In 1968, Bill Gates was an eighth grader at the Lakeside School in Seattle. Using the proceeds from a rummage sale, the parents at Lakeside had purchased an ASR 33 teletype machine for the school. To the modern eye the ASR 33 teletype isn’t terribly impressive. Propped on a bulky beige platform, it looks like a cross between a typewriter and speaker’s dais.1
But for some of the students at Lakeside, the machine was a marvel. Gates, for one, was so enthralled by the teletype that he convinced his teachers to let him cut math class to work with it. In no time he had taught himself BASIC, a programming language then used by GE, and designed a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game.
To supplement their time on the teletype, Gates and a group of friends convinced a local company, the Computer Center Corporation, to give them free computer time at night in exchange for help finding bugs in the system. For the next couple of years, Gates spent countless hours at school and at the Computer Center Corporation gaining hands-on knowledge of programming and computer networks.
Gates never lost the experience he had gained at Lakeside and the Computer Center Corporation. In fact, he built an empire on that foundation of experience.2
Gates’s experience at Lakeside changed his life and the world. As he noted in a 2005 address at the school, “If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft.” 3
He went on, “The school could have shut down the terminal, or they could have tightly regulated who got to use it. Instead, they opened it up. Instead of teaching us about computers in the conventional sense, Lakeside just unleashed us.” 4
As Aristotle wrote, “Men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre.”5 Gates became a coder by coding. Experiential learning is what made Bill Gates, well, Bill Gates.
For years scientists have demonstrated the power of hands-on learning. In one study researchers compared the long-term efficacy of two different types of teaching styles in an undergraduate accounting class. One group of students was taught through a standard lecture format, while another group learned using experiential learning exercises. When tested immediately after their lessons, both groups performed equally well on the lesson material. But when tested six weeks later, the group that had learned through the traditional method showed a marked decline in information retention. The experiential group, on the other hand, showed no such decline at the six-week mark.6
Over the summer of 2019, the Harris Poll conducted a global survey of learners for Pearson, a company dedicated to education through providing tools, content, and services.7 More than 11,000 learners from nineteen countries ranging in age from sixteen to seventy said overwhelmingly that they embrace technology and online learning. They want more vocational education, soft-skills training, and bite-sized learning throughout their lives. They want online degrees and stackable credentials, meaning that one credential can lead to the next and then the next. Among the key trends are the following:
• A do-it-yourself mindset is reshaping education.
• The forty-year career is gone, replaced by life-long learning and diverse career paths.
• People expect to engage in digital and virtual learning.
• Confidence in educational institutions is wavering.
• Some young workers think you can do OK in life without a college degree.
• Markets in places like India and China are the leaders in upskilling.
• Learners believe soft skills will give them the advantage over automation.
The benefits of experience clearly extend beyond the classroom as well. Researchers in another study tracked the performance of 2,058 students at Elon University over five years. Each student was assigned a score based on the amount of time they had dedicated to experience-heavy activities such as internships, community service, leadership positions, and undergraduate research. On average students who had participated in more of these activities reported forming stronger connections with faculty, giving back more to the community, writing better, and feeling more positively toward the university than students who had shied away from such activities.8
But experiential learning doesn’t occur nearly as often as it should. It was an opportunity, not an institutional commitment to experiential learning, that gave Gates the chance to learn with his hands and think on his feet. Had Lakeside’s parents not recognized the importance of the budding computer revolution, Gates would have missed out on an invaluable learning experience—and the rest of us might well have missed out on the personal computer revolution. Even with Lakeside’s access, Gates and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen still had to break into the nearby university to gain access to a computer.
This is one of the central challenges of connecting students with experiential learning opportunities in our current system. Often these connections occur because of serendipity rather than structure: for example, a high school teacher who has a personal connection with a local business finds an after-school internship for a bright student, or a handful of self-starting undergrads convince a startup to take them on as apprentices.
Experiential learning is available, but not as widely or as reliably as it should be. And it’s still viewed as extracurricular—“extra,” as in “outside.” It’s too rarely integrated into the school day or standardized as part of a student’s academic path.
At Guardian I’ve seen how impactful integrating experiential learning can be. Several years ago Michael Carren, our former head of corporate social responsibility, sent me a report comparing the professional standing of graduates of Ivy League schools working in the financial services sector with the professional standing of City University of New York (CUNY) students also working in that sector.
Every year, I learned, financial services companies hire twice as many graduates from CUNY as from all the Ivy League schools combined. And yet students hired out of CUNY are typically paid about half as much as their Ivy League counterparts, and they’re usually hired for much lower-level jobs.9
These troublesome disparities needed to be addressed, so we designed an experiential learning program to help. Over the past few years, we have hosted networking fairs that introduced recent CUNY graduates to potential employers, we’ve paired CUNY students with Guardian mentors, and we’ve created a series of workshops centered on experiential learning.
