Podcast
Podcast
- 06 Sep 2023
- Managing the Future of Work
Chike Aguh on government innovation in workforce development
Joe Fuller: The federal government has seldom been accused of getting out ahead of important workforce trends, but there are signs that the bureaucratic business as usual might be changing. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Labor has initiated a number of programs aimed at bringing workers up to speed in a rapidly advancing digital economy. Those programs have been complimented by workforce development efforts tied to investments in infrastructure and emerging industrial policies. Will such efforts narrow the skills gap and increase economic opportunity? And as technologies like artificial intelligence change the nature of employment, what’s the proper regulatory response?
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Chike Aguh, former Chief Innovation Officer at the U.S. Department of Labor in the Biden administration. We’ll talk about the department’s role in fostering workforce development and safeguarding worker rights, and we’ll also consider the potential roles for the federal government in helping America’s workforce development system respond to the changes emerging in the labor market. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, Chike.
Chike Aguh: Thank you so much for having me.
Fuller: Why don’t we start with a little bit of your journey to becoming the Chief Innovation Officer at the Department of Labor?
Aguh: My family is from a far and out of the way village in Nigeria that most Nigerians, themselves, will never go to and never visit. None of my grandparents went past middle school. My parents had Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms and kind of what changed life for them and from really the course of my family is they got golden tickets to come and study here in the United States of America. And I am the first person in the entire history of my family born in America, and I got to be an appointee of an American president. When we look at the data, what I just described to you was very unlikely in America still today, particularly for a family that’s Black like mine, that grew up poor like mine, that’s immigrant like mine. And the question is, how do we make those types of outcomes, not fate, but the result of systems and the result of choices that we make as a society? And for me, partially what made this possible was the availability of skills and economic opportunity. And so that’s where I have focused. So I’ve done the chutes and ladders across my career from local and state government with Deval Patrick, back when I was a grad student here, actually, to the Bloomberg administration, when I came right out of undergraduate, all working in education policy, everything from K–12 all the way up to college access. The nonprofit space, running a nonprofit focus on broadband access for families with kids. Also working with community colleges, trying to get them to help reskill underserved populations. And then in the private sector, working at an education technology company and corporate strategy, as well as working as a consultant with CHROs of big blue-chip companies, as well as folks like the NBA. So this weird mélange of experiences kind of brought me into the administration. I got the call for this job on January 7, 2021, the day after the insurrection. And anyone who knows in D.C. where Labor is, it’s right behind Capitol Hill. And so when I got the call, my wife was like, “Are you sure you want to take this role?” But I couldn’t think of a more important job to take at a more important time.
Fuller: I think the Department of Labor is a little bit of a mystery to a lot of people. They may know elements of it, like OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—but I guess even reasonably well-informed citizens really don’t understand its full breadth and mandate. Could you just give us a little bit of a primer on that?
Aguh: If you think about the three functions of the Department of Labor, they are, one, labor market information—basically knowing what’s happening with the American work and the American economy. Think of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs, numbers, inflation, as well as unemployment statistics, things like that. They are the best in the world at what they do, and they’ve been doing it for more than a century. The second function, which we properly call “worker investment,” it’s the biggest function by budget. This is workforce development, this is unemployment insurance benefits, trade adjustment assistance for folks who’ve lost their jobs due to trade. This is foreign labor certification, H1-B, H2-A, H2-B. This is apprenticeship. This is Job Corps, as well as work with our veterans who are exiting service to get jobs. This is female workers, the Women’s Bureau, which has been around since the ’20s, the Office of Disability Employment Policy for the millions of workers with disabilities, making sure that they are all supported within this economy. And I broadly say, we are investing in workers so that they can make their own economic choices. The biggest function by FTE is worker protection. This is OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This is the Wage and Hour Division, which basically makes sure that we are paying workers what they’re supposed to be getting. It is also the Employee Benefit Security Administration, which regulates every private benefit given by a company in this country, $11 trillion of wealth for 150 million Americans. We inspect every mine in this country, all 13,000 of them, four times a year by law. And, actually, after the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, the largest enforcement agency in the federal government is the Department of Labor. So we have tons of lawyers, we have tons of people out in the field with the goal of protecting workers’ rights to make sure that they’re safe and dignified—15,000 FTEs, a $15 billion discretionary budget, hundreds of regional offices around the country.
