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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nick Beadle: We’ve known each other for a while, but tell me about your work in this space. I loved what you guys did on skills-first hiring at the Markle Foundation, obviously. How are you continuing that work over at Third Sector?

Dr. Joy Coates: It's a passion point of mine, but I'd even take it back a little bit further, even to my JFF days, where I really started to cut my teeth on this whole idea of better pathways and postsecondary opportunity. I spent a lot of time at JFF working on dual-enrollment pathways—specifically dual-enrollment pathways that would definitely lead to the job—and was able to leverage that experience when we started having this conversation around skills-first pathways.

I identified with it on a very personal level as an adult learner who always worked two and three jobs while trying to finish various and sundry college degrees. I really understand intimately that there are so many skills that we acquire through simply having to do our day-to-day jobs. Those skills may be recognized with a good performance review or a slight [pay] bump or whatever. But if we would really quantify those skills, the power of understanding what those skills are, how to map them, and what gaps they can fill, [the] pain points they actually can alleviate for employers is one of the most powerful workforce innovations.

When we were at Markle, that was really the crux of what we were trying to do with ReWork America Alliance: get this concept into the hands of not only employees but also intermediary organizations that focus almost solely on career navigation for adult learners. It's often an untapped space, I think, because people expect adults to just kind of know. They expect you to grow into knowing what your career path is, how to maximize it, and what avenues you should take, simply because of the chronology of your age.

We would never expect that of "traditional students," but I think what's important with the adult learner is not only that we can provide guidance on the pathway. It's guidance that doesn't make you start from ground zero. It's guidance that helps you understand and quantify your own skills and thereby gives you more control of your career path than you might have thought possible and a greater avenue to upward economic mobility.

Nick: Knowing how to evaluate those skills is really so much of the challenge in terms of getting someone in there and helping someone also know, "Hey, is this employable?" I think a lot of people think that they're not employable as workers even though they have a ton of skills.

Joy: Largely, employers of any industry are well-intentioned in terms of wanting to be able to retain their own talent. They don't necessarily have the time [or] a framework in place to be able to quantify [worker] skills [on an individual basis].

The other part that's powerful about the skills-first hiring is certainly not just the hiring, but it also gives you a clearer pathway for more strategic retention. Yes, you are able to directly map your skills to the gaps in your own workforce, in your own organization, and I think that that too can be really critical for employers.

Certainly, they need support. Organizations like mine, like yours, can give that support, but I think as long as we continue this shift in the conversation toward partnership versus finger-pointing or vilifying, like "Employers don't care about x." I honestly just choose not to believe it. I think it's that we need to have better ways to partner faster and in a more concrete way with employers and galvanize them.

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Nick: Something I didn’t necessarily realize when we were building Nexus was that there was power in that it didn’t require a rulemaking or a legal change to be used, but that’s been one of the more positive bits of feedback we’ve heard about it.

We are bringing people along on a solution that is already there. It's just not been used. Maybe we don't need to build anything. Maybe we need to look to figure out how we can leverage the whole thing into something new.

Joy: Wherever we see evidence that there's a set of standalone apprenticeships in a given region that are having really substantial results in terms of how they are getting folk into their industry (at higher rates than others or at higher pay than others), that's the good point that we're getting to with something like Nexus, right?

I think it's less about us needing to, to your point, use Nexus as an amplification of those systems. Maybe there's a world in which we're working with one set of partners that are not quite as far along and really need [Nexus] to be a power tool. On the other hand, we've got some folks that are super far along. They've got great placement and great upward economic mobility, but they don't actually know how to quantify that, and they want to expand.

That could be an opportunity for Nexus to almost be an evaluation framework of sorts that we could help them to plug into how we're thinking about what they're actually showing us they already know how to do. If they're having high placement, clearly those skills-first components are in place, and they're just not failing at that.

We have an opportunity to not only build but scale using the same framework, the same set of skills. I think that will open up the conversation with more employers to be able to say, "Nexus is new in terms of how we're talking to you about it." It's certainly new in terms of the codification of how you would take the best of these two modalities, but it actually does exist, and we can actually use it the way that we've documented to sharpen and expand [skills training], versus you feeling like now you've got to throw the whole baby out with the bathwater and do this whole new ground-up thing.

Nick: Something that’s fascinating here is that in calls we’ve done very recently, there are people who have been low-key using Nexus or versions of Nexus for years. They’ve not used it a lot, and they haven’t talked about it a lot.

Everything in apprenticeship can be a third rail sometimes. Some folks have told me, “I don’t know why this was a third rail. We’ve been doing it for years, but people think we hate it.”

Joy: Demystification gets you so far, but what's always interesting to me is how long it can sometimes take to get to the demystification. Once you're there, people are like, "Oh, yes, of course, we'll do this. You know what? I got three people I can put on this." Whereas that first conversation was like, "None of us have time. We don't want to do ‘Fill in the blank.’"