The goal of the partnership was to level the playing field for promising CUNY graduates so that they could thrive in the financial services sector on equal footing with their peers. But it was also an investment in Guardian’s own workforce: our joint programming with the university opened a valuable pipeline between CUNY and Guardian that enabled us to seek out top talent, train them for the skills we need, and hire impressive graduates. Through the partnership we weren’t just able to launch CUNY graduates to better-paying jobs—we were able to attract high-performing workers who have since flourished as Guardian employees.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PARTNERSHIPS
Building partnerships of any kind can be challenging and labor intensive. Employer-educator partnerships are no exception. Here’s how we approached it.
Early in my tenure as CEO, I wanted to align Guardian’s philanthropic work more closely with the needs of both our business and our communities. We wanted to help people become more financially independent, and we knew that community colleges would become an important investment. Our thought was to place volunteers from Guardian in the classroom to offer real-world life lessons on money management, but we were unsure how to approach it. Fortunately, I met Kate Bolduc, an executive who had recently left Travelers Insurance to focus on community-based projects, including postsecondary education. She had built a program while at Travelers that focused on teaching personal money management. Not only did it help the students become financially mindful, but it also taught them how to become employees of a financial services company. More broadly, it helped students in two-year community colleges how to go on to graduate from four-year institutions. Many of them went on to work full time for Travelers.
Kate read our initial plans, loved the concept, but identified one problem: “This will not work because that’s not the way community college systems work.” She was not shy about giving us guidance. Each community college is independent and different from the rest. They don’t run like a corporation, and the students you want to reach are not likely to take the courses you want to offer unless they are for-credit, rather than noncredit, optional courses. We initially thought we’d work in community colleges across the country. Kate warned that if we went broad—say, 200 colleges—rather than deep—perhaps 20—we risked not having a sustainable supply of volunteers and instructors. She advised that we build strong relationships with the local leaders—presidents, deans, career services—if we wanted to see the partnership grow.
Kate and Tracy Rich worked together to design and build a pilot program with a community college in the northeast region. There was a lot of excitement, but they came back from the first meeting dejected. The president of the college had been very welcoming, but the academic dean, who controls the coursework and enrollment, was suspicious of working with a corporation and would have none of it. The lack of strong leadership doomed that particular attempt. But we didn’t give up. We met with the president of another community college, and his first question was about what we had done wrong to compel us to donate to a community college. The educator was used to companies attempting to do something philanthropic in order to boost their reputation. That was not our objective, though we wanted the community to see us as caring and engaged.
“You know what?” Tracy told him. “You’re not the first person to think that. But you’re the first person to say it directly. No, we actually want to help.”
From then on our relationship began to deepen. We learned about the students. They are a little older than your average university student. They are working one, if not two jobs. Many lack health insurance. They are unlikely to have a bank account. They might have a laptop but no Wi-Fi at home. Transportation is a challenge. They live paycheck to paycheck. Many are immigrants who are learning English. These are students who are working hard. The New York Times reported in October 2019 that children of low-income immigrant fathers have done better over the decades than children of U.S.-born fathers, in part because their parents invest more in education. All children deserve our investment, and all children have enormous potential.
Another leader who taught us a lot was Dr. Regina Stanback Stroud, who today is chancellor of the Peralta Community College District in Oakland, California, and, prior to that, was president of Skyline. Her work has been primarily in California, but she has had a national impact. She was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans to make recommendations on strategies and policies to improve the financial well-being of young people.10
Like Kate Bolduc, Regina advised us to get leadership on board and to tap the creativity of the faculty. But she also advocates “boots on the ground” inside and outside the classroom. Throughout her illustrious career in education, she has forged partnerships with Genentech, Cisco, Intel, National Semiconductor, and others. She has succeeded with a guiding philosophy that workforce development and community education go hand in hand. “It is the means through which people are able to affect their own individual economic sustainability, and then in turn, affect the economic sustainability of the household. Then you affect the economic sustainability of an entire neighborhood, an entire community.”
Over the years she and her staff have gone into small and large businesses to study the core skills that students need in order to land jobs at those companies and be successful. She hired people from those companies to serve as adjunct staff to develop curriculum and teach and to offer internships. She also brought in organized labor and community-based organizations to ensure that nontraditional students, those who might fear entering a college setting, felt welcomed. In other words, she left nothing to chance.
The attacks of 9/11 were a wake-up call for Stroud and her workforce development team. United Airlines was a major employer in the Bay Area, and with planes grounded—and demand for flights dwindling—6,000 workers in the region would be affected. Her community college went to work inventorying the skills that would be in demand. Biotech remains a large employer in the state, and so she worked with Genentech and other employers to help workers train to work in labs and operations. They focused on automotive technology, health care, and early childhood education jobs.
There’s no procedures manual for building public-private partnerships, but the learning that comes with success and failure illuminates the way forward. Guardian now works with fourteen community colleges in the regions where we operate. We began by focusing on financial literacy, but as we saw increasing pressure on the labor market, we shifted to partnerships that would help advance workforce development through community colleges.