Fuller: So I don’t think that many people immediately associate federal bureaucracies with the word “innovation,” and you were the Chief Innovation Officer. What was your specific ambit, and how did you conceive of innovation in a bureaucratic setting, where so much of what’s done is driven by legislation, is driven by process and procedure, legal precedent, administrative, legal precedent?
Aguh: I think it’s important to start with, “What is the definition of innovation?” And so, one I took from an old boss of mine, Jim Shelton, who’s now at Blue Meridian, “innovation” is a new way of doing something done at scale for a purpose. There are lots of inventions that happen, and inventions aren’t helpful because they only reach a few people. We have to figure out scale, particularly when you’re in the government. And my job was to take that definition and apply it to the way that we did business at the Department of Labor, and also to serve as kind of the principal adviser on emerging technologies to the secretary and the deputy secretary along two fronts: One, how do these technologies affect the American worker—everything from generative AI to XR to quantum computing to UAVs and everything in-between. And then, also, how can we use these technologies to actually advance workers? I spent two and a half years working on unemployment insurance—in many ways, during the pandemic, a triumph, probably the largest income transfer program in the history of the country stood up in 38 days, but also one that had a lot of challenges because of the federated nature of it. A lot of people didn’t get their checks in time. Not every category of worker was equally served by that system, and we had huge integrity issues that we had never seen before. And when you looked at a lot of the issues, a lot of it was, frankly… the way that the system is delivered to a lot of people is, frankly, super clunky, not a great user interface. And in many ways, the lessons that a lot of us have seen from consumer technology—I like to say people like Amazon make it really easy for us to buy stuff that we do not need, particularly those of us who have means. Whereas benefits that literally keep people in their homes, keep people fed, we make really hard to get. And when they do get them, then we make people spend a lot of time and a lot of effort. We have to change that model. They’re spending a lot of time with $2 billion from the American Rescue Plan trying to overhaul their system, all the way to how do we use big data with our wage and hour division to potentially find businesses who are shorting workers on wages—not necessarily by having to go door to door and knock business to business, but actually are there things we can see in tax filing data that indicate there might be wage staff going on so that we can be much more efficient on how we deploy limited resources—and things in-between. I was the liaison to the National Space Council, which I think was because I could go to the meetings to be the very honest. But thinking through how can we, at the Department of Labor, help fill in the technical workforce gap, the welders, electricians, machinists, who we need for that industry, who we actually don’t have enough of right now.
Fuller: Let’s just double-click on a couple of the things you mentioned, Chike, and you’ll be completely unsurprised that one I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about is how AI will affect, not algorithmic traders or performance marketers, but everyday working-class Americans.
