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Investing In Talent

Investing In Talent

Written by: WorkingNation
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 Companies need workers and workers need the skills to fit the open jobs of today. The Talent Finance Initiative is one of the best plans out there – outlining how to bring public and private funds together to train workers for the future while decreasing the cost of education. PBS’s Hari Sreenivasan talks to two of its designers – Jason Tyszko and Peter Beard – about this model that results in less debt, great career opportunities, and, hopefully, a better return on investment for workers and employers.WorkingNation Careers Economics Personal Success
Episodes
  • Taylor: If employers don’t invest in their employees, they’ll go elsewhere to get the skills they need to remain competitive in the workforce

    Taylor: If employers don’t invest in their employees, they’ll go elsewhere to get the skills they need to remain competitive in the workforce
    Jun 21 2023
    In this episode of Work in Progress, I'm joined by Johnny C. Taylor, president and CEO of SHRM – the Society for Human Resource Managment – from their annual conference held last week in Las Vegas. There was a lot of talk at the annual conference about skills-based hiring and skills training, notably from guest speaker former president Bill Clinton and from the SHRM leadership, including Taylor. "We shouldn't require a college degree if the job doesn't require it. There are a lot of benefits to going to college that go way beyond economics, but we shouldn't make our economy less efficient by lowering workforce participation when we have 10 million open jobs," President Clinton challenged the in-person audience of 21,000. That's a message we have been hearing a lot lately in workforce development, so I took the opportunity to ask Taylor a question that I have been thinking about: If you don't use a college degree as a proxy for what a job seeker knows, how does an HR professional screen for skills and talent? "It's really hard and it's time consuming. It's not efficient. Part of the degree requirement was it was efficient. I could weed out people who didn't have it. A proxy for smart was what the degree was. Well, now that means HR's got to go back to the fundamentals, and that is interview people," Taylor tells me. He says that those HR managers need to ask questions that show just how curious and smart an applicant is. "We need smart people. Smart doesn't mean you went to Harvard and have a college degree. Can you figure things out? During the interview process, HR people are trying to figure out how does your mind work. I'll ask you questions. How can you solve problems? And are you curious? That's real big," Taylor says. He adds that being a team player and having the willingness to work hard are equally important. "There's nothing that you can communicate better during an interview to a hiring manager more than the fact that you're willing to work and you're going to work hard at it and work smart. If applicants will get that across – hiring managers, if you're looking for those things – we can almost train anyone to do anything." And that brings us to the next big question: How do employers attract and retain talent? "One of the issues that's top of mind right now is training and development. Given that 50%, even as much as 70%, of the jobs that exist today won't exist five years from now – or will be so meaningfully reconstituted that they won't exist – if we are not investing in our employees' professional development...then employees will leave because they're going to go where they can get the talent to remain competitive for decades," says Taylor. He the companies that are succeeding in attracting and holding onto the talent they need see upskilling and reskilling as essential, and they are offering education benefits to their workers as part of their benefits package. "The first thing that companies are saying is, 'This training is for both of us. It's not just for you and it's not just for us; it's for both of us. We have to give you skills that will make you competitive in a rapidly-changing economic environment, and you need them just in case things don't work out here and you need to go somewhere else. Even if you leave me, it's yours.'" Taylors says this is important because America has a worker replenishment problem and it's everyone's problem. "I often say this, America is browning and graying at once. We just don't have enough children out there ready to be the future workforce so we've got to get people to remain in the workforce longer and we've got to ensure that they have the skills to remain in the workplace longer. It doesn't matter that you want to be in the workforce, and that you need to be in the workforce, if you don't have the skills that we need. And that's the problem. "We've got 165 million jobs. The struggle is a lot of those people are leav...
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    14 mins
  • The critical work of upskilling and educating future and current workers

    The critical work of upskilling and educating future and current workers
    Apr 12 2023
    Talent Finance is a partnership of more than 200 business organizations, nonprofits, financial institutions, and others that have come together to develop and champion new approaches for financing talent, arguing “the way we finance and invest in talent has not kept pace" with the needs of workers and employers. The initiative is led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation with its partners the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Greater Houston Partnership (GHP), Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and WorkingNation and details 16 recommendations to foster change. Two of the architects of Talent Finance – Jason Tyszko, vice president of the Center for Education and Workforce at the Chamber Foundation, and Peter Beard, senior vice president of Regional Workforce Development with GHP – join journalist Hari Sreenivasan in a conversation about the progress the initiative has made over the past two years. It also examines what still needs to be done to change the outcomes for more students, workers, and employers. You can listen to the conversation in this Investing in Talent podcast here on this page, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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    26 mins
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