Mike Smith, COO of Innovate+Educate
Employers should focus on finding workers with the right kinds of cognitive skills instead of placing a heavy emphasis on recruiting talent with a list of secondary degrees, suggests Michael Smith, COO of Innovate+Educate, a nonprofit industry-led organization. He reflected on his organization’s efforts to help close the skills gap last week at the inaugural Close It Summit in Washington.
Career Journal: How does Innovate+ Educate work to close the national skills gap?
Smith: People call this the opportunity divide. One thing that drives us is that we hear employers say ‘I can’t find qualified candidates, what’s wrong with the job pool?’ Then we hear from frustrated job seekers who can’t find a job.
What’s unique about us is we are starting to see, and starting to understand why employers are frustrated and why job seekers are frustrated and why educators get frustrated. They are frustrated about the same thing, but they are just not talking to each other.
We are all about ways to help find the hidden talent. As a national organization that’s trying to bridge this opportunity divide, we know we have to work with education, we have to work with employers. If you look at our board of directors, it’s employers, and it has to be industry led.
We truly believe that industry is going to shift the continuum to getting the right dialogue and the right systems in place to ensure that people are working and employers are getting the right people. We do this through collecting data and doing research and providing tools through products and services, to actually putting together what we’re calling whole ecosystems.
Career Journal: What is the benefit of having so many industries present at the Close It Summit?
Smith: This is a community-based effort. We know we have to change the community’s way of looking at this. [We have to] bring all those stakeholders together, and it’s about movement-building on a national level, and also, movement-building on a regional level.
Also, so we’ve learned a lot in the five years of our existence and here at the Close It Summit, (which) is our coming out party to bring the right people together. Let’s bring the right employers, let’s bring the right government agencies together, let’s bring the right regions together, let’s bring the right HR specialists together and let’s have a dialogue about what ‘s really going on, but also how can we move forward to solve this problem called the opportunity divide, this opportunity gap.
Career Journal: There is a heavy emphasis on cognitive skills in many sessions here. Can you explain why these skills are so important?
Smith: What we’ve learned over the past several years are a few things. One, there’s hidden talent. Two, some of the most predictable ways of hiring people is not just education, there are other ways such as cognitive assessments. Three, you have to really create a community to have this dialogue and try to really change the way we look at the challenge. Four, education has to be an active partner, especially the community colleges have to be an active partner in this because that’s where people go for those 80-85 percent of the jobs that really require cognitive skills. It’s a process and we look at really broad things. We know that education teaches content [skills]. But there are cognitive skills that are consistent across the board, such as reading for information, applied mathematics, locating information, work place observation.
Career Journal: How have you combined your research and findings with regional and state efforts, such as Talent Albuquerque?
Smith: The Kellogg Foundation came forward and offered a presentation with Dr. Merrilea Mayo, who’s one of our founders, and they were really interested in what we were saying and the fact that there is hidden talent out there. They are interested in the opportunity-youth, the certain age group of 16-24. They funded us with $6 million for three years and asked us to find out more about opportunity-youth.
Our approach from the start is that it’s a bigger picture than opportunity-youth. You have to change the whole system to be able to get them to plug in the game in a fair way. Eighty to 85 percent of the jobs in the research that we find and other research that ACT has provided shows that reading for information, applied mathematics, or locating information is consistent in 80-85 percent of the jobs. So how can we translate those skills?
We’re finding that we can capture that, so we funded skill-rating communities in New Mexico, in Las Cruces, in Farmington. The Las Cruces one is run by the Chamber of Commerce down there. We fund the local economic development bureau and in Albuquerque we’ve said with the support of the mayor and the city council and we put together Talent Albuquerque. It’s an organic system that recognizes talent. So we did some math and analysis based upon some real-time data that we had and said you have an invisible workforce and it was really amazing to show what we call our talent maps.
Career Journal: What about specific initiatives within Talent Albuquerque?
Smith: What we offer in a skills-based hiring system is a way to identify what a job requires when it comes to cognitive skills, and a way to identify whether a person does or does not have those minimal cognitive skills to get into that job and to be successful in that job at an entry level and then at a medium level after six months.
It’s a quick way to remediate, because it’s focused on training. So a person (can put) 30-40 hours into (a job) and then the employer says come back to me. The employer saves money and time in ramping up, the skills of training is done on that job seeker side and we always tell the employer, you know, a person who puts 30-40 hours into skilling up…what does that tell you about them. I think that they want the job.
The other thing that we do with Talent Albuquerque is we try to get from this reactive hiring system to this proactive hiring system and now we have all the data for these people who are qualified, so the employers see there is talent ready to do the job. So we offer employers a resource to reach out to that talent pool that we’ve already assessed and skilled up, and they can talk to them in a proactive sense instead of a reactive sense.
Career Journal: Moving forward into 2014, what is your vision for taking Innovate+Educate and related efforts such as the Close It Summit to the next level?
Smith: Even though we need to have national movement-building and a national dialogue, and The Close It Summit is really starting to have that within the right key stakeholders, we know that the employment (effort) if going to be regional, because every region has a unique culture difference, has a unique needs.
In industries such as manufacturing, there are so many opportunities and there are great stories to tell. Why can’t we systemize this, which we think that we can, and automate it to a certain extent where we can connect to it nationally. From region to region it’s transportable. Let’s face it, this generation coming into the workforce wants to be transportable, it’s transportable skills. Two years in a job and they’re tired.
We know that cognitive skills are very transportable skills. We want to help the workforce move (forward) as demands change.
