Lisa Larson, CEO of Education Design Lab: How Micro-Pathways Can Boost Workforce Development Success

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future ready workforce.

According to recent studies, micro-credentials are experiencing a surge in interest and acceptance by learners and employers, which is creating both a challenge and an opportunity for educators to meet the demand for them. One of the major players helping educators in this task is the Education Design Lab, which is working with 70 community colleges and state community college systems to implement micro-pathways that map to 100 different job roles.

I’m happy to welcome the CEO of Education Design Lab, Lisa Larson, to the podcast to help us understand the growing use of this approach and provide examples from EDL’s work across the country. Prior to her current role, Lisa served as the president of Eastern Maine Community College of the Eastern Maine Community College, and has also served in administrative roles in the Minnesota State System.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Lisa.

Lisa Larson

Of course. Thanks for having me.

Van

Absolutely. So please define for us micro-pathways and how they differ from traditional programs or short-term certificates.

Lisa

Sure, absolutely. So micro-credentials, micro-pathways is what the lab has named the work that we do within the community college growth engine program, and they have similarities to short-term credentials or certificates that you would see at community colleges. There are a few key unique differences that set them apart, and I’d like to go through those and share those with you.

To have a micro pathway, we have created eight design criteria that all of the colleges that participate in CCGE (Community College Growth Engine) follow and align to as we design micro-pathways in partnership with them. They include that there has to be stackable credentials that lead to a degree and what we find in working with colleges is that this may include industry credentials or portions of industry credentials or a college credential that they’ve established. So it’s a variety of credentials that accept towards a degree though it also has articulation or currency to that degree, meaning credit’s aligned to any type of credit, their credential that’s next in line at that institution.

These are also initiated and validated within by employers. So employers are very engaged from the beginning, from the micro pathway design factor, and we look also at local labor market information as well as work very intentionally with local and regional employers.

The micro-pathways are no more than a one year in duration, and for the most part, I would say for the colleges that we’ve worked with, they’re usually four to six months as a micro pathway, them go up to a year for certain. They’re also offered in multiple modalities that meet learner needs, and that could be hybrid, asynchronous, synchronous or face learning. I mean, there’s multiple ways in which the college is really designed to meet the learner needs and the employer’s needs. They can be credit or non-credit. We also have some that are both credit and non-credit, a mix of that.

Within that micro pathway, they include technical skills as well as durable skills. So we find that many employers are very good at understanding and defining those technical skills, but when it comes to durable skills, we really ask them to get very specific. If they say we need someone who’s a great communicator, well let’s talk about what that means. We at the lab have nine durable credentials which we start with and they could look at. And each of those has four sub competencies, so we can get very detailed with employers. So there’s very much a shared language and understanding of when they say a “good communicator”, the college design team knows what it means specifically.

These pathways also need to be affordable, and we like to say “free to affordable”. It’s both. There’s opportunities to build-in employer support or hosting or scholarships around these aligning funding wherever we can. We do that as they go through the design process. And finally, these should result in jobs that pay at or above meeting income wages in region.

Van

Oh, I’m so excited to hear those eight criteria. It seems like the work that Futuro Health does to bring untapped talent into healthcare credentials aligns with all eight, so I’m super proud that we have alignment there. Talk to us about the path that you took in order to get all the colleges to accept these eight. Having come from the community colleges, I know that it’s not an easy path to get adoption, so do you have any stories that you could share with us?

Lisa

These were designed right when we were moving into the pandemic. I wasn’t at the Lab at this point, but Kathleen, our founder, had been working with several community college leaders and continuing just to use human-centered design and deeper questioning and deeper conversations around what is needed to help align the future of education to the future of work with putting at the center of that the “new majority learner.” We’ve coined that term to mean what you and I would have called non-traditional students, right? So those individuals that are looking for other opportunities, access points, flexibility, adaptability to meet their needs.

So these design criteria really came from that. When we start working with colleges, or colleges reach out to us and are interested in doing this work, this is kind of our readiness factor. Are you ready to consider these design criteria and how important they really are to the outcome that you’re going to have of a micro pathway to drive to the impacts that we want for learners who necessarily haven’t had the access opportunity or been represented as well to what the employers need in terms of either timeliness of a workforce, the quality of skills for the workforce, those things.

Colleges have been pretty responsive to those. That does not mean that they haven’t had their hurdles or challenges to address them. And so throughout the design process we have what we call a learner journey map. We think about, as you’re going through the arc of design, what is going to be the experience of the learners that they’ve identified? And we do learner profiles so that they really have in mind the focus of who they’re designing with and for. We have learners on the design team, and through this journey map, they are trying to address where are the barriers, and especially along these design criteria, where are the barriers that we need to think about in terms of our processes, our policies, our practices, our departments that we need to shift our mind frame, we need to change language, change learning or policies to help address those and meet those types of events.

