but thanks this afternoon all right we're i think we're official hello i'm jenna talbot i'm senior vice president at whiteboard advisors i lead our communications practice uh here at whiteboard and really excited about the conversation today we've got a great great set of panelists here the topic here is is social capital so i know for so many of us working in education creating equitable pathways to economic mobility is really what animates a lot of our work and we know that unlocking that opportunity isn't just about what people know but it's also about who they know how they navigate networks how they navigate changing dynamics in the workplace how they build community and so we're going to be talking about that today luckily there's lots of great people in our world that are thinking really deliberately about how we help individuals build social capital alongside our our education institutions so i'm really thrilled to have a number of those folks here you know as i was preparing for this i was looking through um some great survey data from strata education network and one of the things that they found in a recent report they've been doing with with nessie on current um student engagement they found that first generation students are far less likely to participate in social capital building activities they're less likely to hold internships we know that these are the kinds of activities that help strengthen that connection from education to employment and that's really what we're gonna spend our time on today in in the year of 2022 we can't talk about this topic without talking about technology and so that's where you'll see a lot of the conversation anchored we'll talk through what technology can do well uh what it might not be able to do well what we need to to be thinking about to ensure that we can go about social capital building in as equitable as a way as possible um so let's get into into conversation you'll see pretty quickly everyone's bios and perspectives come to light in their answers so i'm not going to spend a ton of time but we have an awesome panel uh hannah lee who's a director at cognizant foundation thank you for joining us we've got reuben harris who's the ceo and founder of career karma christine cruz-vaguera who is the chief education strategy officer at handshake and certainly last but not least julia freeland fisher who's a director of education at the christensen institute and julia really it's been a lot of your research over the last five or six years that uh prompted us to have this conversation so as we kick off here give us kind of a starting definition of what we mean by social capital and perhaps you can give us maybe like a crash course on what you've learned in your research over these years and i know that social capital isn't always just about building networks and so just helping helping the team or the group here kind of ground our definition would be would be helpful yeah awesome thanks jenna and so thrilled to be um in conversation with hannah christine and reuben um who i think of as like really important thought partners and exemplars in this work um so yeah social capital not a jargony term at all um but it's it's really a basic concept that our networks contain value so your financial capital your dollars and cents in your pocket that you can get things with your human capital what you know and can do and people in the labor market will pay you to do um your social capital likewise describes the idea that your networks contain value um and that can be all sorts of value it can be emotional support from neighbors and friends it can be favors that people pay you but when we're talking about access to the workforce it can also be information about jobs support in the job getting process and people willing to open doors networks and take bets on you um and we know that opportunity is a social phenomenon an estimated half of jobs come through personal connections exposure long before the job getting moment shapes our sense of future possible selves um economic connectedness is a leading predictor of economic mobility um and so all of this sort of amounts to like if you care about economic mobility skills certainly matter but the many years of the skills gap conversation has largely ignored uh the the outsized role that networks can play in in accessing the labor market um and jenna you sort of alluded to this but i think in 2022 and this is really sort of after years of research predating the pandemic in terms of the role of technology in building students networks particularly those furthest from opportunity um we'd be crazy to ignore the potential for technology to really um democratize access to connectedness right it's far cheaper than it was 20 or 30 years ago to overcome geographic and time costs of meeting people you might otherwise not meet and at the same time traditional social media has not gotten us there it's digitized a lot of our offline networks and i'd argue it's actually scaled distrust more than connection in a lot of ways and i think that's why folks like career karma and handshake are such exciting examples that they're sort of looking at technology through a new lens of what does it actually mean to build authentic connection particularly the sorts of connections you might need to get jobs that might otherwise be out of reach because of the way that social capital shapes access in our labor market and what does it look like to actually build technology tools that don't just do what we do offline more efficiently but do something totally different in terms of building community and access um the last thing i'd say that as we have this conversation jen i'd love to like frankly hear my colleagues thoughts about is that um i think it is at the same time really important to be discerning about new tools emerging in the market i think there's a lot of tools charading as networking tools that are just digitizing cold outreach and like that's great we've all done cold outreach in our lives and like lending some efficiency to that thankless process might be good but it's not the be-all end-all it could actually perpetuate a lot of inequity and bias i think there's a lot of tools positioned as engagement tools that may make learners and workers feel a greater sense of belonging but not actually be about accessing more resources through those relationships and that's really i'll just end on that note this idea of social capital keep reminding ourselves social capital refers to the resources contained in our relationships so it's not just that i know someone it's that i am reciprocally exchanging resources with that person and how are we building technology tools that sort of nudge scale increase the likelihood that that resource exchange is happening not just for the best connected um but for all learners and workers so i think that's sort of where i'd love to leave off and hear from our colleagues about what they're building and doing in this space yeah and julia that's i mean that's as we were talking about in in