Aguh: I think, for AI specifically, what’s some of the promise that I see? For businesses and for workers for whom they don’t have infinite resources, this can be a force multiplier. I’ll use a very specific example. I think about a social entrepreneur that I know in D.C. He runs a nonprofit focused on helping returning citizens get back to work after they leave, which we know is an unbelievably challenged population. Four-person nonprofit. They need a website. He’s like, “I can’t pay a contractor. I use ChatGPT to write the base code, and I probably will never hire someone to do that work for me again. And I can now run my business and help all these folks who are coming out of incarceration.” There is a parallel I have to think about in terms of AI obviating certain jobs. In the very short term, the biggest issue is people with AI skills will obviate people who don’t. So the lesson that I take from that bit of promise is, how do we make sure that we get the most vulnerable populations those skills as quickly as possible? Again, I believe in the next five years, probably the next two years, knowing how to use ChatGPT and writing the right prompts will be as critical to a job as being able to use Google Search. But let’s just talk about hiring, which you talked about. Even before generative AI, you had many AI and machine learning power tools used by companies to do the front end of resume scraping. “Hey, who am I going to interview? Who’s going to get that first round?” And what you would find is the tools aren’t perfect. And not only did you see bias along lines of demography, but you would also see people with the requisite talent actually being screened out of the process. So I spent years in my role, I met with probably 50 C-suite teams from companies across the Fortune 2000. And at times some of these tools frankly create your problem. They’re screening out talent that you should be looking at, but you don’t necessarily have the tools. You may not have the skills-based hiring practices to be able to evaluate them, and you’re creating your own problem. You are actually keeping billets open that actually are affecting your bottom line. And so that is a peril—that it’s not just bad from an equity point of view, it’s bad for your business. Basically, AI is as smart or as biased as we are. And in some ways, it takes art and wisdom, and it scales. It takes our biases, and it scales it. And so the question is, you have to mitigate those at scale as well and in ways that don’t hurt your business. One of the things that I saw during my work on unemployment insurance is, one of the key barriers was that most workers who are eligible for unemployment insurance didn’t know it, or they just assumed they weren’t eligible because of this or that. If we could use tools like generative AI to proactively, number one, you, Joe, just lost your job, you are eligible for this program, and I’m going to geolocate a text to your location and say, “Hey Joe, I think you just lost your job. Hey, here’s a link. You actually should apply for UI in your state.” Again, instead of, I’m going to make Joe go to an office, wait for half a day, maybe have the right form, maybe not, I’m going to actually go to that person and proactively do that. That’s something that we can never do at scale before, because it would require a human being. But now potentially these are tools that can make something like that possible. So thinking outside the box is how I think we get the promise of these, but also I think it kind of mitigates some of that peril.
Fuller: There’s no doubt that AI is going to be a two-edged sword, and certainly our research indicates that even the more simple, streamlined AI in things like applicant tracking systems did have the effect of creating artificial shortages of candidates, because companies had tuned their processes to actually interview an absolute minimum number of candidates. And all that does is create an outcome which excludes qualified candidates. And the funny thing is, in our research, 90 percent-plus of companies admit that. As you think about AI and the regulation of AI as it relates to hiring evaluation, what do you think the issues that people need to keep in mind, what are the trade-offs going to be between harnessing this technology in the way you were just alluding to at the end of your comment, versus letting it ride and litigating after the fact if there are damages done?
Aguh: Right now, for most applicants to most jobs, they may or may not know if those tools are being used. And I actually think that’s important, and I actually think all the rules that you’ve seen around just basic disclosure, I actually think it’s important. Number two—and I was actually at IBM’s MIT lab yesterday—their AI lab is there, and they’ve done a lot of work around explainability. So an AI tool is used; I didn’t get interviewed. If I want to know why, I should be able to find out. I think thirdly, you’re hearing a lot about audit functions. There should be some type of audit done on an irregular basis so people can kick the tires. But I also would say, let’s flip this for a second. I would argue it’s harder for businesses to think about using these tools in ways that widen the aperture, versus close them in this sense. Most companies mathematically can’t simply hire from the communities they’ve always hired from to fill all their billets. They just can’t. If they could, they would never have come to talk to me. So the question is, “Okay, how do we begin to use these technologies in terms of awareness creation?” In my home county at Prince George’s in Maryland, we have the largest casino on the eastern seaboard, MGM. And for years they had open jobs. Things that actually are not that hard to train for: CDL, groundskeeping, food service. In my county, about 35 minutes from there, there are a number of communities where the unemployment is two points above the Maryland average consistently. So you basically have work that needs to get done and people who need work, which is crazy to me, living 35 minutes apart for jobs that aren’t that hard to train for, you could train for within 12 weeks, probably less. Imagine using AI to make those people aware that those jobs exist, and then helping those folks figure out, “Okay, here’s actually how I get there. Here are the two buses that I need to take.” So getting people to think outside the model. And I still think we have in too many companies, “Well, the talent’s not showing up.” Well, you actually need to go get it.
Fuller: We don’t have a way for getting into formal employment.
Aguh: Exactly.
