Last month, a group of Cleveland leaders in the public K-12 education and workforce ecosystems travelled together to New Orleans to attend the national Jobs for the Future Conference, “Horizons 2022”. This is one of the most well attended national workforce and education conferences, with over a thousand attendees, and it came with the music, food, and fun as it only exists in New Orleans. Certainly, the shared experiences and relationships built (for me anyway, as I was newer to the group) are always the most memorable parts of a trip, and will benefit and last the longest.
Aside from those, though, here are the takeaways from the conference (summarized by the group collectively):
- Work to unstick people from the sticky floor. The sticky floor is the things that keep people down, including keeping them in low-paying, entry level work. For some students in our public schools in Cleveland, the list of these barriers to overcome is long; for us to build the pipeline of talent our companies need to grow, the supports we provide must address all those barriers.
- Watch out for the paper ceiling. The paper ceiling is the ceiling on peoples’ careers which exists because of expectations of senior leaders to be people with bachelors, masters, or more senior degrees. We have three areas in which to work here:
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- First, while skills-based hiring can help get people off the sticky floor, it hasn’t yet shown to lead to career pathways to our most advanced roles (e.g. CEO). We need to work on this so we aren’t creating dead-ends into low-wage entry level jobs.
- Second, the value in the degrees is not only the credibility on the academic side, it’s also the networks. As we build career pathways for youth, we need to also build opportunities for network development.
- Lastly, we want to encourage learning for life. We can all learn and earn for many years. Among students who seek to start their careers through working immediately out of high school, we want them to see that the most senior levels of responsibility (such as CEO jobs) are attainable at later points in their career, and also, to be open to continuing education – a credential or certificate, or a university degree — at a point.
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And the last one, which is my own observation: greater Cleveland’s thinking, and more important, it’s actions in this area, are ahead of the country. Elements of the philosophy undergirding Cleveland’s workforce and education initiatives – such as equity for all—were key themes of the conference. But nowhere is the action plan as well developed, is the implementation underway, and is the approach as comprehensive, as we have in greater Cleveland.