prep that's where i get excited we think about what are the applications of technology you know yes bringing content online or being able to make cold outreach more effective right um it has had its utility but really when you think about how how can we actually build relationships and expose people to experiences or people that they may not be able to reach whether that's a geographic issue or a community issue a family you know challenge um and so i think that's that's a really exciting opportunity here that on the flip side also brings uh challenges and and the need to be really intentional so maybe we'll we'll start um christine with you just sharing a little bit about what what you're observing from what you guys have built at handshake sure julia thank you for i think won the definition but two helping to sort of ground the conversation and i think a lot of the pros and cons of what this can what this can look like you know at handshake our mission has always been to democratize opportunity for students recognizing that unfortunately the way that college recruiting or early talent recruiting was done when all of us were students is just not equitable because you only really have access to those at your institution and to the employers that choose to come to your institution and so by intentionally creating handshake as a network it allows for more opportunity and resources julia as you were mentioning to actually flow to more students in more accessible ways so that they one actually have the knowledge and information and exposure to begin to build these types of relationships so i think when i'm thinking about social capital and when we're thinking about how we build that into the platform we're thinking about it actually at a lot of different levels it's not just the connection to a person as you mentioned it's first actually making sure that we're democratizing access to information because if you don't have good information you can't make more informed decisions and that inherently was one of the inequities that existed for a lot of people before right before if we're thinking about sort of like pre-technology sort of what that looked like and so by making sure that information whether that's from peers whether that's from recruiters whether that's from your school all of that is more equitable and found easily found on handshake and then from there we're really thinking about how do we make it easier and remove barriers for students to actually reach out to peers peers at their own institution who maybe they don't take classes with but are actually interested in really similar things or are participating in activities that are actually tangential to what they're doing how do they connect to them how do they connect to their alumni at their institution but because we're a network in sort of this safe space how do they also connect to students and alumni at other institutions that they wouldn't typically have access to and so i think one of my favorite stories is actually of a wellesley student that i personally knew and advised when i was um associate provost there and she was really interested in entertainment but at wellesley we didn't have a huge alum base of folks that worked in entertainment and were out in la and handshake had recently just launched sort of the peer-to-peer messaging so i told the student to go on and see if she could find a student at one of the la schools that perhaps had an entertainment major or or area focus she ended up connecting with a student from loyola marymount university who had just done an internship at a studio that she was really interested in they ended up connecting becoming friends and that student also ended up helping her figure out how do you actually do an internship in la where will you live when you come here for the summer who are some people that i can introduce you to and vice versa they've now actually become colleagues in the field and in the industry and i think that's such a great example of what can happen when i think that technology is built with intention around what the purpose is and that it's not just a let's just connect in almost like a virtual exchange of business cards but it doesn't actually mean anything so that's a little bit of what we're doing reuben how are you thinking about this yeah man i love the the preamble that you you gave jenna and you julia as well and i like that christine started talking about um taking the old school a lot of times when we talk about technology we forget about the old school um and something that you said jenna was that a lot of people don't engage in social capital building activities but i would argue that they do they just don't even realize it um and you probably heard the whole the whole um concept of like you you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with and the people that you spend the most time with can either prohibit your growth maintain your growth or make you a little uncomfortable so you're growing and i really like that uh julia talked about social media having a lot of promise but also also being the cause of a lot of uh misinformation or things like that and any traditionally when we think about social networks for example at curriculum like we want to help a billion people in next 10 years but often if you have very very large networks of people you can actually create even more confusion um when i think about social capital people are trying to make decisions that they can trust um and when you think about post-secondary education after housing and transportation post-second education is like the largest price tag that people tend to spend on in order to invest into themselves and so usually the way that they make decisions is less on what an accredited government institution tells you or what a certificate says it's more like didn't does my friends and family tell me that this is the school that i should go to right um and based off of who you grew up with or who you're exposed to that's going to lead to what you think is a vetted institution or not so when i think about technology i think about how can we expose learners to vetted academic institutions not by government but by students that have achieved what they want to achieve because the problem with making your decisions based off of your friends and family is a lot of times your friends or family didn't live in the world that were in today from an educational perspective so a lot of the decisions that they made back in the day are different like where you go to school for four years and then work for 40 years are different than an environment where you're you know working in multiple jobs and going to multiple schools and so you need to expose yourself to people that have made those decisions so when i think about technology and social capital how can we show that social proof on the school side um help people build the confidence um and things like that so that's that's that's the stuff that i think about it about how to blend um those things and the only the other thing