Community colleges and businesses have a shared interest in preparing students and existing workers to be more successful in their careers. Guardian has provided grants on two occasions to the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) to study partnerships leading to a future-ready workforce and to understand the college-work balancing act for students. Nearly 70 percent of students work while enrolled in two-year community college programs, and the overwhelming majority of their financial need is not being met. But funding is not the only challenge to persistence; so are time and academic performance. Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian told Fortune’s Alan Murray that his company founded RiseHY to help bring out-of-school, out-of-work young people into the Hyatt workforce. The company needs a larger and more diverse pipeline of employees, but a common challenge has been ensuring that these workers get to work on time. They struggle because of complicated living arrangements and uneven access to transportation.11
ACCT recommends a set of academic and non-academic student support to help overcome these challenges, including work-based learning, flexible scheduling, prior learning assessments, and child care.
As drivers of local workforces, community colleges must work closely with area businesses to properly equip students with the necessary knowledge and skills. Collaboration can include identifying (a) the capabilities of students and existing employees (b) current job and career availability and necessary skills, and (c) how to align individuals’ skills and business needs through academic programs and work-based learning opportunities.12 In chapter 9 we examine some of the recommended federal policies that can also help.
Experiential learning is great for students and great for companies. But because experiential learning is the exception, not the rule, many of those potential benefits are not yet being realized.
Skills learned by doing—whether through an apprenticeship, an internship, a work-study position, or any similar experiential learning program—are grounded in real-world needs. These programs help students and schools focus on what’s needed in today’s as well as tomorrow’s workplace.
And businesses can help. Business leaders have valuable insights about the skills that will be important down the road. They can help to give students the training, teachers the guidance, and school systems the support needed to ensure that all students have the chance to learn real-world skills that will serve them throughout their careers.
A number of education programs powered by experiential learning already exist. These programs have shown us how to bring the workplace into the classroom, and by and large, they’ve been enormously successful.
By examining, imitating, and scaling these programs, we can build a system of experiential learning that will enable more students to lay a strong foundation for their future and for ours.
THE APPRENTICE
In many parts of the world, apprenticeships are a well-trodden path to professional success, most notably in Germany, where they are part of the country’s dual education system. Many executives in Germany’s manufacturing ranks rose up through an apprenticeship program. After graduation, more than half of all German high schoolers choose to join the country’s vaunted apprenticeship system.13 These students are paired with a business who matches their professional interests—for instance, Volkswagen for students interested in mechanical engineering or Deutsche Bank for those interested in finance. Over the next three years, trainees split their time between company and classroom and take advantage of both textbook and hands-on learning. When their training is done, students undergo certification exams and begin their careers with years of experience already completed.
The apprenticeship system has proven beneficial for a broad base of stakeholders. Students are given the opportunity to learn directly from experts in their industry through a program largely paid for by the government and private companies. The government’s investment, in the form of subsidization and supervision, is more than offset by the yearly infusion of nearly half a million trained and certified apprentices into the German economy. And private companies are happy to help cover the cost given that the apprenticeship system guarantees them a ready supply of well-trained and highly experienced workers.
Apprenticeship programs in America produce similarly positive results but have been slow to match the level of success in Germany. According to a Mathematica Policy Research report, apprenticeship graduates earn almost $250,000 more, over their careers, than workers who do not complete such a program.14 The U.S. Department of Labor states that almost nine in ten apprentices are hired after graduation.15
Unfortunately, less than 5 percent of American students enroll in apprenticeship programs.16 Despite having four times the population, America produces less than one-seventh the number of trained apprentices every year compared with Germany.17
As the head of a company founded by German immigrants, I’ve followed the success of the German apprenticeship model with interest for a number of years. America could benefit significantly by building an apprenticeship system as robust as Germany’s.
America requires structural support to build such a system. In Germany apprenticeships rely on a tightly woven web of connections linking government, private industry, local communities, and academia—connections that have been forged over generations. (They have done so over many generations, in fact: an early antecedent of the current system, the guilds, rose to prominence in Europe during the Late Middle Ages.)18 If a German company wants to start an apprenticeship program, it can easily tap into this preexisting infrastructure. Curricula have already been designed, funding structures developed, government support secured, and best practices learned.
Moreover, America needs to broaden its view of education. In this country, as I’ve mentioned, the four-year degree has become practically a nonnegotiable requirement for professional success. However, viewing the four-year degree as the only path to success, rather than one of many, has steered countless students away from considering opportunities, such as apprenticeships, that might be better suited to their individual interests and needs.
Byron Auguste, head of Opportunity@Work, writes that apprenticeships and work-based learning are needed:
Increasingly, U.S. businesses, industries and policymakers have looked to adapt apprenticeship practices from northern Europe, in partnership with a variety of labor unions, community colleges and specialized outsourcers. Tennessee’s Centers for Applied Technology are a great example, or IBM’s P-TECH (pathways to technology) high schools, which are industry-led, publicly-funded programs in Brooklyn and eight states.19
It can be done. Indeed, a number of American organizations have begun to develop apprenticeship programs that are succeeding in adapting a German-style system to the United States. An excellent example is Vetsteps Financial, a twenty-four-month apprenticeship designed around competencies, milestones, and mentors. The apprenticeship assists veterans as they transition from military to civilian jobs. The effort was cofounded by Lloyd Polmateer, CEO of First Financial Group, an agency of Guardian Life Insurance in the mid-Atlantic states. Lloyd left his native Michigan as a young man to join the Air Force. After basic training he was stationed at Andrews Airbase outside of Washington, D.C., where he served on President George H.W. Bush’s detail. He left the service after four years, found his way into the insurance business as an adviser, rose through the ranks, and landed at Guardian in 1995. By 2004, he had taken over ownership of First Financial.
