New York
The simple bargain that Geoffrey Canada offered students entering the Harlem Children’s Zone, the nonprofit he founded in the mid-1990s, can no longer be guaranteed.
“I made a straightforward promise to my kids: If you graduate from college, you’re going to get a job,” he says. “It’s become increasingly clear to me that this is not the case.”
Recent graduates of the program, he says, are looking “desperately” for work.
To try and improve job prospects for young people, Mr. Canada has joined 55 other like-minded leaders in academe, business, education, and the nonprofit world in a group called Rework America. The organization is the brainchild of Zoë Baird, president of the Markle Foundation. The grant maker last fall committed $50 million to the effort to keep the American Dream within reach for workers struggling in job markets upended by technology.
Ms. Baird envisions a “revolution” in which traditional criteria for jobs, such as a college diploma, are revamped. Instead, Ms. Baird and the Rework America members encourage the use of more specific credentials and accomplishments, such as classroom work that falls short of a college degree, experience on the job, or training provided by a labor union, nonprofit, or prison.
To develop a blueprint for its work, Markle convened a who’s who of experts, including Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state; Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce; John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable; and the group’s co-chair, Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks.
The result is a book published this month called America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age. In it, Ms. Baird and the members of the group lay out a plan to overhaul the role of education and the process of matching employers with job seekers that is “more about empowering individuals than institutions.”
The Zappos Model
The idea is to create an online job market where employers provide a clear description of the actual skills needed for their open positions. The site would also provide job seekers with ways, short of a college degree, to demonstrate they are qualified or direct them to organizations where they can develop the needed skills.
Ms. Baird compares the approach to shopping for shoes online. On Zappos, a popular footwear website, consumers can sort through brands, sizes, widths, colors, and heel heights. Using a similar system, businesses could post a more granular portrait of job requirements, giving them a better chance to find matches for the more than 4-million midlevel jobs Ms. Baird says employers are trying to fill.
It could also help workers who currently don’t feel they have much hope of career advancement, she says. For instance, thousands of young African-American men emerge from incarceration and find it difficult to find a job. But often they have learned technical skills in prison that could be matched with employers seeking those skills.
“In an environment with traditional criteria, they may never have a chance,” she says.
Two pilot programs slated to begin later this year in Phoenix and Colorado will test Markle’s approach.
Working with several government, education, and business partners, including Arizona State University, edX, LinkedIn, and the Walmart Foundation, Markle plans to build a comprehensive job-market site. Employers will be asked to post their needs on the site, and job seekers will be able to use a skills-assessment tool to determine what they need to qualify for certain jobs and point them to classroom and online courses to learn new skills.
Pushing Transparency
Mr. Canada is optimistic the approach will shed light on what talents companies actually need and make the job search his graduates face more “transparent.”
“There are a bunch of folks who would learn the skills if they knew what skills were required,” he says.
Markle has also begun to convene focus groups to discuss Rework America’s plans, says Ms. Baird. She has noticed enthusiasm from older workers who want to retrain for the digital economy as well as from young people seeking to get a toehold in the job market.
Looking ahead, she says, “if we’re successful, we’ll substantially increase the training provided by employers both to their employees and generally in the marketplace.”