that i'll say is how can we create that smaller dynamic of of groups online with people so that people can make decisions better like i'm a montessori kid and so like they talk a lot about like optimal uh classroom ratios teacher teacher child races stuff like that so stuff to think about hannah from from where you sit you've got a 30 000 foot perspective perhaps and get to see lots of different organizations and researchers trying to tackle some of these issues what what stands out to you and we're talking about the role of technology here yeah and thank you jenna for facilitating this conversation and julia for for giving that context up front i think julia to your point um social capital is an exchange of resources and reuben i think that lends great into your conversation if you need to have that inherent trust to exchange those resources so how are we building trust especially in time where we do not trust a lot of institutions so from from my role um as a director at the cognizant foundation we are working to equip communities to thrive in a digital economy and to date we have invested nearly 60 million dollars to across kind of the kindergarten to career continuum to ensure that folks who are underrepresented in technology have the pathways into technology and through kind of skill building and social capital and really as i see some opportunities what was really interesting for us in covid is obviously covet expedited a lot of technology innovations and when we surveyed our partners six months into the pandemic about 50 of them started offering a new type of social capital element into their programming or initiative and with that addition of those new social capital elements i think came better job attainment job retention and kind of career progression for their students and learners and so they think about that opportunity that technology has we saw it play out in so many different training providers i also think there are so many things we have to be guarding against including things like 21 million americans not having access to high-speed internet um how are we thinking about that how are we ensuring that learners and students cannot just connect to via their laptops but by their mobile phones where most people are connecting online so i'm really excited to explore this conversation um i know christine and ruben you all are like leaders in this technology and we are learning from you a lot um so excited to hear to hear the learnings from today well hannah this brings me to a question for christine because you talked about so many of your grantees you know starting programs in the midst of covid christine you guys quickly shifted to virtual networking which kind of became the the norm across higher ed um and of course there's some natural inclination to go back to normal and think about doing everything back fully in person but one thing that really stood out to me when you all were surveying students about whether they liked the virtual networking um i think we saw some really interesting and perhaps startling findings and maybe not surprising in a lot of ways but you were hearing from uh students in particular you heard from about 60 of black students who said they felt more comfortable participating in virtual networking and felt like they were more likely to be seen by future employers and i think there was another stat around uh black black and latinx students feeling more likely to apply to a job after they had participated in a virtual event and one of the things you heard a lot was was confidence building so i'm curious if you can share what you've learned from those experiences and in talking back with your higher ed partners and and making the case for where um virtual might complement in person what's kind of the feeling on campuses today around this topic yeah jenna you're right about all those stats and actually i would include women as well so as women and students of color over 50 in many cases 60 or a little bit above 60 percent all said that they felt more seen they felt more prepared they felt like they could be more themselves which then led to more authentic connections and conversations um which then resulted in them applying more and so i think for us a big piece that we've had to really emphasize to our higher ed partners is that while there is absolutely a place for in person all of us are excited to resume certain things back in person i myself am in the office today to connect with some of my own colleagues it doesn't mean that we need to abandon what we've learned also works in the virtual world and the real question for all of us now is to figure out how do we optimize for both modalities in a way that is best for all of the various students that we're trying to serve and so in person may be really fantastic for a lot of students and quite frankly for a lot of employers but there's also a subset of students that you don't want to forget about and it's the same subset of students that quite frankly every employer right now really also cares about and they're trying to attract they're trying to bring into their organizations so we would be remiss to not also offer some virtual components so that those students can also get the connections that they're looking for they will very easily look elsewhere quite frankly if you don't provide those things right and i think that's something that we need to take into consideration i also think another component that's super important for higher ed my higher ed colleagues to recognize is that because virtual is not going anywhere in the work world it is our job as educators to prepare students for what it means to connect and build those relationships virtually jenna in our prep i used you and i as an example we've been working together for three years i would consider you someone that i now closely collaborate with and feel comfortable enough texting and at the same time we have only met once in person right but we've developed a really great relationship and we've actually done that all completely digitally and so it's a matter of learning how to build a relationship the technology itself is not going to magically make that happen it's just a medium what you do with that and how you interact is what's actually really important and so as educators we have to teach students how do you make those connections what does it look like to actually build and foster a relationship how do you properly communicate in a way that allows you to be vulnerable and to share and to build the trust that ruben was talking about earlier those are all skill sets that we have to learn and doing it virtually versus doing it in person does carry some differences in that but i will i'll end by saying we did another survey with a bunch of our students uh talking about social capital specifically and 80 percent of them said that they believe it is much easier for them to make professional connections than their parents generation and they very much attributed that to the rise in digital technology and connection and the