Polmateer’s firm serves many military and government clients who are looking for financial stability and strength, integrity, and products suited for small to midmarket companies, including those that contract with government. He and two colleagues at First Financial, all veterans, decided to launch Vetsteps Financial after they studied funding guidelines for the GI Bill and realized they could help today’s veterans receive $2,500 per month for twenty-four months learning to become financial advisers. Initially approved in Virginia, it is growing nationwide.
According to the Vetsteps Financial website, participants
start with the basics and by the time you have successfully completed the program, you will be a fully-licensed Financial Advisor with an established market that you have developed with the help of your mentor. We expect that candidates who graduate from the program fully-licensed will enter into a contract with The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, or one of its subsidiaries, because we want you to continue your career as a Financial Advisor with us.19
Polmateer beams with pride when talking about those who have joined the program, veterans like a retired naval lieutenant who started in the spring of 2019 as a financial representative, is hitting all of his milestones, and is on his way to become an adviser—a similar but clearer pathway followed by Polmateer years earlier.
A different approach is a consortium of companies led by Accenture and Aon. Apprenticeship 2020 is an initiative that enables Chicago students to skip a four-year degree by earning a two-year associate’s degree while completing a two-year apprenticeship in business. Building on the Chicago Apprenticeship Network, which brought on its first apprenticeship in 2017, it includes a $1.25 million investment in city colleges by the companies to build new curriculum and support. The effort includes support from McDonald’s, Walgreens, and Zurich Insurance Group.
My friend Greg Case, Aon’s president and CEO, told reporters at the announcement, “This is about Aon getting access to the best talent Chicago has to offer. These students are forging a new path for us in bringing diverse and exciting new talent to the company, and they have already had a remarkable impact.”20
“We recognize the important role professional apprenticeships can play in closing the skills gap in the U.S., providing underserved groups greater access to innovation economy jobs and helping re-skill workers whose jobs have been, or will be, disrupted by technology,” Accenture wrote in its announcement.21
According to the apprenticeship network’s playbook, professional apprenticeship programs can help to address the skills gap facing most companies, provide greater opportunity for people who are underrepresented across industries in the innovation economy, and re-skill those whose jobs have been—or will be—disrupted by technology.22
Another interesting initiative is the Illinois Consortium for Advanced Technical Training (ICATT) Apprenticeship Program. Originally started by the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest, ICATT is an umbrella organization that helps to support about fifty-five small and medium-sized businesses with apprenticeship programs. These programs generally follow what I think of as a three-two model. For three years apprentices split their learning time between the company and a local community college while pursuing an associate degree. Companies cover an apprentice’s wages, tuition, fees, and books. When apprentices graduate from their three years of blended learning, they do so with a two-year job guarantee from the company that trained them. In other words, apprentices are given the enviable opportunity to earn, learn, and return.23
Companies in the ICATT network are able to offer such competitive incentives because they receive robust administrative support themselves. The organization offers businesses help with curriculum development, candidate recruitment and selection, partnership development, program management, public relations, and a variety of other organizational and administrative tasks.24
ICATT has started to build confidence in the idea that vocational education can be a viable alternative to a four-year degree. More than 85 percent of individuals who enroll in the ICATT program graduate, with average starting annual salaries around $50,000.25 The program has grown significantly over the past few years as more companies recognize that their investments are returned many times over by the work of their apprentices. ICATT has demonstrated that apprenticeship programs, if built correctly, can work—not as fail-safes for students who have no other options but as promising and lucrative steps toward fulfilling careers.
The testimonials on ICATT’s website are powerful. Nicholas Christensen was a student at Cudahy High School when he learned of the ICATT program. A teacher, Mr. Backes, handed Christensen an ICATT flier and encouraged him to apply. Christensen had taken shop classes, but he had never seriously considered an apprenticeship. But with Backes’s encouragement, Christensen decided to apply. He was accepted and placed with Krones Inc., a beverage technology and bottling manufacturer. Now, in addition to his work at Krones, Christensen makes it a point to return to Cudahy High School to share his experience with other students. As he explains, “Mr. Backes says his passion is his students and he’s trying to help them become successful. I’ve learned that I can also help others by talking about my experience with ICATT. It’s a great opportunity.” 26
When Christensen shares his success with Cudahy students, he’s pushing them to consider a path that many have not taken. For some of those students, an apprenticeship could be the perfect opportunity to follow a passion and lay a foundation for lifelong success.
A PROGRAM FOR LIFE
In the early 2000s, Carroll County had one of the highest high school dropout rates in Georgia, a state with one of the highest dropout rates in the country.