Fuller: But let’s go to another issue you raised, which is something we’ve studied here at our project for a number of years, which is the skills shortage that you see in graying areas in the workforce, often in manufacturing, in certain construction trades. We have a terrible problem right now, for example, in U.S. Navy shipyards finding workers, particularly pipe fitters. And, now, I must admit, building a U.S. Navy submarine in New London [County], Connecticut outside in February, I can imagine that that is not the most appealing job description, but an excellent-paying job and highly secure. In my time studying this, which is 12 or so years, that problem has been widely discussed by policymakers. It has become a growing subject of anxiety and urgency in the corporate world. Why are we failing to respond? And as a second question, at the federal government level, who has the ball? Because the Department of Commerce is deeply involved in some of this stuff. Obviously, this is the origins of the Department of Labor. Obviously, one of our big issues is what future aspiring workers coming out of K–12 systems are learning. So I’m curious about hearing both your thoughts about why this problem is so persistent, and also, is the federal government really configured to intervene in ways that are going to change it, or is this really something that’s more at the level of states and municipalities, and maybe the federal government’s charge is to be galvanizing more innovation experimentation at that level?
Aguh: How much time do we have? I can talk about the meaning of life after this.
Fuller: Okay.
Aguh: But no, no. So a couple pieces of your question. One thing that this administration focused a lot on—and definitely in my time with the Department focused on—was job quality and good jobs being a big part of this. And you’ll hear from Joe Biden all the way to my boss, Marty Walsh, to Julie Su, who was my direct boss, talk about this. And one example that I’ll give very specifically is trucking. There are many parts of that job, as well as it pays, sometimes that are not the greatest.
Fuller: Yeah, demanding.
Aguh: And in a historically tight labor market, people have choices. So economically, if I can get paid the same and have an easier job, I’m going to take that. And so now how do we make trucking a more appealing job? And it’s not just about wage and benefit at the Department of Labor; obviously we think about the right to organize. We would think about, frankly, freedom from discrimination. The ability to get training and advancement. Last summer, the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce released joint principles on what are in good jobs around five elements: wages, benefits, right to organize, freedom from discrimination, and advancement and access to training. We have too few companies thinking along across all those measures to attract people into those jobs. And it’s important when you have a historically tight labor market, depending on how you look at the data, the American workforce is either stagnant or shrinking in size. I’m in a historic competition for talent, even compared to when that “war for talent” term was created. You have named in the federal government all the people who touch part of the ball there. And again, state governments, local governments. The nature of the solution is multisector and multilevel. The bigger issue is even if you were to reorg the federal government—take an unemployment insurance system, which is in many ways usually from the people, the gateway to training for example, or to job placement. It’s a 53-state system. Unless you’re going to change the 1935 Social Security Act, it is what it is. Similarly, in the end, most training if you look at the data is done by corporations, it’s done by businesses. So how do we get them involved? So I’d argue the federal government’s best at deploying capital and enforcing incentives and changing behavior. There are certain things that other people, because they’re more proximate to the worker, may be better suited to do. And so everyone’s like, “Okay, what’s my competitive advantage within this space? And then, how do we kind of move in the same direction?” Again, I would say for the first time, I think, in a long time, would we get the beginnings of an industrial policy in this country, which for many is a very dirty word. But when we look at, particularly, our geopolitical competitors, that I think is another role of the federal government. What are we shooting at? What is talent that we actually want to have? If we want to be a leader in generative AI, for example, that requires certain talent. We want to be a leader in XR [extended reality] technology, that requires certain talent. And to be honest, we can’t just depend on the state of Maryland, the state of California, the state of Texas to figure it out. We need a bit of a North Star. And then, how do we basically resource people and incentivize people to help do that? We have two big problems in America. And I also believe the federal government has a role to enforce that as a principle and to show people the opportunity. When I have companies explaining that they don’t have the workers that they need, a couple of questions I ask: “All right, which of you wants people with incarceration who have records? How do you deal with that? If someone didn’t have a degree, how would you assess they can do the job that you want them to do? If someone went through a training program that you, yourself, endorsed, tell me the easy streamlined path from that training program through HR into a job.” Too few companies have the right answers to those questions—or have answers at all.