ability to use that to spark those connections and what i found most fascinating was when you looked at the gender split women were about 20 points higher than men in believing that you can build meaningful relationships digitally and so i think when you're looking at that and we're looking at making our world more equitable we have to think about how do we engage and use technology as a tool and as a medium to foster those relationships and christine when you you talked about like it's not just the technology you should teach people how to use it and build those meaningful relationships as you talk to uh career services you know directors and and leaders on campuses i'm curious do people feel equipped to do that um it's i mean a lot of that is seems intuitive in some cases but it's not always right and certainly not with with technology as a medium so what what are you hearing from partners are there kind of innovative things that are that are bubbling up you know i think it really varies i think some partners are really comfortable with it and they've been able to develop some really amazing workshops and resources for their students to to learn how to do this more regularly some are still kind of getting their feet wet and they're figuring out what that looks like i think honestly it's not rocket science the ones that are really doing it well are utilizing the technology themselves and so they're engaging the students with the use of technology whether that's zoom whether that's handshake whatever that may be and they're actually practicing with the student and they're not afraid to give the students feedback as they're going through that they're building trust themselves with the students and they are going to be part of the students network and social capital um and so i think it's the folks that are actually just quite frankly trying it they're using it they're doing it they're practicing and they're giving feedback as they go along and they're constantly learning from what doesn't work um and sharing that with the students as well julia you want to chime in on just this idea of like what what is our post-pandemic reality look like this has to hannah's point earlier um accelerated a big a big shift but what what are you seeing there yeah definitely and it's funny i use the term post pandemic like every other day and then my kids are in quarantine from daycare so it's like when is post-pandemic tell me someone um i i think just three core principles and i would love reuben to share on the last one at least like of our gut instincts around how should we use all the infrastructure that was built up over the past two and a half years around forming connections around video chat around all sorts of things that again like was sort of accelerated to hannah's point i think there's three one is we have the chance to start to take the chance out of chance encounters i'll say that one more time take the chance out of chance encounters we leave so much in our traditional education and frankly recruitment practices to like meeting the right person at the right time um and as as sort of um charming as the notion of a chance encounter can be like why are we leaving so much to chance would be my question um and by having ways to even in a data-driven way ensure that students and learners and workers are connecting on a regular cadence you're actually just getting more reps in which we know can lead to better outcomes more options in the labor market the second is really leveraging technology for connections otherwise out of reach so we all know that we don't want to do like zoom thanksgiving this year again right like there are types of connections that we want to enjoy in person but there are still connections whether it's because of geography or cost that are out of reach for students and that's where technology is an immensely helpful tool that shouldn't be seen as less than but actually like better than nothing for lack of a better term but the last piece i think is really around the concept of affinity and being able to bring together um peer-to-peer or groups of affini like affinity-based groups on a much more nimble and on-demand basis because we know similarity breeds trust and belonging it's why all sorts of companies and higher ed institutions have affinity groups and yet those can be very sort of fixed structures when we're not actually we don't have the tools to actually resort people as their interests goals and needs change and so reuben as you were talking about this idea of like who are you going to to make your decisions about your educational professional pathway um having a support group around you who are in a similar place in their education or career or just a step or two ahead of you is incredibly powerful but you have to do that flexibly because our goals and lives are changing on a regular basis um and our sort of old structures around that i think are problematic i'll say one more thing and then reuben get in i think i'll channel or i'll directly quote our colleague chris motley who's building a tool called mentor spaces that is really looking at mentoring as a strategy for recruitment and focus specifically on black and latino early sort of early career starters um and i talked to chris a lot about the notion of affinity and also the notion of making sure that we're connecting um workers and learners of color across lines of difference to ensure that they have access that their white peers may have outsized access to because of the composition of their networks chris made the point that early on in a user on his platform might actually seek out someone who looks like them and later on regardless of the race of the of the sort of mentor they're trying to talk to on the platform they're actually just looking for someone who's aligned to their interests and goals and so affinity can be both along lines of race and ethnicity and interests or goals and again i think technology allows us flexibility rather than sort of picking one group and sticking in it because we were sort of assigned to it at the start so reuben i don't know if any of that resonates with what you've built but it's how i think of career karma's flexible sort of infrastructure i mean i think everything everybody shared was uh resonates i mean i'll talk about all three of you i know i know hannah talked about um wi-fi for example so traditionally when you think about wrap-around support people are going to talk about wi-fi books laptops you know uh kindness that uh itself contributed to a campaign we have called reskill america to help people get laptops but what a lot of people don't think about when it comes to wraparound support um is psychological a lot of things that you're you guys are bringing up um i love that you all talked about the pandemic and how it launched a lot of virtual things like video but something else that happened with the great lockdown um was the growth of audio right social audio um why is that important well first of all our roots are on audio so before we started