Corporate Voices for Working Families

John M. Bridgeland, President and CEO of Civic Enterprises, and Jessica Milano, Senior Policy Advisor at Civic Enterprises, contributed this post as Featured Guest Bloggers. Civic Enterprises is a public policy development firm in Washington, D.C. Corporate Voices and Civic Enterprises released new research on America’s college completion crisis and skills gap – “Across the Great Divide” — in conjunction with America’s Promise Alliance’s Grad Nation Summit in Washington, D.C. This post was also re-published in the Huffington Post.

How can it be that today, in the midst of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression and millions of Americans seeking work, that 53 percent of employers find it difficult to find qualified workers?  How can a workforce desperate for new jobs appear so helpless amid so many businesses desperate to hire?

The answers to those questions lie at the heart of a new divide that has developed within the American economy.  Over the last several decades, a chasm has emerged to divide the skills of the nation’s workforce, as they exist, and the demands of the nation’s job market. Today, America has only 45 million workers who have the training and skills to fill 97 million high-skill jobs that businesses provide.  U.S. companies have to choose among importing skilled workers, outsourcing jobs, or relocating operations in markets overseas with a rising supply of skilled and affordable workers.  At the same time, the nation has more than 100 million candidates for only 61 million low-skill, low-wage positions. If America wants to remain competitive, we will have to expand our supply of high-skill workers.

But that will require more than just pointing high school graduates in the direction of their nearest college campus.  The national spotlight on “access” to college has shrouded another priority: ensuring that those who enter college programs graduate with the skills and credentials they will need to succeed in the workforce and help America remain competitive around the world.  Today, more than 70 percent of high school graduates enroll in some kind of advanced education within two years.  Yet, just over one-half of bachelor’s degree candidates complete their degree within six years, and less than one-third of associate’s degree candidates earn their degree within three years.  America has a serious college completion crisis.

The first step to overcoming this crisis is to broaden our definition of “college.” Despite the conventional wisdom that bachelor’s degrees are critical to success, the job market of the future will demand a vast new supply of talented graduates of a diverse range of postsecondary programs, including those that are two-years or less. By the end of this decade, about an equal percentage of jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or better (33%) as some college or a two-year associate’s degree (30%).  Not recognizing the value of career credentials and associate’s degrees is hindering our efforts to meet the needs of employers.

The second step is to recognize that as the costs of higher education outstrip what many can afford, businesses and colleges, especially community colleges which offer shorter-term degrees, need to do more to allow students to “earn and learn” at the same time.  More than 80 percent of college leaders and, 60 percent of college dropouts, identified financial pressures such as needing to work as a major challenge to students completing their degrees. Compounding this challenge is that oftentimes the work students do outside the classroom to pay the bills has little relevance to the degrees for which they are studying, and so rather than enhancing their studies and increasing their motivation to finish their degree, it often becomes a competing priority for their time.

Ultimately, it is crucial that American businesses work collaboratively with higher education to provide internships, apprenticeships, cooperative learning experiences, and to ensure that they are producing graduates with the competencies required by the business community. As the former Chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble John Pepper recently stated,

“Closing the skills gap is an important issue for business leaders, for citizens, and for the country as a whole.”

If America wants to regain its place in the world and restore the American Dream for millions of our people, closing the skills gap must be priority number one.

A copy of “Across the Great Divide” is available on Corporate Voices’ website at www.corporatevoices.org and the Civic Enterprises website at www.civicenterprises.net.

Barbara S. Hoenig, a consultant on mature workers and workforce development, contributed this post as a Featured Guest Blogger. Barbara has more than twenty-five years’ experience in the fields of aging, intergenerational and workforce development programs and policies. She develops strategic alliances between businesses, the public workforce system, policy makers and national and community-based organizations.

Older people are staking their claim in the workplace. They are continuing to work beyond the “normal” retirement age for two reasons. First, they need the income. Secondly, they are healthy and up to the demands of the job, and they feel that they have something special to offer.

In several focus groups conducted in 2005 with both working and retired senior pharmacists throughout the country, I learned that they were keen  on mentoring young people entering the pharmacy profession. This interest extended to helping secondary school and high school students, particularly minority students, choose pharmacy careers and to supporting and developing opportunities for pharmacy technicians, who were already in the workplace, to move on to becoming full-fledged pharmacists. “Pharmacy is a helping profession” was a repeated refrain. Moreover, the senior pharmacists saw the opportunity for growth and the prospect of receiving continuing education credits as part of the mentoring credentialing.

Many older pharmacists see the value of continuing to work rather than retiring. Aside from salary and benefits, they want flexible hours, a friendly atmosphere, and “ergonomic” adjustments to make the physical environment more comfortable. And above all, they want to be recognized for the interpersonal skills they have perfected over the years.

