really important and what strikes me about what you all said is that part of motivation some people like Lashana you're just born with it, you're wired with it the toaster is broken you fix it but other people just look at the toaster and one reason people can be unmotivated is because they have no hope also and so there's a real this point it's why when Alexa told me about her website you know I love this idea of the coach there was a great study that Gallup did five years ago of college grads five years out of school and they asked them are you happy with your job and your life and it's a giant study and they then drilled down to the people who said yes I'm happy and they had two things in common they had had an internship somewhere along the way in something they were interested in a professor, a coach who took an interest in their hopes and dreams so before we end just talk about that how do we get a hope button on everybody and why do you think that's important so you know part of the work that we do that's very very important and very closely tied to this is positive storytelling so and that drives hope and all of that is you know it's an ecosystem you know the work that we do is very important because these accelerated programs allow us to hack the system and to get more women and more people of color into this system so you know half of our population is female they need to know and I think a larger part of the labor market is female they need to know they need to hope and aspire to all kinds of careers Hollywood, digital so important so you know we hack the system and we create that hope and we drive it by creating those positive stories every time someone gets hired you go to our blog you see their face and you hear their story you know you see Lorana she was a yoga teacher now she's you know working as a tech specialist and that drives that hope so that someone else who's you know laid up up late at night at 2am and they're like ah what am I going to do you know trolling the internet and they see Lorana's face and they're like hey here's a young lady what is she up to they read her story and then they're like that hope and you know the ecosystem of opportunity definitely can be fostered and it has to be fostered you know in Hollywood plays a huge part I'm super happy when I see that you know a hacker's a woman a woman of color I think that was the case in like the last Fast and Furious and you need to see more of that and so there needs to be a lot of work interdisciplinary work to kind of drive all of that that's great Sean I have to see Fast and Furious I didn't see that from the perspective of something that actually happened I was leaving to go to the White House for the Tech Hire Initiative where my story was being featured and President Obama talked about me for 3 minutes and it's still kind of fuzzy in my head and before I left a woman asked me to sit and speak with a bunch of high schoolers female who were being honored for doing all of these scientific kind of studies and things in the area and I don't know if anyone's read Amy Cuddy's Presence or seen her Ted Talk but that popped in my head and I said you know I'm going to stand there and I'm just going to have them do what's called the Wonder Woman Pose which is one of the power poses and I did it like as a last whim at the end of my speech and then I got on the plane and I left and I came back to launch code just to kind of talk and see how things were going and one woman grabbed me and she said my daughter was in that audience and she heard everything and she's having me do the power poses 2 minutes every morning and to me you know I'm just thinking okay I need to say something and I want to leave something positive but even just taking that moment to just talk to them something that I thought was maybe even a throwaway speech is something that kind of keeps me going and I'm thinking if I can just spread that and it spreads from there then you know I've planted some sort of seed without even knowing and I'm learning that it's not necessarily it doesn't have to be purposeful it could just be something that you're just doing to try to help and as long as you try it seems like something happens, something starts. Thank you. Alexis. I feel like I've learned in this era of more technology, more decisions, more options it's so overwhelming for people to manage their lives and so we've realized that you also need this intelligent assistant. You need someone to tell you where to go what to look for, what to wear when to show up, what are your options what do you do in the event that you might be late, how do you handle all these different decisions that you have to make to manage your life, to get your job and stay on the job and manage your finances and support your kids and if people around you don't know what to do and if your parents don't have that experience, you're really on your own and so for us what we've learned we built this into what we're building is by having this coach who guides you and gives you advice and can answer these simple questions that would otherwise just like make you fall out of the system you can help people really continue along and stay on their path. Perfect, thank you. Karin, close this up. In the work we do at TechHire which is 50 cities across the country we see everything that they talked about here how do we scale that hope and I think the answer is networks so it's online networks whether it's sort of I can see the profile of the person who got the job I'm in a chat group with everyone that's doing this or offline networks very importantly so launch code that Lashana mentioned runs a CS50 class that is online but they get right now in Rhode Island in Providence where we sort of architect at TechHire there you have 200 people who are getting together twice a week to learn together to do this in the evenings and that's an offline network that is happening but how do you allow these networks to be able to tap into the stories the support both the intelligent assistant but also the intelligent assistants that exist and in the age of technology we actually can do this powerfully Terrific. This has been a great panel Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.