career con we started a podcast called uh breaking into startups and before that i worked in radio and and how it fits with small groups is i used to be a gamer i used to play games like counter strike i should play you know world of warcraft starcraft things like that why is that important it's because some of these relationships i built online without ever seeing somebody's face are friends that i have in real life today and i've built very strong relationships over years without even seeing this individual on video and people talk about things like zoom fatigue and blah blah long story short um during the pandemic we launched uh live audio rooms which is kind of like discord and clubhouse had a baby focus on careers um i think when it comes to video or audio or anything that's asynchronous it's cool from a broad application but it's even more powerful when it's specific like what discord did focus on gamers right um i say this because it brings me to affinity um yes there's a lot of power bringing people together that are your same race or your same gender so on and so forth but i think that's not enough to build trust actually um just because you're another woman or another black person doesn't mean that you had the same upbringing that i had or that you had the struggle the way that i struggled or you you know overcame the obstacles that i had to overcome so i think as you think about affinity and shared bruises how do we bring people to have the same shared struggle right so for example if i'm working with a large airline and i'm dealing with flight attendants yes they might all have the same affinity from a from a role perspective but there's a lot of things that it has to do with your schedule with mental health with so many things that you have to deal with that is very unique to them and so um so so i agree with everything that you all said but i think um as you think about um these virtual spaces technology there are some formats to your point that lend to in-person conversations there's some things that are appropriate from a text perspective from a video perspective from an audio perspective that all have different factors when it comes to psychological wrap-around support and motivation to push through these programs that you will not feel like doing on a day-to-day basis like because it's hard you will have to study when you don't feel like it and so having someone that has a shared struggle with you that's like hey i know it sucks and i know we got this crazy schedule but let's let's do this today it's like going to the gym so reuben the example you just gave about the flight attendants is is also one i want to call out um because the context is learning learning in the context of work right and so we talked a little bit with christine about maybe a more traditional notion of you start out at school you end up moving to you know into a career um but you know of course education has long been a benefit for for many employees and we've seen an explosion of that in the last few years we've seen employers also think um much more intentionally about using education as a benefit and we were talking about this in in prep right you're um you're seeing employers acknowledge that it's not just offering it but it's thinking about the particular use case for an individual employee then they're realizing we need to bring in support not just on the academic side but career coaching how to navigate with your direct manager that you have a test at the same time that you are on the schedule to to work right talk to us a little bit about how you're seeing employers think about social capital alongside some of the education benefits and and opportunities they're providing for for frontline workers yeah i think it's a great question i mean to your point education benefits aren't brand new they've existed for years i mean mcdonald's had his own university um people have lms lxps like all these things uh launching their own institutions or just offering it as a tuition reimbursement and first of all a lot of people don't even know that they can get a job that paid for their education but even if they do know that their job is paying for their education they don't know if if they sign up for it that it will what opportunities it unlocks internally right if they are aware of the benefits and they are aware of the opportunities that unlocks internally do they know that their hiring manager cares about it how how how is that demonstrated so employers are wanting to like make sure that they know that not only are they facilitating the benefit but that they actually care about it not just from a ceo or a lnd perspective that we're funding it and it's a nice press release but all the way down how are we supporting the front the hiring manager of the frontline worker a lot of people don't talk about that part of things as well um and then assuming that you have both of those people bought in you have the like the the shared affinity group so the people that have the shared struggle let's say it's like the flight attendant group with the hiring manager and the opportunities that are available at the end how do we make sure that everybody that does care about it assuming that they do care about it can see progress so that if people are actually struggling they can step in and support and mentor or guide mentorship takes many forms there's the peer mentorship so you might already have someone that has already gone from flight attendant into software engineer that can talk to you from day one so you're like wow this is possible i can talk to you today like that's amazing and and a lot a lot of things like that and i think that the the conversation with technology often focuses on just roi and analytics and in understanding what's going on which is great but once you have that information how do you make adjustments to the program how do you run experiments to iterate and make it better you know that's that's one of the other things about technology that's really great and i think there's a lot of power on the peer mentorship hiring manager and all the way at the top so you can have something that's going not just tops down or bottom up which tends to be all the only things that we talk about but something that is core through the entire organization um okay so many so many ideas running running through my head um let's uh let's zoom back out for a second less about the technology but i'm curious you know christine you guys are are students of gen z um you've also been you know been serving millennials of course i'm curious like are how are generational differences impacting how we think about building social capital um certainly there's the technology component of it but i'm just curious what what have you guys observed julia maybe this has come up in your research as well but christine curious what you guys are learning as you watch nz right now is one of you know we've got our first few classes graduating college and moving into the workplace you know i think the the core tenet of how we