Fuller: What you’re saying is completely consistent with our research findings over the last decade. The employers in the U.S. consistently adopt a posture that the way the system is supposed to work, there should be a steady supply of people who are prepared to do the work that they are advertising in job postings at the all-in economics that they’re offering, and somehow the system is broken if that’s not the case.
Aguh: I call it the Domino’s Pizza theory of job training. I call up, I order certain workers, ready to go. And it doesn’t work that way, particularly in an economy where occupations are growing and changing so fast. A year ago, the job “prompt engineer” did not exist. If you look at the projections from my colleagues at the Burning Glass Institute of what that’s going to look like in five years, no system can practically move that fast without your input as an employer. And so that’s why, again, I talk about the need for co-design between employers, training institutions, the federal government. And I would argue you need a degree of collaboration that is uncomfortable to be successful. You have to figure out what skills are required for the jobs that you need. And by the way, you internally need to agree on what those skills are. I’ve gone to many companies and asked two people about the same job and gotten different answers.
Fuller: Yes, that’s also very consistent with our research, as is just a general finding that the quality and the timeliness and the flow rate of information in the labor market is terrible compared to most markets, in terms of it doesn’t have standard syntax, things are time-lagged. We don’t have accurate numbers on everything from how many job postings are actually open positions or preemptive postings. Everyone who has truck drivers always has postings up, even if they don’t need to hire right now, as an illustration. And we don’t have an accurate number of how many people there are with felony convictions in the United States. We have guesses, but I think there is some hope that you alluded to in all these areas, which is, this is the type of data synthesis and summarization that generative AI is good at.
Aguh: Yes.
Fuller: And so maybe, rather than forming another national task force to try to agree on a taxonomy for retail clerks, we’ll just get web crawlers that can look across all those job postings and say, “These are obviously retail clerk jobs, and I’m going to harmonize the language or direct people who are looking for that sort of job to these positions, rather than leave it to them to navigate this absolutely dense thicket of a system.” This is very, very counterintuitive, and hard for someone who doesn’t have a lot of resources or a very directed career path to turn into a launch pad for their careers.
Aguh: And one thing we don’t say a lot—and I used to be a product manager, and so you would think about kind of designing around your customer, kind of human-centered design, and that we don’t design this system around the worker enough, in the sense of my colleague, Michele Evermore, who used to work with me on unemployment insurance. She used to say, “A person who applies for unemployment insurance, that day is the worst day of their life. They’re trying to figure out how they’re going to pay rent, take care of their kids. They’re trying to figure out how they’re going to go home and tell their family, ‘Hey, I lost my job today.’ And on that day, the worst day of their lives, we asked them to do a series of really complicated clunky things to take care of themselves, which doesn’t make sense.” Similarly, when thinking about someone who is either trying to get to a better place in the labor market or falling out trying to get back in, they are suffering from a lack of social capital. And, for example, you talk about how many jobs that are posted are actually open jobs. Actually, what’s the flip question? How many jobs are open out there that are never posted, that are filled because someone knew a guy, which is, depending on the data, the majority of jobs in America. And when you think about the communities that have been left out for the longest, who are likely our most open sources of talent right now, they’ll never know those jobs even existed. And so I’ve seen, if you think about people like Dun & Bradstreet, who are thinking about, if you look at accounts receivable data and business credit data, actually going even that upstream to say where might there be opportunities that someone who wouldn’t know otherwise can actually begin to look for? And that’s actually what generative AI can actually be good at, and that’s where I think there’s promise as well as to counter and parallel the peril.
Fuller: One of the things that’s written about a lot in the last six months is, of course, the CHIPS Act, the implementation of the CHIPS Act. How are we going to respond to the labor and skills requirements of the spike in demand for workers in specific locations for these facilities? And what are you going to be looking for there as evidence that we’re filling the gap, and that the industrial policy logic is actually beginning to intrude into the skill system in a productive way?