I think that is the first thing we learn and the first thing we forget whenever we are trying to do any kind of engagement: it is not about how good your thing is, it's about how well you understand the need, and how clearly you are able to convey that in a way that makes sense.

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Nick: As we’re doing our barnstorming tour here, what are you hoping to hear as we talk to people about what they're getting from Nexus and where they want to go with it? I have some ideas of that myself, but we're in an interesting phase here because we've been building this thing, but at the same time, now we got to get people to pick up on it.

Joy: I'm listening for alignment to a clear pain point. I'm listening for them to hear what Nexus offers and make the connection that it's not something they would have to adjust to, but it's something that they need and would actually be a welcome addition to their existing strategy.

The thing I would like to hear is for folks to say this is really clear. This gives me some marching orders that I can use not only in my org but in my industry, and I actually want to champion this. If you want to do it locally, that's great, but I think that when we're talking about real scale and take-up, we want to begin to cultivate some fellow champions of this.

Nick: We called out some specific industries in that paper. Are there any industries that you think Nexus may be a good fit for, from what you've seen since we wrote that paper or even as we've been talking about this stuff? We talked about manufacturing, we talked about cybersecurity, and a few other ones that are kind of newer.

Joy: Hotel, restaurant, and travel. I say that because it can feel like a catch-22, right? I think that when we think about the way the economy is, it's like, “Well, people are traveling less,” and those things are true. I also think about where we're sitting at this conference, right? You do see dual enrollment programs that are funneling folks toward HRTA because there'll always be some sort of need for that, and it touches on all kinds of things from logistics to food, crap, and all those pieces.

When we think about folks who have been displaced because they've been laid off, maybe you are a project manager somewhere else, or maybe you are in some kind of adjacent industry. I think that would help the HRTA industries to think about something like Nexus versus saying, "Oh, I only need people who have this degree in HRTA, or I only want people who've got 20 years of hotel experience." There is a gap in terms of folks who have been in this business, HRTA, particularly 20 to 30 years. Those folks are retiring, and you're not necessarily seeing heavy recruitment of folks. There are plenty of people that have transferable skills that, to our conversation at the top, may not know how those skills are transferable.

Being able to do some of that work for both the employer and the potential employee, I think there could be great opportunities in terms of the skill alignment for an industry that certainly may be having some challenges. It could actually breathe some life into it because it could bring unique perspectives and skill sets if they were to employ a strategy like this.

Nick: That’s very interesting because it takes me in a couple of directions. Auto technicians are as well, because I think we were well into getting this paper out. We were at a conference, both of us—the C-BEN conference—and there was someone at a community college who told me one of the examples we have in the paper, which is that his autotech students were getting hired to service machines in manufacturing plants.

For hotels and hospitality, the people who I feel like are slowly seeing her thriving because of AI are generalists. You learn a lot of general things in those fields because you've got to make this stuff work.

Joy: You can take it even a step further when we think about existing executive development or GM development pathways that hotels will have. If you've been in the hospitality department for two years or something, you can qualify to go into the franchising program [for some chains].

Nick: Wrapping up, and trying to figure out the type of annoying question I would ask someone who I’m not working on a project with, where do you hope we end up a year from now as we move Nexus along?

Joy: As community colleges in particular begin to rethink some of their apprenticeship adjacencies, I think it's a great place for that. I also think it's a great place for dual-enrollment programs, as folks are thinking about bringing career navigation down into the high-school and middle-school level. The career navigation exists there, but [we need] much more "What do you feel or think you might want to be?" versus giving you the steps to a clear pathway.

I think when we're talking about upward economic mobility, we've also got to talk about education, and we've got to talk about how early in the education pipeline those conversations are going to happen. A year from now, I'd like to see us being able to have some of those conversations in earnest, based on the success that it's had and what we're thinking of as our more traditional adult learners today.

Since The Great Platform Switch of March 2026, I’ve gotten quite a few asks from folks trying to buy paid subscriptions in bulk so their whole team can access my weekly cheat sheet and grant listings. The fine folks at beehiiv have made that much easier to do in the past few weeks.

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beehiiv introduced a bunch of intriguing new features last week, including one or two that match some longtime reader requests. I’ll be coming to your inbox in a few weeks for my annual reader survey, and I’m thrilled to get your feedback as I develop what’s next.

Thanks to Joy for bearing with technology and risking getting kicked out of an empty ballroom while we talked about our project. Again, you can sign up here for our webinar on Wednesday afternoon.

Allegedly, this part of summer is supposed to be quiet, but I’ll be back here on Thursday for THE MONEY with some more workforce odds and ends from Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling’s confirmation hearing. Plus, anything else that blows up in the next 48 hours. See you then.