Van

Lisa, have there been participation by four year institutions as well? Or is the emphasis right now just with the two year institutions.

Lisa

Primarily with community colleges and we’re actually at over a hundred colleges right now, which is great. But we have one university, and it’s Marshall University in West Virginia. When they came to join the work, they brought their biggest community college partner with them, Mountwest Community and Technical College.

Van

Good for them.

Lisa

But that’s been great to design with them.

Van

Now, of course, when you explained the work of Education Design Lab and the eight criteria, I understood immediately the why and the relevance, but maybe you could spell it out for our listeners. Why do micro-pathways matter, especially right now?

Lisa

They’re critical. Right now we are finding more and more individuals as they’re thinking about their higher ed decisions, what’s important to them. And what we continue to hear from certainly all the colleges we work with, from leaders in higher ed and just from the sector itself, that what learners and what colleges needs to be concerned around or designed around is relevancy of this curriculum to the work that’s going on to the workforce that’s available to the workforce of high demand, great jobs and careers, and that people need short-term options to move towards their larger goals. So they need laddering opportunities. They need flexibility in terms of when they can work on achieving those skills, building those competencies, they need alignment so they know exactly what the work is going to lead to. So what starts off with a good job is going to continue to progress to career and with the advancement opportunities and that those employers are ready for them, they understand how they’re coming for them, and then finally, they absolutely have to be affordable. So it’s time, it’s money, it’s resources, critical services that we talk about a lot of what learners are going to need in addition to the skills that they’re building at the same time.

Van

And how did the Education Design Lab come to be working in this space?

Lisa

So the Design Lab has been around about a dozen years, and Kathleen deLaski is our founder. She’s now our board chair. In her past life she was a journalist, so she’s always been serious and she’s had a lot of experience in many different areas, but she really focused in on higher ed on what was missing in education, why were we seeing the results that we were seeing? And she also became introduced to human-centered design so she knew that there was an opportunity to approach change management, to approach transformations, to approach this sector, higher ed in particular, around human-centered design

So the Lab came to be and actually started off working in the area of transfer pathways and transfer. And over time she heard so much about skills gaps that employers were talking about, — they couldn’t quite find the right exact right people to fill these jobs — and so that’s where the Community College association program came to be…it’s working with college leaders and knowing their communities and regions that they were serving. How might we design a micro pathway that meets the needs of employers and focuses on the learners so that you have a successful pathway that has durable skills in it that’s going to create portability for people to take those skills and move into the job that also see the path for where they can go.

Van

One of the worries when it came to short-term Pell grants was that there may be credentials or certificates that were of poor quality that colleges could do. What I love about your process is in a way, there’s two ways to certify something that is quality: one is the outcome — so maybe the students get employed, for example, successfully. That’s one way, but especially when you’re starting new program, there isn’t that data yet and it takes a while for that data to come in. But there’s also quality inferred from the process, right? It’s like in parallel worlds, maybe ISO certified, for example, or LEED certified. These are all processes, and the stamp of approval is conferred because you have held up on the process. I am wondering, do you see, especially with short-term Pell becoming less restrictive or more available, how can the Design Lab do more work in this space to help higher ed?

Lisa

Well, workforce is certainly an opportunity for colleges to think differently, to reframe their view on what does a credential value mean and how can they provide value as a starting point, again, from a job to that career ladder, and not only stopping at an As or a S3, but really moving on, right? What’s the bachelor’s degree look like in this field and beyond? And so our opportunity as we think about workforce health is to align our design criteria to what we know today around the workforce health criteria. And we’re very closely aligned. I mean, there’s some things that we’re just a little bit different on. So we know even working with our 100 colleges that we work with today, we can go in and do that audit with them, maximize the pathways they have right now to speak them just a bit, to get to that full alignment. And then whatever rulemaking impacts they have, we can address that as well.

But they can also now think about scale in a different way, and they can say, what about our other programs? Is this the time? What are those most high demand, high wage, high opportunity that, because they’ve gone through the process, because they see the audit of where the skills mapping takes place, it’s easier for them to flexibly adapt and quickly respond to those workforce opportunities. I think that’s the opportunity.

