At Guild, Doing Good is Doing Well

Note: This piece was originally published on July 11, 2018

If you walked around the Guild office over the last few weeks, you’d likely feel caught in the middle of something both exciting and admittedly a little chaotic — in the last month alone, we worked with two major employers, Walmart and Discover, to offer a debt-free college education to over 1.3 million frontline employees. This is notable for two reasons: first and foremost, starting immediately, these programs will change the lives of the employees and their families who take advantage of them. Second, they represent a shift in the way we talk about college accessibility for all frontline employees and those without a college degree.

In the midst of these corporate announcements, we had another exciting success — Guild was honored to be recognized as a “Best for the World” company, placing us in the top 10% of all B-Corps globally.

When we embarked on the process of becoming a B-Corp, it was, to us, the formalization of something we’ve understood as core to our business since we first began: we can do good and do well and those concepts are not, and should not be, mutually exclusive. At Guild, doing good is synonymous with doing well as a business.

To us, doing good means achieving our mission of increasing the economic mobility for the 64 million working Americans without a college degree through access to education. For those 64 million folks, a college degree is an important vehicle to economic success — more than 90% of the jobs created since the 2008 recession require a college degree. Today, receiving a diploma or a certificate represents more than just something to be framed on the wall — it is a passport of sorts that offers a pathway to economic opportunity and the chance to be part of the middle class. However, this rigid mobility criteria has the effect of creating a mismatch in people and training: over 40% of American employers say they cannot find employees with the skills they need. As our economy changes, so do the requirements to succeed, and an increasing number of Americans are not equipped with the skills required to do so. Our goal at Guild is to change that.

So when thinking about how we operate our business, we operate with our #1 core value in mind — “students-first”. This means placing students at the center of every decision we make. We do this not just because it’s what is right, but because it is what is best for our business. We’ve aligned our own incentives and the incentives of our employers such that Guild succeeds financially when these employees succeed through dual retention — at work and at school. In that operating choice, we’ve inextricably linked doing good and doing well in the way we operate.

At Guild, we believe that all Americans deserve the opportunity for a better future — an opportunity provided, in part, by an education and lifelong learning. More importantly, we believe companies should not have to make the tradeoff between margin and mission. We’re proud to be a part of a B-Corp community that celebrates doing well by doing good, and even prouder to be recognized as Best for the World.