think about social capital is not actually different uh between generations but the way in which it manifests so i'll explain what that means um trust has always been at the very core of social capital we talked about it at the beginning of this conversation we've talked about it throughout it still remains true you go to where you trust you go to the people you trust to ask the questions and you trust often the advice that they're giving you and you'll often follow it right the biggest difference i would say from generation to generation is simply what is the size and scope of the circle of trust so in previous generations trust was perhaps a smaller circle it was maybe your family it was maybe your friends it was maybe people in your community your faith group your school people that you knew in person because that was the main way of interacting and so those were the people you trusted and i think when you talk about millennials and you talk about gen z it's still based on trust if you ask them they're not going to go listen to somebody they don't trust but i think a lot of older generations would be surprised by how many gen z's quite frankly go to tick tock for career advice and they go to career talk right and so an older generation person might think what does that kid know about how to get a job in consulting and for a gen z student right now they're thinking but i trust him because he's real and he's authentic and he's done it himself exactly what reuben was saying before right and so there's a level of trust and so i think the the reality is simply just that younger generations define trust differently and they're more willing quite frankly to actually trust those that are peers not just those that are older than them because they view it as authentic and real there's a rawness to i think the way in which information is now shared that this generation certainly gen z even more than millennials they want sort of the unpolished unvarnished real talk with each other um and that goes a really long way whereas i do think the older generation often look to the experts if you're an expert i'll listen to you and that's not necessarily the case with this particular generation so trust is at the core i think just the size and scope of who you trust has changed one thing to pick you back on what christine just said is i actually think that there's a distrust from institutions even if you are someone that has great outcomes right because if i am telling you that my school is the best and that i have all the outcomes i'm going to be skeptical of course you're going to say that you're the best i want to talk to somebody that went through your program that tells me that it's the best because whoever created ben school of business is going to say yes my school of business is the great the greatest if you're talking to me but not that somebody has been through my program so that's something to to keep in mind about why people are going directly to the people versus the people that created the the curriculums absolutely they want the social proof to them it's social proof yeah well that's i know christine you guys rolled out you know uh reviews on the platform a number of years ago where students could actually share their experience and then peers are able to look and and see you gave the example of you know your own student uh reaching across the country right to find a find a student i'm sure she asked about her experience too and do you you know what was it like to work at the studio were you treated well did you have the right opportunities i mean so that's that's where obviously we're just bringing this full circle that's where where that all comes together julia anything you'd you'd add there hannah i'm curious um to what degree do you think tools like what we've been talking about can actually nudge post-secondary institutions or training providers you know or employers to source and support their talent differently are we are we learning are you seeing action uh taken on on that side of the conversation yeah and to christine and ruben's points like they gave a lot of great examples of how those tools are actually changing employers minds and i think it does come back to that trust piece both in the sourcing and career progression once individuals have the job what does their career progression throughout the company look like and we have so many examples of um training providers that are doing this in really creative ways so for example um ada developers academy they train women and gender expansive adults to be software engineers and they go through a seven month program and upon completion of the program they're placed into a tech company and any manager that accepts one of those ada graduates has to go through an implicit bias training and also figure out how to support that individual while they are on the job so usually software engineering teams look majority white and male but as you coach these managers through how are you supporting this person building trust with this person and like supporting them and progressing throughout their career i think is so important so i think those tools are definitely allowing folks to get their foot in the door but like how are you then coaching the hiring managers the managers to really support in building that social capital an intentional ways throughout being on the job and then the career progression yeah i think that's uh i know we'll maybe jump to this question now because i think that's exactly we often talk about social capital building in the context of access right and getting your foot in the door getting that one that first job and we often talk about it on the from the perspective of the individual the career seeker but hannah two you know two things from from your comments there is how do we actually equip hiring managers or managers to help build that social capital and the other piece too is once someone gets into that first job how do you then navigate what the second job looks like how do you navigate promotion internally how do you advocate uh for development right how do you make sure that those individuals are building the networks across their industry or across their their institution so i'm curious maybe starting with um from the perspective of the individual what uh what what are we learning about what what role capital social capital uh plays once they're actually in a job i mean i think competent competency modeling is starting to become more and more important i think um the role of hr and people development is becoming more and more important because historically when people think about hr is more like how do you deal with conflict like harassment or diversity issues or a bunch of other like more administrative stuff but now you're starting to see hr teams focusing still on those things in in talent attraction brought more like how can we grow our players especially in a world where there might be a lot of hiring freezes or there might be a big focus on retention um in a world where similar to sports