The Miseducation of The US Workforce
Since a college degree is no longer enough, how can we rethink the way that people are trained and validated by employers?
The year I graduated college, Google piloted a program called “Google Start”. The premise was that high-performing students graduating from top universities could be slotted into open roles in Advertising and People Operations according to Google’s hiring needs, regardless of major.
I was placed as an Account Strategist in Online Sales and put my unrelated finance degree up on the shelf.
Google Start dissolved shortly after I arrived. While there was never a public explanation, I can speculate that the company’s leadership decided that “bringing smart people on board” was not a strong enough strategy. Google tried to skip the step of properly matching people to available roles. But misalignment leads to high turnover, which can be very costly for the company, and not great for employees either.
However, I do respect that Google was exploring new ways to identify and match talent to jobs — something that more companies should do.
According to recent studies, only 11% of employers think that graduating students have skills that fit their needs, and 96% of employers are unhappy with their labor pool. A full 83% of HR managers say their systems need an overhaul.
The mismatch between jobs and skills in the United States can be staggering: 46% of American workers consider themselves underemployed, but there are six million jobs in the country that are going unfilled. Three out of four Americans say they are not using their degree or training.
How many unfilled positions will it take before companies and educational institutions alike realize that it’s time to rethink how workers are educated, hired and trained?
The Google Start program challenged the idea that a candidate’s major was relevant to non-engineering entry level roles. Seven years later, established companies and “people ops” startups alike are taking it a step further to question other basic premises — like whether requiring candidates to have a degree is actually necessary — and developing new methods to train and assess skill proficiency.
A whole new crop of education startups are tackling this problem from different angles. Lingo Live is breaking down language barriers that slow the productivity of employees at tech companies. Pairin identifies the skills that make employees successful and provides tools to help students and workers level up. As I’ve written before, other education companies are approaching this problem by strengthening the pipeline of qualified candidates as early as grade school, helping students get to and through college and matching non-traditional candidates to jobs.
There is a clear market opportunity for entrepreneurs rethinking education and building the bridge to employment. The need is clear, and there is already a precedent: 50% of working age adults report having received some sort of education or training related to their work in any given year and in the US alone, and employers spent $64 billion dollars on external services for training and development in 2013.
Google Start was a spark of the higher ed and workforce innovations to follow that are focused on building the desired skills to be hired, validating these skills among employers and helping current employees get the training needed to reach the next step in their careers.
Ebony Pope is Senior Manager of US Ventures at Village Capital, which is currently seeking applications for Education: US 2017, a venture development program for early-stage education entrepreneurs across the US in partnership with Lumina Foundation. Learn more and apply here.