The biggest challenge around this though is going to be data, and we all have to think about that. Colleges aren’t necessarily structured to be able to report it out or to use it as impactfully as they would like to. We don’t know what states are going to come up with. I’m assuming states will be held responsible for ensuring that the data is there, whatever those standards are. I’m sure there will be a push for asking the federal government to take care of that around wage and labor because it is so hard to get wage and labor data, and it’s often lagging that that will be the tough nut to crack on this. How do we align our systems of designing the right skill sets and training opportunities to measuring it and being able to show that impact?

Van

Lisa, I’m curious, as your 100 colleges are going about, for example, doing skills mapping, are any of them tapping into the latest technology tools like AI or anything like that to make their jobs easier?

Lisa
I think there’s an interest in that, right? I mean, I think some are designing it on their own, for sure, and then some are looking for is there a tool already out there and then some are coming to us saying, can you help us to bring the tool in and figure that out with us? So it depends on their level of comfortableness with AI as one thing that we’ve heard about. But I absolutely do think that it’s an opportunity to either become more curious about it, develop their own set of capabilities around it, or to become more comfortable with those ed tech partners that can provide solutions for them.

Van

So you’re probably aware that Futuro Health’s nonprofit mission is squarely in the healthcare space, and 65% of the healthcare workforce are these allied roles, which fit in nicely into the time constraint that you have. Most of them are under one year to produce somebody who is a completer. I wonder if you have you seen some examples amongst your 100 colleges of micro-pathways in mental behavioral health, or in allied health?

Lisa

We have just very recently completed some extensive work with the Colorado Community College system around behavioral health. When they came to us and wanted to work with us as a system, the system said, we know we’re going to focus on health. They then let the colleges opt in and they weren’t quite sure what aspect of healthcare they would be working in. It then became readily apparent — and with the governor’s support —  behavioral health became the focus. And so we began working with eight of their 13 colleges and through extensive work across those colleges collaboratively in doing their research around the LMI and talking extensively with employers — they had 50 different employers who partnered with them on this — they identified five different pathways in behavioral health, and they all leverage each other.

So there’s a starting pathway, and then you work your way through a series of what’s the next stackable micro pathway that they can learn to move through to their next job as they have an interest and opportunity to continue to do that. But it starts off with one particular one, I think it’s called the Quality Behavioral Health Assistant

I bring that one up because it is entry level, and it was designed to be Medicaid-eligible, so it’s reimbursable.

Van

So important.

Lisa

So, we have these five pathways that all have articulated credit together. They then lead to an Associate of Science degree within the system, and then that leads to one of their first and second bachelor’s degree that the system has designed and aligns behavioral health and social work. I mean, there’s components to that.  I believe now they’re looking at partners for a master’s degree.

We’ve trained all 13 colleges, so they all have training in what the micro-pathways are. They all have funding to make sure they have faculties and resources to provide these five micro-pathways. There’s funding for individuals to cover the cost of tuition for the first three years of this program. And they had a huge marketing effort, so they’ve really done it right to meet a growing need in the state so that the governor and the state stepped in and said, we want to leverage this initiative. How can we help do that?

And colleges stepped in. They designed collaborative leads together. They have common course numbering. They share resources and faculty. It’s led by a couple of different leaders across colleges. So they’re very invested in it, I guess is my point, to the point where we have another state that we’re working with that we brought in because they had an interest to learn about it, and they’re now moving their way through developing their own set of behavioral health pathways based on this work.

So it’s just been a nice example of what’s the need and what does it take to move as quickly as systems and employers can to address those needs on the ground.

Van

Well, that’s an excellent example and congratulations on that. Good work. Now, you launched a project last year in Arkansas that brought stakeholders together to design skills-based pathways to meet that state’s workforce needs. Tell us what unfolded there.

Lisa

Yeah, so the state of Arkansas, they’re doing some really amazing things very much focused on having a workforce-intentional strategic plan for every person in the state. The governor has  said, we need to ensure that we have people who are as best qualified as they can be for their regions, for the jobs that they have today, but also the jobs they want to bring into the state.

We were able to start with eight colleges of the 22 in the system. We have a lead college, Northwest Arkansas Community College, that really kicked the work off. And again, we’re going through a micro-pathways process of understanding by region, by state — and some of these are also aligned to universities, so there’s a strong partnership there — but understanding those needs and focusing on a skills first mindset with the colleges. That’s really about focusing on how employers are going to show up to not only share what those skills are, but what’s their recruitment process look like, what’s their hiring process look like? Upskilling, right?

There’s a very deep ingrained partnership there to be able to map a learner journey to a talent journey and get those skills clearly identified and embedded in micro pathway. They also, again, put out some learner profiles of who has had not the best opportunity that they want to focus their time and attention on, and what are the key services and resources they also need to be successful in the micro-pathways.