uh where free agency got introduced people don't stay at one company forever if they don't want to right so the the power is still in the people so people teams uh ceos are starting to rely more on their people teams to create a culture where they're able to demonstrate that they're invested in them from day one and one of those ways to do it is not to just do the competency modeling to ask the individual where they want to grow in their career outside of how much they want to be paid but also investing in it from day one and from a social capital perspective how do we give you a work buddy that is in that role from day one right outside of your hiring manager that you can check in with like once a month so you can stay that's a carrot too it's not just a raise or a promotion that keeps you excited that makes you want to go to where you want to go so i think competency modeling is something that people aren't talking about enough outside of compensation but also um creating this uh comfort internally where very similar you might see it more at startups versus that traditional companies where it's okay to switch your job into something else at a company a lot of people think they have to stay as an accountant forever or as an engineer forever if you have front-end skills as an engineer you could be a good designer right or even good in marketing i mean my co-founders are probably the best seo person in the world but he started off in engineering right and in finance before that and so just really letting people know that you can actually do multiple things in a lifetime at the company will invest in you and expose you to those individuals not just with a shared struggle or affinity or direct role but a different role as well so you know what's available outside of just reading it on paper and maybe even shadowing them on the job to see what it looks like i had a feeling this conversation was going to go fast so i'm looking at the clock and wanting to get to a few other questions and i will remind folks that if you've got questions drop them in the q a or in the chat we'll get we'll certainly uh make time to get to those um julia so let's talk about skills based hiring uh we're seeing more and more employers begin to to rethink the degree as the appropriate you know hiring requirement which is really exciting opportunity at work has done some amazing research and advocacy on this front hannah you guys have funded a lot of their work um i think it provides a really important opportunity and at the same time like i'm curious julia how does that moment or how does that momentum intersect with social capital as we think about the move to alternative ways to hire um what are the opportunities and and what are the the watch outs yeah totally jenna and i saw this question in the q a as well from um from keel i think it is so i think it's a great question and i think let's first sort of speak to the elephant in the room that kill you brought up which is social capital seems like the least meritocratic thing ever like it shouldn't be who you know that matters it should be purely what you know and i think skills-based hiring is an answer to that that is incredibly important in making hiring practices more meritocratic period end of sentence this should not be in lieu of more fair equitable and skills-based hiring practices but to put the two in dialogue i actually think gets to an even more fair system in certain ways because for a couple reasons um if you think about who helped you get to where you are today even if you were not the beneficiary of a nepotistic or problematic hiring practice along the way who you know shapes not only your exposure across the career continuum but also who is willing to support you and take a bet on you along the way we are after all social creatures and we don't want to create a system that is um sort of that rejects all forms of helping behaviors in service of meritocracy we want to create a system where who you know doesn't give you an outsized advantage at the moment of hiring but pre-hiring and post-hiring we actually want people to be well networked so that they are actually realizing their greatest potential by being able to rely on those around them so that's one way to sort of put these two in dialogue of like the moment of hiring we may not want a system we certainly shouldn't want a system where you get to the top of the resume pile because your uncle is the ceo but what led you to apply to that job is deeply embedded in your social context and whether you can thrive in that job will depend on your ability to be in relationship with your colleagues clients etc the other thing i think that is important to sort of point out there is the interaction of networks and optionality and one of the shortcomings of the skills-based conversation i think is is the the uh speed at which skills sort of decay in terms of importance in the labor market and then we have to reskill right this is the nature of a sort of turbulent ever-changing labor market and if you think about uh your own children maybe and wanting to prepare them for a future workforce that we actually don't know everything about one way to future proof them is to ensure that they have access to a diverse network that offers them optionality right and so it's not in lieu of skills it should not be instead of skills but making sure that we actually know a variety of people who can help us realize our potential change our careers etc actually means optionality for more people not just the wealthiest most well-connected would love to hear my colleagues thoughts on that but i think it's such an important um it's important to kind of put these two in dialogue yeah i mean i like the the concept of calling out the shortcomings of skills-based hiring that's consistent with i saw that question in the comments as well i think um i'll be very brief because i know we're limited on time um assuming everybody has a skill let's say everybody has a skill and they're interviewing for the same job you got to realize that you can't just hire office skills alone whether you went to college or boot camp or not why because it's very similar to a basketball team people like working with people that they like right and so if you could check the boxes that you can do the skill and assuming it's a competitive company everybody's going to be able to do the work so what's going to do what's going to differentiate you is your social qualities your your non-work related is the way you communicate the way you what your life experience has been related to adding value there so i think that's a shortcoming how do you really like assess the the qualitative side of things uh maybe even the networks that you grew up in that could add a lot of value i think that's one thing with respect to what you said about um the larger institutions and companies dropping the requirements to have a college degree opportunity of work is great but i think one 110 um is doing a lot of really powerful stuff um with ceo led dropping of the requirements