Yet, older workers need to be able to fit into today’s multigenerational workplace if they want to survive and prosper, recognizing they are near the top of the age demographic that rises through four generations: going from Generation Y (born 1981-2000) and Generation  X (1965-1980) to Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Traditionalists (1945 or before). Each generation is shaped by forces that have produced differing perspectives on work ethic, leadership and authority, communication, problem solving and decision making.

A hallmark of today’s workplace is the interaction between the generations in the workforce. Past barriers are lowered, and the different values and perspectives of the generations come together head on. At times, differences between these generations may lead to tensions in the workplace. But whether intergenerational tensions are the root cause for tension in the complex workplace environment is a matter open for further study.

A recent national survey conducted for Corporate Voices for Working Families (Corporate Voices) by Public Policy Polling, through the generous support of Workplace Options, probes answers from a sample of 642 American workers to five questions that focused on their experience and perceptions about intergenerational attitudes and conflicts at work. The worker sample is distributed across age, gender, ethnic background, industry sector and salary.

Broadly speaking, the responses overall show that less than 20 percent  of the workers polled feel strongly that there is conflict or discord between the generations in the workplace. In fact, only 9 percent of the all those surveyed answered “Yes, always” to whether they are uncomfortable working with different generations or age groups.

However, it is significant that the responses over the entire sample are heavily weighted toward the views of “White” participants and also toward the Baby Boomer generation. The sample of 642 American workers is 68 percent White, versus 14 percent Hispanic, 12 percent African American, and 6 percent other, reflecting the U.S. population.  By generation, it is 60 percent Boomers, versus 10 percent Gen Y, 18 percent Gen X, and 12 percent Traditionalists. The responses vary greatly according to race, age, and employment sector.

A close look at the data by race and ethnic origin reveals that the fraction of Hispanics (21 percent) answering Yes to being always uncomfortable working with other generations is 3 times the fraction of Whites (7 percent ) with that view. By contrast, a conclusive 83 percent of the African-American participants register an emphatically that they are not uncomfortable working with other generations, compared to 66 percent overall.

One prevailing feeling emerging from the survey is that mature workers have more respect for young workers than vice-versa, and the survey indicates that this feeling grows as workers grow older.

Corporate Voices’ survey generally supports the findings of a 2009 Pew Research Center survey of views in the general public , which found that only about a quarter of the respondents (26 percent) saw any big conflicts between young and old in America. The big source of difference between diverse generations, the Pew study found, is in how they use technology.

Indeed, the jury is still out as to whether any inherent generational characteristics might be a significant cause of conflict in the workplace. However, as noted by Pitt-Catsouphes and Matz-Costa of Boston College’s Sloan Center on Aging & Work, external factors such as flexibility and the drivers of employee engagement may be important for individual success, more in some age groups than others.

Having a four-generation workforce is not only a matter of necessity because of our aging population, but it can also have benefits of synergy by which the whole is actually greater than the sum of its parts. This calls for creative and perceptive management.

An AARP study offers six principles for managing generations successfully that encourage open discussion of perceived differences, give recognition to the personal needs and preferences of workforce members and build on individual strengths. In this way, contributions from a mixed-generation team may bring unexpectedly positive results, making the business case for promoting better intergenerational dynamics.

Sure, there is friction in the workplace, and sometimes the source may be generational. It goes without saying that conflicts between workers are commonplace for countless reasons. Many of these may turn out coincidentally to be between Gen Ys and Baby Boomers or Gen Xs and Traditionalists, for example. But whether intergenerational tensions are the root cause and in a class by themselves as a distinguishing feature of interaction in the complex workplace environment is a matter open for further study.

At a strictly practical level, SHRM gives some key strategies for successfully retaining talent and avoiding conflict in a multigenerational workforce. They include:

• Communicating information in multiple ways, both oral and written, along with
• Training for managers to be sensitive to intergenerational differences, as well as
• Collaborative activities that promote intergenerational respect and inclusion, and finally
• Mentoring programs in which workers of different generations work together and share experiences.

Cindy Morgan-Jaffe, Executive Director of The Internship Institute, contributed this post as a Featured Guest Blogger. The Internship Institute is a nationally focused, action-oriented non-profit organization that develops and promotes best practices around internships, assures access to quality internships and provides solutions to effectively bridge the gap between school and work.

Hope. Where are we as individuals, families, communities and nations without it? Hope sustains us through tragedies such as that in Japan and unrest in the Middle East. Hope is what lets us believe in a better future even as we face such difficult times.