Among those eight colleges, I think they’re up to 25 or 27 different micro-pathways in manufacturing, business, healthcare and they align all of this work with the state leaders to ensure that those strategies are being used. They’re also going to align it to data collection opportunities that they’re going to have, as well as mobility or portability. Having personalized opportunity plans for all individuals is great.

Van

So Lisa, as you have cracked the code in terms of being able to work with big systems to create these micro-pathways, where do you see the frontier moving? What’s the next frontier for this body of work?

Lisa

I think the frontier is right in front of us. I think to crack the code, it’s really being intentional about having have everybody at the table. Does everybody have a place at the table that needs to be at the table to ensure that what we’re planning for around the needs of the state for economic development reflects the needs of the individuals who are going to be the next generation of workers, and beyond that, you have the technology that’s being invested on the emerging workforce that’s coming around.

You can imagine that whole list.  K 12 needs to be there. Your associations, workforce boards, states…they all need a voice. You have to figure out what’s the binding agent that’s bringing us together to have that shared language, to understand policies that need to be in place to understand funding of where that’s coming from, and investment in communities too.

Whether that’s broadband because you need to get information across, or whether that’s around better facilities, the lab, the equipment or the technology that needs to be embedded for that. And probably just the cost of what does it mean to have a prepared workforce and an educated community? Community colleges really are the center of that. They can be the driver, they can be the buying agent, they can help address so many aspects of that work to be successful.

So, I think the opportunity is how might we design strong ecosystems to ensure a skilled workforce that’s ready for its future and all come together around that? I think workforce Pell could be kind of a first step in doing that because you see that you have to integrate your systems to be able to understand the what and the how and the impact. And it could be maybe the small opportunity to say, how do we grow this to ensure that we’re aligned fully, and not just around one area, but really fully committed to having a thriving community and what it means to be that.

Van

What are you hearing on the ground from the colleges as this federal restructuring takes place, especially with the Department of Ed being subsumed under the Department of Labor?

Lisa

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of fear and unknown of what does this mean? You can imagine when this administration came in and all of a sudden you have federal grants that are in up in the air. What are we doing with them? Do we still have them? So being able to address and be on the ground with them and help them, I think has helped them to gain a little bit more confidence and awareness that they can take the right steps when they need to take the steps.

I do think that community colleges are ready to address what’s coming, whether it’s AI or what’s happening with the Department of Ed, I think they’re just rolling with it. They’re already adaptable, flexible organizations that can do that. They’re already serving so many students as.

I think what we need to really have in terms of the care and support for colleges is the initiative fatigue that can come up, and I’m sure you’ve experienced that in your past. How do you manage the amount of change that’s coming through, and how as senior leaders and decision makers do they have the best information to leverage and understand what is important now? How can we integrate and pull in opportunities to drive bigger impact? What does it mean to strategically partner? And how else do we seek out new partners such as technology and AI to help maybe drive some of the innovation and at the same time they could see effectiveness around that?

So I think that’s what they’re grappling with right now, are big things like that.

Van

So let’s close with giving you a chance to look at your crystal ball on the future of community colleges. What’s your advice, Lisa, on what they should do less of and what should they do more of?

Lisa

That’s a great question. No one’s asked me that before, so I love this opportunity. I think creating, again, more doors, more access points, more flexibility in saying, how can I design the right set of skills for what I want to be able to do for where the market is going or where education is going? And being open to not only hearing from learners, but hearing from employers and being able to have that mindset shift of, “Yes, you can do that,” versus, “Well, we’ve always said it this way.”

I think having more effort across colleges to prepare people for how information is coming to them and how they can all be the drivers and decision makers in key ways. So, one thing we hear from employers a lot is, “Well, I’ve tried to work with community colleges and they don’t answer me.” So, how do we create a mind shift at colleges? It doesn’t matter what door an employer walked into, there’s a connection point immediately that we help make for them. They need to reduce the responses of it’s too hard. And how might that look for colleges to do that?

Then in terms of what to do less of — and this is hard and I’ll admit it myself — is to believe that the only way for success is for someone to get a degree. And what I would suggest is to change the language. To put it in terms of to get the degree in their timeframe, to get the degree when it meets their goals, and to be open to the idea that a credential of value is going to look different as we move forward with the emerging technology, with how work is going to change, with where people’s goals are with people working for a lot longer in their lifetimes, that I think colleges need to have a much more open aperture on what success looks like for them.

Van

Well, Lisa, I certainly learned a lot, and it was such a pleasure to hear about the Education Design Lab and the wonderful work that you’re doing to support colleges in their support of students. Thank you very much for being with us today.

Lisa

All right. Have a great day.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you’ll join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.