School administrators knew that their county’s graduation rate was doing real damage to young people in the area. They knew that students who failed to graduate from high school would earn, on average, $8,000 less every year than those who completed all four grades.27 But they weren’t as aware of the impact that the dropout problem was having on local businesses—that is, not until Stu Thorn, the head of one of those businesses, approached them with a proposal.
Thorn had recently become CEO of a Carroll County institution called Southwire, an electrical wire, cable, and cord manufacturer headquartered in Carrollton, the county seat.28 As a business deeply embedded in the community, Southwire had a vested interest in seeing students graduate with good educations, an interest that was equal parts municipal pride and competitive concern. If the Carroll County school system had trouble getting students to graduate, Southwire would have just as much trouble hiring qualified employees from the area.
So Thorn set up a meeting with leaders of the Carroll County school district and put forward an innovative proposal. The dropout problem was a clog in Carroll County’s education-to-employment pipeline. If educators and employers could work together to clear that blockage, everyone would benefit.
In that meeting, a program called 12 for Life was born. The program, as its name suggests, would help to motivate students to complete all twelve years of primary and secondary education to set them on the right track “for life.”
At its core, 12 for Life would be powered by experiential learning. Southwire purchased a factory in Carrollton and retrofitted it to suit the program’s needs.29 Students would spend part of the day at school learning in a classroom and then would be bused to the factory in Carrollton to work a four-hour shift at the Southwire plant.30 They would be paid for their work and would be connected with an array of support resources while employed, including mentorship, tutoring, and work supervision.31
The program was designed to engage students by using real-world experience to underscore the usefulness of classroom learning. Students in the 12 for Life program learned from a STEM-intensive curriculum that was built off their work at the factory. Students’ wages acted as a secondary incentive for attendance. Those who didn’t show up to class weren’t allowed to show up to work. And if they didn’t show up to work, they couldn’t get paid.
It was a great idea. But to get from conception to execution, the leaders of 12 for Life had to clear some hurdles. The first of these hurdles was bureaucratic. Whereas the state of Georgia was used to work-study programs conducted outside of school hours, the 12 for Life model integrated experiential learning directly into students’ daily academic schedules. The leaders of 12 for Life had to apply the same creativity they had shown in designing the program to the challenge of passing bureaucratic muster. Using their experience with the Georgia Department of Education, Carroll County educators secured a charter waiver for 12 for Life, which gave the program a freer hand to transform the work-study status quo.32
Waiver in hand, the 12 for Life planners quickly found themselves faced with another hurdle. When they were designing the program, it had seemed feasible to bus students back and forth from each of the five feeder schools in the district and the Southwire plant.33 But, as program supervisors discovered, building a bus schedule that could ferry students across a county almost half the size of Rhode Island in a timely manner was not easy.34
To address this challenge, educators and Southwire leaders worked together to set up classrooms on the Southwire campus and to bring in teachers to give some lessons on site. (It is important to note, though, that not all lessons are offered at the plant. Southwire students still regularly return to their home high school for instruction, which ensures that students are given a chance to learn in a more traditional classroom environment.)35 With the Southwire plant thus outfitted, students were able to spend more time on the job and less time on the road.
This time on the job was not without its challenges. Both students and Southwire employees faced a steep communication learning curve. Students could be a bit unprofessional. Southwire employees could be overly demanding. Recognizing the problem quickly, leaders from both Carroll County schools and Southwire sprang into action. Plant supervisors helped their employees adopt a more appropriate tone with their young charges. Carroll County educators, on the other hand, encouraged their students to speak more professionally and respectfully while on the clock.
These fixes helped the 12 for Life program survive its growing pains and mature into a wildly successful program. Since 12 for Life’s creation, dropout rates in the Carroll County school district have plunged by almost two thirds. In 2018, the county announced that every school in the district had achieved a graduation rate of more than 90 percent.36
In addition to keeping kids in school, the program is improving their behavior and academic performance while they’re there. According to a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education, on average, each year that a student participates in the 12 for Life program reduces the student’s suspensions by 1.85 incidents and increases their GPA by 0.26 points.
The program has been just as beneficial for Southwire. In fact, students are even more productive than their adult counterparts. To launch the program in 2007, Southwire invested about $4 million. By 2014, 12 for Life was generating more than $1.7 million in pretax profits per year.37
These impressive results are built on a foundation of collaboration between educators and employers. It took the combined experience, insight, and effort of both groups to overcome the early challenges that could have sunk the 12 for Life program. Similarly, the partnership between corporate and academic worlds was integral to ICATT’s ability to offer apprentices multifaceted and robust learning opportunities.
When educators and employers work together, great things happen.
THE POWER OF THE UNLIKELY PARTNERSHIP
Working together, employers and educators can help to generate the innovative horsepower required to pull our skilling system into the future. Employers have a front-row seat to the economy and the market. They have intimate familiarity with which skills are necessary today and a pretty good idea about which skills will be necessary tomorrow. They have deep experience analyzing real-time problems and designing real-world solutions.
Educators, meanwhile, are experts at helping people build new skill sets from the ground up. And, just as important, they’re experts at motivating people to take on these major skilling challenges. They’re adept big-picture thinkers and can communicate abstract concepts with ease. In addition, they often have a rich network of personal connections with other educators, through which effective strategies can be quickly democratized.