As the Executive Director of The Internship Institute, I work daily to provide hope for others. I join hands with fellow parents, corporate and community leaders and like-minded professionals to clear pathways to brighter futures. I believe this is both possible and essential for our prosperity and survival in the global economy.

Today, more than ever, we hear the clarion call for internships. While some job-training programs face cuts, hefty grants are being issued by The Department of Labor for career training programs and community partnerships aimed at increasing college graduation rates. A common recommendation especially by Learn and Earn advocates is to increase internships and related experiential learning counterparts (apprenticeships, co-ops). Yet, in many cases, the reality of such efforts falls short.

The Internship Institute is a nationally focused, action oriented non-profit. Our goals are to develop, certify and promote best practices around internships, to assure access to quality internships, and to provide solutions that bridge the gap effectively between school and work. One best practice is the creation and support of formal internship programs. Indicators of success of such programs are higher graduation rates, a more focused and prepared talent pool, and employers eager to reduce costs of recruitment, training and turnover. When these programs are thoughtfully designed and adequately supported, the benefits can far outweigh the costs for both employer and individuals.

Why Internships Fall Short

There is no substitute for experience. Experiential learning gives individuals the opportunity to explore the world of work, align interests and skills, determine fit, find mentors and make meaningful connections. Employers benefit because they get to test drive talent, develop mentoring capacity and build relationships in the community.

However, the internship experience often fails those invested. The following are common reasons:

1. The focus is more on the need for the internship and less on the quality of it.
2. The lion’s share of the work in placing interns falls on educators (career centers, faculty and intern program managers) who are under staffed, underfunded and who don’t operate in the employer sphere.
3. The burden for success falls on the employer and intern who are commonly untrained or inadequately supported in how to make the internship count for all invested. (Few supervisors will follow a manual on how to supervise an intern.)
4. Confusion exists around what models are best for different populations and needs. (A high school internship is much different than one for a third year college student or postgraduate.)
5. The management of the process is inconsistent. Is the manager the intern, the supervisor, the educator (if involved), all or any of the above?
6. Poor fit of intern with career interest, intern with employer, intern with supervisor, intern with the work and intern with knowledge of what he or she needs for success.
7. Compliance concerns, confusions and variables tied to differences in industry and employer practices.
8. A mindset that academic study and work-based learning should be on separate tracks. (Apprenticeships are only for trades, not professions, and vocational schools are for the lower performing and lower class.)
9. The assumption that an academic setting and education prepares students for a work setting and career.
10. Unpaid internships are inaccessible to large groups of talented and diverse individuals.

Ironically, the practice of experiential learning goes back centuries, drawing on the connection between mentor and mentee to build mastery. Yet the factors above, in addition to larger social, economic and political factors, have contributed to a broken system that – according to some – never worked that well in the beginning or has not evolved sufficiently to reflect the needs of society today. A presentation called “Changing Paradigms” by Sir Ken Robinson, the British Minister of Education, sums it up nicely.

“The problem is [we] are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way [we] are alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school. When we went to school we were kept there with the story, which is if you worked hard and did well and got a college degree you’d have a job. Our kids don’t believe that…”

There are ways, however, to modernize the educational system and to use internships as a way to engage students and help them gain necessary job-related skills.  Indeed, formal internship programs, if implemented effectively, can do much to build the preparedness of students, and to help them become engaged and invested members of the future workforce.

Why Formalized Internship Programs Work

Formalized internship programs can address most if not all of the factors listed above.

At the top of the list is clarity and buy-in around the mission of the program. For example, if college completion is critical to the mission and a measure of success, then how this is achieved must be integrated into the program design and implementation from the start.

Successful internship programs share common best practices that include:

1. A clear mission, process and indicators for success.
2. Projects interns do are designed to fit both the needs of the organization and the needs of the intern.
3. Clearly defined processes, expectations, structure and consistency.
4. The employer is able to articulate how the program ties to the larger business strategy of the organization and communicates that across the company.
5. Training and support for the interns and their supervisors before and during the internship.
6. Mentoring for both supervisors and interns (Partnerships between employers and academia that include mentoring students in school helps to better prepare the intern for the internship experience.)
7. A system of feedback and evaluation with ongoing and pre-determined check-ins.
8. Links back to classroom learning, education planning and support for education activity.
9. Compensation at the very least for out of pocket expenses.
10. Compliance with laws and regulations issued by the Department of Labor.

Connection to the College Completion Agenda

When students connect their learning to who they are and how they fit into the universe of life and work, they are more engaged. When employers connect to talent that becomes invested in the success of the organization, everyone wins. Internships can be the launch pad for this engagement. Formal internship programs can be the strategy for fostering such engagements. And as time goes on, all will realize that a lifelong practice that connects work to learning ensures healthy, vibrant societies.