Aguh: We have a couple of benefits, particularly for the CHIPS and Science Act. Think about semiconductor fabrication. One, these fabs take a long time to build, because they’re enormous, the size of a city block, cost as much as a nuclear power plant. We should take advantage of that, which means we have time to set up talent pipelines in very specific jurisdictions. This is the time. Let’s work with municipalities, with our organized labor colleagues, with higher education to begin to train those folks now. One of the things that we see across a number of these areas would be semiconductor fabrication, the space industry, green tech, infrastructure. It’s a lot of the same jobs, what we probably would call the “skilled technical” workforce: welders, electricians, machinists, things actually the Department of Labor has been doing for a very long time. And so I think that is a benefit. We know we need a lot of this. Where I worry a little more is where the timescale is not as long, because you just don’t have the time lag to produce the talent if you don’t already have it locally. And so the question there is, “Do I need to move labor around in the country?” I’m sure you’ve looked at this data, but when you think about the degree or lack thereof of labor mobility in America right now, people are moving less for jobs than they ever did before. That’s a challenge. How do we potentially incentivize that? Be creative about that in the short term, but I think for these big national projects, take advantage. And my fear is that we may not be strategic enough to set up those pipelines in concert with the creation of those projects.
Fuller: When you use that phrase “not strategic enough,” what do you have in mind?
Aguh: So really the alignment of all the players to produce that. So again, let’s just take building a semiconductor fab. So there’s construction, huge construction, and we know what those jobs are. Everything from bricklayers, cement truck drivers, all that. We know what they are. If we don’t have enough of them in the area, first of all, so what’s the baseline? How many of those do I have in the local area? All right, what’s the delta between what I need? Okay, do I have now the higher education providers, the intermediaries, the unions to train those folks? If I do, all right. If I don’t, we’ve got to bring them in. And I believe the employer is key here. The employer in the end is going to hire. The employer roughly—probably—is most placed to know what the skills are, being super clear about that. And now—and you’ve written an article about this with my colleague, Matt Siegelman—treat it like a supply chain. And we would know who all the people are who are adding value, we would know when they’re late, and so on and so forth. And we would time that out appropriately. But we don’t treat talent acquisition that way. And so that’s what I mean. And I think being inclusive about all the players—if you need bricklayers, are you’re talking to your CTE system in your K–12, because they probably have some programs there. Are you talking to your community college? Are you talking to, again, your local union, if you haven’t, or other similar organizations? I think those are the alignments that are happening in certain places, but they’re not happening at scale and at enough places to make sure that every business is going to have what they need to fill those workers. And the flip side, which is, how do we make sure that every community benefits from that? How do we make sure that we’re sourcing from there to make that happen and also make sure that they’re in good jobs along the way?
Fuller: So you recently left the Department of Labor, and one of the new roles you took on was being on the Maryland Higher Ed Commission. So sitting in that vantage point, how do you think about managing this strategically, and what do you see across your home state and the educational infrastructure? What is it going to take to get the biggest-by-far supplier of talent at all levels more aligned with the rest of the system, because we’ve done research on both the suppliers and the buyers—i.e., the educators and the employers—and I won’t quite say they’re equal opportunity in terms of their unwillingness to change and wanting the other party to change to accommodate them.
