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Workforce is at an interesting spot with employers, who you might have noticed are kind of vital to the conversation because they tend to be the ones who give people jobs.
AI is looming over a lot of employment decisions, and it might not be changing work with the speed and substance that employers expected. Separately, public policy in this space has bent more toward what employers want, but policymakers haven’t yet seen the results they want. At the same time, employers continue to look to the public sector for help sorting workforce development—including money—but don’t feel like they’re getting what they want in response.
It’s a complex time, but last week I had an interesting conversation on this space with Dan Marsella, who is the vice president at Workforce Edge, which helps employers build and implement their workforce strategies.
Below, we talk about how to communicate better about employer-funded training and education resources, what employers might need in hand to spend on workforce development, and what in workforce really “scales.”
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An interview with Dan Marsella.
Dan Marsella is Vice President of Enterprise Partnerships at Workforce Edge.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick Beadle: To level set, where does what Workforce Edge does fit into workforce and where it’s going in the coming years?
Dan Marsella: Our mission at Workforce Edge is to help our employer partners transform their investment in learning and workforce development strategies and taking that investment from kind of check-the-box benefits that they have typically offered to their workforce and really turning that into a workforce development strategy that builds critical talent pipelines.
At the end of the day, our mission is to really sit down with employers and understand where their needs are. Not just right now, but also in the medium and the long term. How are they thinking about utilizing their investment in a more strategic way so that folks are taking advantage of [employer-provided] learning opportunities?
The employees taking advantage of [these] programs are typically finding their way to [that] information on [things like] the company's intranet. Three percent of the organization maybe raises their hand and chooses something on their own and the organization says “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe”—and off they go on their learning journey.
We [work] with each organization—because they're unique—to really understand how they can best maximize the investment and create the best opportunities for their workforce.
Nick: You mentioned the trainings that show up on the company intranet. I’ve been an employee in different contexts, and when I saw that training on my employers’ intranets, it was not always clear to me whether it benefited my career in any way to do it. When you’re building these opportunities, what are you doing to make sure that what’s important is communicated?
Dan: I'm going to use an example in healthcare.
Predictions are [that the healthcare industry is facing] continued vacancies in key roles that keep the machine rolling—and it's not just nursing. You [need] to create visibility into what does the career ladder look like [to reach different roles]?
We really, really want to help organizations communicate that more clearly, so not only is there an opportunity for you [the worker] to take advantage of our education benefit program and maneuver yourself from point A to point B, but what does point B mean? What is a day in the life of a [surgery] tech? When you can clearly articulate that and combine it with intention in your program design, that sort of day-in-the-life content, I think, goes a really long way.
Nick: Very often, in my experience, it's that workers don't necessarily know that opportunities are out there or that they may be a fit for them.
Dan: Communication is key. It goes beyond just getting more prescriptive in the pathways that you present to your workforce. It's going a level deeper and helping [workers] understand what that means.
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Going beyond investing just to invest.
Nick: A common conversation I have these days is about employers not investing in the workforce space. Y'all definitely have a commercial interest and a substantive interest in that employer investment. What do you tell employers about why they should invest, and what are you reading from the market right now?
Dan: The idea that [employers] should just invest to invest is probably not something that they're going to implement.
Getting really crisp on what those opportunities are and where the supply-and-demand [has an imbalance] gives employers a lot more confidence [about where] to put their investment. Because there's a plan.
That's where I think we're helping a lot of organizations see that this investment is worthy. It needs to be tied to an overall strategy.
Nick: If you were trying to convince an employer to invest in workforce development, what is that tangible end goal? Is it saving money? Is it getting better talent?
Dan: It's both of those things.
There is a way to measure the retention impact, but I also think that there are cost savings [from external hiring]. We all have heard the different numbers as it relates to the cost of turnover. You think about nursing, you think about even in technology, the cost of turnover is high. If you can create the opportunity to fill those vacancies from within, there is cost savings.
[But] it goes beyond retention. It goes to the idea that it is really difficult to recruit for these roles because in traditional higher education the supply is not keeping up with the demand.
You're also building a strategy where you're replacing those workers from within.
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Curation, not customization, and workforce development at ‘scale.’
Nick: Today, I was looking through some policy documents from a year ago, and one of them talked about how AI is rapidly changing the workforce in ways that workforce training can't keep up with. I'm not sure employers are actually seeing that right now.
How are you engaging those issues? I do think employers thought, “Hey, AI will be doing x, y, and z for us right now, and it doesn’t seem to be doing any of that” because of cost, or because the machines haven’t gotten to that point yet.
Dan: It's an interesting time to be alive, right?
One of the things that we've designed [is] our Tech Skills Academy. One of the reasons that we created it is because employees have decision paralysis. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t realize what opportunities exist and they don’t know what pathway to choose.
AI training is certainly a part of [Tech Skills Academy], but every organization is at a different stage in terms of what they’re trying to achieve. What we do is we [work] with the organization, and we create their version of our Tech Skills Academy. What training or learning should be incorporated for each level of employee, each pocket of your workforce? Is it degree programs? Is it short-form? Which one?
Nick: That's interesting because, as we’ve been talking, I'm hearing a lot of customization in what you guys are offering to employers. What I hear a lot from policymakers is that they want scale, which typically seems to mean a solution that solves everything and works everywhere. Customization isn’t really aligned with that version of “scale.”
Is a deep level of customization just necessary in y’all’s experience from employer to employer?
Dan: I wouldn't even say it's customization—I think it's curation.
In certain industries, developing your own internal pipelines is going to be critical. Is that a playbook that you can give from one employer to the next? Probably not. I think each employer, based upon their unique needs and positioning, will need a program tailored to them as it relates to their education benefit.
Nick: In other words, different employers are different and they have their own needs. The curation idea I think is very interesting because curation is something that maybe is transferable. You could have a packet of resources and there’s some choose-your-own adventure going on underneath it.
Dan: Employers in specific industries [will] need to have a sound strategy in place for the way that they grow their own talent. And I think that's what needs to be scalable.
Card subject to change.
Thanks to Dan for a fun conversation.
“Oi” from the University of Oxford in the U.K., where I’m hanging out with smart people from across the world and talking about apprenticeship degrees as part of a lovely event thrown by the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. On Thursday, you’ll get a special edition of THE MONEY looking at a topic that’s (theoretically) been key to workforce funding the past year.