Though their respective skill sets and mindsets might differ, educators and employers share the same goals. Educators are committed to preparing students to succeed in the working world, and employers have a strong bottom-line interest in ensuring that those efforts are successful. As ICATT and Southwire have demonstrated, when partnerships successfully unite educators and employers, students gain the skills they need.
Still, even with shared goals, and even when the creation of a diverse partnership would be beneficial for all involved, the differences that power these partnerships can be hard to overcome—but not impossible. If we carefully examine successful educator-employer partnerships from the past, we can learn valuable lessons to apply to partnerships in the future.
Lesson 1: Run an Open-Source Planning Process
The Pathways in Technology program (P-TECH) is one of the most successful employer-educator partnerships in the twenty-first century. Inaugurated in 2011 at a high school in Crown Heights, New York, P-TECH is a pioneer of the “early college high school” model, which allows students to earn a high school diploma and an associate degree in one continuous course of study.38 By taking classes at both the high school and college level starting in the ninth grade, P-TECH students jumpstart their academic, professional, and personal development. Rather than graduating with a high school diploma in four years, they graduate with a diploma and an associate degree in six years, sometimes fewer.
Started through a collaboration between IBM and New York City, the program has grown to include more than 110 schools and 550 employers in states across the nation.39 Its effectiveness has earned it widespread acclaim, including a shout-out from President Barack Obama in the 2013 State of the Union.40
The idea for P-TECH was born at a U.S. Open match in 2010. The CEO of IBM, Samuel J. Palmisano, and the superintendent for New York City Public Schools, Joel Klein, were sitting next to each other and began discussing a shared professional frustration.41 The education system, they agreed, was not preparing graduates for high-skill positions of the future.
Palmisano and Klein decided to do something about it. They tapped Stan Litow, IBM’s president of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs and former deputy chancellor of New York City Public Schools, to help design a program that would unite the powers of both the private sector and the public education system.42
As a fellow business leader and someone with a longtime interest in experiential learning, I’ve spoken with Litow a number of times about his experience getting the P-TECH program off the ground. Over the course of these conversations, and in reading his book The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about the development of employer-educator partnerships.
When guiding a program through its early stages of development, one can be tempted to limit the number of individuals engaged in shaping that new program. Concerns over credit and control can push program developers to offer only a few seats at the table.
Litow moved in the opposite direction. Quickly and intentionally, he engaged a broad collection of shareholders in the project, starting with one of the most powerful individuals in New York City: Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Collaborating with Litow and the IBM team, Klein sent a proposal outlining the rough details of the program to the mayor to solicit his support. Soon after, much to Litow’s pleasure, the mayor referenced the budding program in a TV appearance. It was, in effect, a stamp of approval.43
But Litow didn’t stop there. He reached out to the principals’ union, asking them if he could do a sit-down brainstorm and feedback session with a collection of their best and brightest. By inviting them into the development process, Litow secured not only their expertise but also their support.44
Litow also reached out to Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and asked for her insight on how the nascent program should be structured.45
Either of these unions could have thrown up significant, if not insurmountable, barriers that might have stymied the P-TECH program’s implementation. But Litow sidestepped this risk by proactively and respectfully seeking their input.
Litow and his colleagues at IBM did the same for the community in which the first P-TECH school would be placed. The school selected, Paul Robeson High School, named for civil rights activist and musician Paul Robeson, was a fixture of Crown Heights.46 Understandably, the community was concerned that changes brought by the P-TECH program would disrupt the neighborhood. So Litow and IBM worked closely with Al Vann, a respected member of the New York State Assembly, to set up a community meeting to discuss the project.47 IBM didn’t try to use its high-level connections to bully its way into the neighborhood. Its executives listened and collaborated with the people who lived around the school and, in doing so, laid a strong foundation for the future success of the P-TECH program.
It’s easy to become absorbed in the impressive success statistics of the P-TECH program. Graduation rates at the Brooklyn P-TECH school are four times the national average.48 In the P-TECH programs now spread across New York state, the majority of students have earned As or Bs in college courses they’ve taken while still in high school.49 But the path for these successes was paved years ago, while P-TECH was still only an idea.
By opening the planning process to many voices, Litow and IBM increased the likelihood that the program would succeed. Many of the ideas and connections made in those brainstorming sessions became key components of the first P-TECH school. For example, of the twenty principals who Litow gathered, one took to the idea with special interest. His name was Rashid Davis, and he would end up being hired as the first principal of that first P-TECH school at Paul Robeson High School.50
Additionally, by opening up the planning process early on, Litow gave stakeholders an real stake in the success of the project. Instead of leaving out the unions, the community, or the government, Litow invited them in. Although IBM had to share credit for the P-TECH program with a couple more entities and individuals, the company’s inclusion generated great ideas and novel solutions that never would have seen the light of day if diverse stakeholders had been barred from the brainstorming process.