Aguh: The Maryland Higher Education Commission is actually unique in that we actually oversee all public and private education in the state. Everything—from Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, to the community college system, our HBCUs, minority-serving institutions. And so it’s exactly kind of a board of directors. A couple of things that are helpful. One, the Department of Labor and the higher education secretariat are actually jointly responsible by law for writing the state’s workforce strategy, which is really helpful. But a couple of priorities that I have that I think will feed into this, one, is too few states properly utilize their community colleges and minority-serving institutions. How do we properly utilize those institutions to feed that workforce strategy in a way that is equitable? Then one thing that the governor also just launched is the Maryland Economic Council, which is effectively going to set an economic development strategy for the state. And so one of the things I’m looking for is really tight coordination between, all right, if you say, for example, the governor has said we would like to build one-quarter of U.S. wind capacity off the shore of Maryland, because we have a lot of shoreline. Great. So now how does that reverberate right into that workforce strategy that we’re going to write? How does that reverberate into the certificates that the University of Maryland global campus is going to start giving out? How do we now be strategic about, okay, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which sits near a huge former Bethlehem Steel site, we’re going to train people on welding, whereas Prince George’s County Community College, which actually sits down by the Potomac River, we’re going to train people on something around sea stuff. This is less my area, but now how do we do that proper division of labor to make sure that, one, we don’t have duplication and redundancy, but that also we’re feeding the goals? And so trying to get that degree of alignment is really what I’m focused on. And also, how do we just improve outcomes across the board? Everything’s just broad student success. Another thing that we don’t talk enough about, which the governor’s very focused on, is how do we have more entrepreneurs and more great ideas being created within the state of Maryland? We know higher education is a huge engine for that. Johns Hopkins—particularly in the healthcare space—is magnificent here. There’s no reason that every institution in the state of Maryland can’t be that as well. Creating Maryland companies, employing Marylanders, again, so we’re not actually trying to attract capital, we’re actually creating it endogenously.
Fuller: Maryland got in the news under the previous governor, Larry Hogan, for a pioneering step in terms of removing a degree requirement from hiring in state government. It was then followed by Utah, Colorado, several other states as well. I’m curious as to what the prevailing thinking is in Maryland, as best as you understand it, as to what effect that has actually had on hiring patterns inside the state? In the corporate world, our research has indicated that corporations have, as a necessary and praiseworthy first step, started eliminating an absolute requirement. “If you don’t have a college degree, you can’t work here. It doesn’t matter who you are.” But when you look at actual job descriptions, there’s really no change in the ratio of job descriptions within those companies that continue to stipulate a degree requirement. It’s not as if there’s been a move to create active deliberate effort to introduce non-degree holders into those jobs that are no longer bound by that requirement. What’s the thinking about both what’s happened so far and what the state can do to realize the potential in removing that barrier?
Aguh: We have, depending on how you read it, 5,000 to 10,000 state vacancies in terms of employment. I will say there are some roles, particularly ones that actually have labor representation, where this I expect might be easier, just because you have a partner who has looked at these roles for a long time. It might be able to quickly, more quickly fill in the skills, “Hey, these are the skills that we have seen really matter here,” so on and so forth. So my instinct is, you will see progress first with more entry-level roles. I think it’s going to get harder as you move up the chain. And I think the question now is: How do we… and also, as you move the chain, the skills are less technical, how do you manage people? How do you communicate? How do you collaborate? These are where seeing folks like the education design lab and others come up with a beginning to have certificates and micro pathways and credentials around that. But that’s where it’s going to get harder, where the skills are not technical that I can assess. When it’s, “Show me when you led a team from X to Y,” that’s much harder. Even corporate America hasn’t really figured that out. Usually what ends up happening is, someone who can talk a good game makes it past the interview. But I expect, if we can even just do this at the entry level, we’ll have made huge progress. For technical skills, how can we assess really quickly? And what, what I still wonder is, if we’ve removed the requirements, do we have hiring managers who, if I have two equal candidates or generally being equal, one of them has a credential, the other one doesn’t, who wins in the mind of that candidate? Not necessarily what they wrote on the rubric, but I think it’s like, “Oh shoot, this person went to University of Maryland, this person didn’t go to school at all. Technically they performed the same. Who am I going to take?” There’s probably still work to do, with folks who actually hire, in not using the degree as the tiebreaker when there might be other better ways.
Fuller: It’s been a proxy for a lot of skills for a long time, and it’s easy to spot, easy to verify. And since people have had a bias toward hiring people with degrees …
Aguh: And if I have one …
Fuller: And if you have one, you’re not going to fail to mention it when you apply.
Aguh: Correct.
Fuller: Well, Chike Aguh, most recently the Chief Innovation Officer of the U.S. Department of Labor, now out of federal service, but still very active in the field, thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.
Aguh: Thank you so much for having me.
Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.