to have a college degree um that was started by kensington former ceo of american express that has a lot of big companies like delta and nike and others that are starting to become a part of it and um christensen institute also has a great article called betting on boot camps um and and clay christensen rp like has talked about this happening for a while with colleges where a lot of them aren't going to be here but in my opinion colleges aren't going to go away they're just going to have to launch shorter faster cheaper models which is why career come will bet on boot camps from the beginning not as the future but as the model that traditional education institutions are going to adopt um so yeah one more thing sorry and then with the colleges part of the reason part of the value of college is actually not the education side it's actually the social experience that you get from it which we're trying to replicate virtually and in person so sorry sorry oh no that that was great and to build on your points ruben and julia your points i think opportunity work has done such a great job contextualizing that are 71 million uh workers in the united states who do not have the four-year degree and they're skilled through alternative routes and by really having employers remove those degree requirements i think it has opened employer's mind to say there are multiple pathways into a job but if we would look a lot of employers have made um statements on we are dropping degree requirements from our jobs or this percentage of degree requirements are no longer in our job descriptions the question i would ask is how many stars are you actually hiring i don't think we have the data on that quite yet and i think as we have this conversation social capital and skills are so important to bring together and bring that conversation together because that's how we'll really get to equity and the way to do that is through training training like hr managers to say like if we are moving degree requirements and we do not want to just put everyone's resume on top that is connected to the ceo to your point julia how are we redesigning our hiring systems in an equitable way that unlocks both the talent for skills and social capital i'm going to try to go through as many of these quickly julia i think there's a great question here about how do social capital fit into k-12 in your view you've spent a lot of time thinking about this do you want to give a quick a quick answer there i would never say the sentence except for there's six minutes left i wrote a book on this topic called who you know um about what a more networked k-12 system could look like but i think lucas just to your question the big shift that we're hoping to see in k-12 schools is starting to treat social capital as a programmatic outcome so students are graduating not just with a diploma but also a network in hand and looking at um all the sort of career connected learning experiences that are emerging in k-12 right now seeing those not just as exposure or content delivery exercises sorry that's my geriatric dog who wants to go outside not just content almost all the way but i know but connection exercises where students are meeting people they might otherwise not know or having new types of conversations with people they already know about their jobs because how often did you do that when you were 11 12 13. quick answer can i answer the social capital being transferable one yeah yeah yeah we have another question here yeah yes i i think that one's powerful not just because of what christine's done with handshake but also um but um you know we did y combinator and like when uh initialize invested in career come on he said that it's kind of like y combinator for the people for the people that don't know what y combinator is it's a it's the world's largest tech accelerator 300 billion dollars in value what they do is they bet on first-time founders which you could think about it as the equivalent of someone that doesn't have a college degree they help them raise money which you could assume is like going to a prestigious institution and now you have credibility um not just from the person that ra you raise money from but also for for your upbringing which is this this network of of of people so there's over 2 000 companies that have been through it when i think about that being transferable what's really powerful about y combinator is no matter who you raise money from or or what you do in the future that brand gets stronger so as you go from school to school to school or company company company you're still part of the handshake network or the career common network or or whatever so as we think about the social capital you can always go to that family of strangers that gave you that advice to get you into your first institution and maybe your next institution and maybe your next job which is that good career karma that we want to be spreading everywhere so yeah i see how you did that nice tie back all right um perhaps one last question here from uh mark roast um can you share resources to empower compu community organizing groups uh to fill an hr role in helping community members fill new technology roles so i think this is um really around you know how how do we not only think about hiring managers not only think about this with the formal institutions between you know education and employers but how do we also help community members play a role perhaps in in building social capital i would point to a model called union capital boston that's doing amazing work across boston low income and middle income neighborhoods to really just connect community members and create sort of a flywheel of reciprocity and resource exchange and they've seen really um impressive both employment and education enrollment gains through that and it's really just they hold networking nights where community members come and say if they have asks or if they have shares um and it's it's catalyzed social capital across entire communities so that's one model that um has done amazing work at the sort of community organizing level great i'm gonna end us with um quick quick popcorn i always like to end on a high note we're talking here about really the the possibility of social capital to help make good on the promise of education and i'm curious you all we've talked about a lot of the concerns we've talked about gaps in networks we've talked about all kinds of racial and and gender uh inequities but in this moment what gives you hope that we're making progress and that people are thinking intentionally about how social capital goes hand in hand with with social mobility um i'll pick on christine yeah okay i'll start i'm gonna actually take this in a slightly different direction than any of my comments so far and in today's conversation and i think what gives me hope is what i'm currently seeing in k through 12 um and with my own with my own son i have a nine year old who just started fourth grade and i think one of the things that uh heartens me the most
2022-09-06