What’s more, had any of these groups been ignored or steamrolled, it’s possible that they could have severely impeded the effectiveness of the program. Understandably, AFT’s Weingarten thought it important that teachers retain their role as head of the classroom in P-TECH schools, and she was therefore seriously concerned about bringing in third parties, such as IBM employees, to help teach individual lessons.
One of the main goals of the P-TECH program, Litow recognized, was to bring the unique insight of private industry into the classroom. But respectful of the concerns of the AFT, Litow made it clear that when nonteachers contributed to classroom learning, they would do so only as guest speakers. Had Weingarten not been brought into the planning process, this concern might not have surfaced until later, by which time it likely would have been much more difficult to address.51
Without a doubt, P-TECH’s open-source development process wasn’t easy to manage. Having so many voices around the brainstorming table can produce some unnecessary noise and some unwanted complexity. But by giving a wide collection of stakeholders a voice, Litow and IBM ensured buy-in, preempted problems, and laid a solid foundation for success.
Lesson 2: Build Relationships First
Joejuan Williams, a cornerback for the New England Patriots, told CNBC after he signed a four-year, $6.6 million contract that he remained financially careful. He lives off 10 percent of his income and credits a high school finance class that taught him how to plan and save.52
“For a lot of public schools in inner cities, it’s not required to take any personal finance classes to graduate or even learn about money in that sense,” Williams told CNBC. “That’s not the real world.”
Over the past few years, leaders at Guardian have grown increasingly concerned about the average American’s level of financial knowledge. Only one-third of adults can pass a basic financial knowledge and decision-making test.53 Less than half can define simple financial terms such as “interest” or “bankruptcy.” 54 And only about one in ten have mapped out a five-year financial plan.55
This lack of financial fluency is making it much harder for Americans to stay in control of their finances. According to one report, nearly half of Americans would have to sell a possession or borrow money if faced with just a $400 emergency expense.56 A five-year financial plan, an improved understanding of compound interest, and practice building a monthly budget aren’t going to solve the underlying societal inequities that have placed so many Americans close to the edge. But they can help people take their finances into their own hands and gain some control over their future.
At Guardian we felt an obligation to help respond to this crisis of financial fluency. If we could build a program that empowered individuals to gain a better understanding of the ins and outs of personal finance, it would improve their financial stability and help clear the way toward rewarding professional paths.
After some research and brainstorming, Guardian’s Executive Leadership Team came up with a plan for building such a program. And at the center of that plan was a partnership.
Capital Community College (CCC), a mere ten-minute drive from Guardian’s Hartford branch, had a financial education course that administrators had been trying to make more successful for years. But it wasn’t preparing or engaging students as well as it should.57
This seemed like a perfect opportunity to form a partnership with CCC. We had a team of dedicated financial experts who were excited to share their insights with CCC faculty and students alike. We knew that Guardian could provide enough financial support to help make the class successful and sustainable.
At the same time, we knew we would need to rely heavily on CCC educators to ensure the effectiveness of the course. After all, every great class needs a great teacher. By pooling the strengths of both Guardian and CCC, we felt confident that we could build something great. The Executive Leadership Team tasked Guardian’s multitalented general counsel, Tracy Rich, with reaching out to CCC to present our proposal.
However, after an initial meeting with the school, Tracy returned to Guardian with some disheartening news. Although some at CCC had quickly signaled their support of the partnership, others had expressed significant reservations. The college had never attempted to co-create a class like this with a business. Some members of the CCC staff were concerned that without any models or precedents, we might not be developing the program for the right reasons.
I understood their skepticism. In fact, I respected it. This skeptical cohort cared passionately about their students’ educations. They didn’t want us in the classroom until they could be sure we shared their passion and had the students’ best interests at heart. It was an eye-opening moment.
We had put plenty of effort into building a plan for how our partnership could work, but we hadn’t put enough effort into building the bonds of trust that would enable this plan to succeed. The CCC staff wanted their students to prosper—to be financially literate and academically and professionally successful. We wanted those same things, but if the educators didn’t trust us, the class would never get the green light.
So we shuffled our priorities. Instead of building a program first and hoping that collaborative and trusting relationships with the staff would follow, we made it our primary objective to develop these relationships. Everything else would flow from there.
Our big breakthrough came when we decided to appoint a Guardian employee to serve as a dedicated liaison to the school. In its report “Connecting Community Colleges with Employers: A Toolkit for Building Successful Partnerships,” the Brookings Institution suggests that educational institutions designate “a ‘liaison’ (or a team of liaisons) who can take on primary responsibility for developing and navigating relationships with local employers.”58 We flipped this model on its head. Instead of asking school leaders to send someone to us, we sent someone to them. And to demonstrate our high-level commitment, we made sure it was someone from our executive team: our former general counsel, Tracy Rich.
It was an important step toward building trust. To use Tracy’s words, “If these folks were going to trust us, we needed to show high-level commitment. We had to demonstrate that we wanted to be there not just for the photo-ops but for the meetings, the classes, the presentations. We needed to show them we’d be there for the long haul.”59
The effort paid off. The more time they spent with Tracy, the more the CCC staff realized that we shared the same goals. Trepidation turned into trust, and then trust into enthusiasm. The barriers to approval that previously had seemed so intractable fell, and the first class of students quickly signed up for the course.
Working together CCC and Guardian developed a curriculum covering the basics of personal finance and money management. Though the class was taught by CCC faculty, Guardian employees regularly joined as guest speakers to share their insights. And as Tracy reported, the classes that brought employees and students together to interact were the most dynamic of the semester.
Students loved hearing about personal finance and the finance industry from financial experts, and Guardian employees loved connecting with engaged and excited students. Employees leapt to volunteer. It was tremendously fulfilling, one employee explained to me, to be able to pass along insights that could have such a direct and positive effect on students’ lives. At the end of the course, when the CCC students gave their final presentations, they were cheered on by numerous Guardian employees who had watched their development throughout the semester.
The relationships built during that first year were critical in ensuring the long-term viability of the partnership between CCC and Guardian. The trust forged by Tracy Rich’s hard work helped to bridge the cultural divide between the corporate world and academia and gave CCC staff and Guardian employees the opportunity to cooperate in teaching the next generation of leaders the financial skills they need to succeed. Inspired by our partnership, CCC has taken the lead in developing the Financial Independence to Reach Success and Transformation (FIRST) Center, which enables students and community members to access financial education workshops, budget coaching, income tax submission assistance, and a host of similar services. The FIRST Center regularly enlists graduates of CCC’s financial education course to help administer these services, thus sparking a virtuous cycle of financial empowerment.
The CCC program has been successful, and since its creation Guardian has applied lessons learned at CCC to numerous other efforts across the country. At the time of writing, Guardian has worked with fourteen colleges and universities to design financial education courses. Of the 5,500 students who have graduated from these programs, a number have come to work at Guardian, either as interns or in full-time positions.60 We’ve seen the impact of these programs on students’ futures and our company, and we’re committed to investing in the creation of more. Each time we do, as we’ve learned, we’ll need to build trust anew.
Tracy set up a meeting with the president of a New York City community college to discuss a potential partnership. After he had delivered his pitch, the president paused for a moment and then posed a surprising question: “Are you here because you’re under some kind of court order?” 61 Apparently this was not the first time a company had come looking to partner on a program. The difference was, these companies had been… let’s say, motivated by different reasons.
The president’s question was confusing at the time. But the question behind the question was crystal clear. It was the same one that the CCC staff had asked us, implicitly, when we proposed that first partnership. Do you care? Or do you care only about looking like you care?
The only way to answer such a question is to build a relationship that speaks for itself.
Lesson 3: Design Through Others’ Eyes
Successful educator-employer partnerships invite a collection of stakeholders around the planning table. They prioritize building strong, trusting relationships among these stakeholders.
But it is important to remember that building strong partnerships is not an end in itself. Partnerships are formed by employers and educators, but that is not who they are formed for. Ultimately, students and workers are the people these partnerships should be helping, and they’re the ones who should remain front of mind when these partnerships are designed. During my time on President Obama’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans, I was reminded just how important this is.
The Advisory Council’s goal was to generate ideas for programs that could help young Americans learn to improve their financial stability. The group was composed of leaders from the business world, the nonprofit sector, academia, and government. It was an impressive collection of individuals, each of whom brought their own valuable insights to the table.
But after a few meetings, some in our group—myself included—started to worry we were thinking too abstractly. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once wrote, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”62
I offered a suggestion. What if we brought some current students into the meeting to share their experiences? The other members agreed, and the next time we met, we were joined by several graduates of Guardian’s CCC financial education course.63
Among so many professionals, the students were mostly overlooked. It was apparent they were unaccustomed to formal meetings. They blurted out comments and interrupted other speakers. But it was good that they did. They communicated to everyone the immense financial barriers to educational attainment, even when classes are affordable. Child care during class time, for example, can be prohibitively expensive for students who are balancing coursework with parenting duties.
The observations the students made, and the questions they raised, helped those of us on the panel to ground our discussion in the bedrock of lived experience. To recognize their valuable insights, the panel listed these students as contributors to the final report.
The CCC students illustrated a lesson that shines through the stories of ICATT, 12 for Life, P-TECH, and every other successful partnership. To succeed, we have to be willing to listen.
If we don’t listen, we can’t run an open-source planning process, as Litow and IBM did. We can’t build strong relationships, as Tracy Rich and our colleagues at Guardian have done. And we can’t design through other people’s eyes.
To harness the power of our varied skill sets and experiences, both employers and educators need to listen. People at the top of the academic and corporate worlds sometimes like to imagine that their way of viewing things is the best. In my time as an executive, I’ve heard plenty of griping about “ivory tower” academics and grumbling about “short-sighted” business leaders.
But the academic and the corporate worldviews have something important in common: they’re incomplete. Each needs the other to account for weaknesses and accentuate strengths. If we listen, we can build partnerships that last.
The challenge we have in front of us is great, but together, employers and educators are greater. If we build partnerships, we can tackle systemic issues, upend orthodoxies, and help the American worker prepare for the future.
The challenges we face will require our combined might. For instance, in order to truly prepare for the future, we must redesign an antiquated and outdated credentialing system.