Shalin Jyotishi, Senior Policy Analyst at New America: Aligning National R&D and Workforce Development

“I think we have a moment in this new decade we are in to start fresh when it comes to how we build our economies and build our communities and build our society,” says Shalin Jyotishi, senior policy analyst at New America. An important part of this fresh start is to further connect workforce development with the nation’s R&D and doing so beyond the nation’s tech corridors. Jyotishi says universities and community colleges have a role to play, but so do faith-based organizations, unions and state governments. A self-described public interest technologist, he counsels against being afraid of the rise in automation in favor of seeing people as the ultimate arbiters of how technology is applied. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for this insightful exploration of emerging ideas in education, training, tech and public policy that could reshape our economy and society for the better.

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Stuart Andreason, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: Bridging Research and Reality in the Job Market

As signs of economic recovery in the U.S. continue to build, some experts are predicting a “jobless recovery,” while others are more optimistic about job growth. Will hard hit sectors bounce back? What changes do we need in job training and education to spur a post-pandemic economy? For answers to these and related questions, Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan turns to Stuart Andreason on this episode of WorkforceRx. As director of the Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Andreason tracks changes in the economy to determine what skills workers and businesses need to be successful. This research also informs policies and programs to help people succeed in the labor market, especially low-and moderate-income workers. “What we strive to be is a bridge between the research and the real world. We want to learn from what people are doing in workforce development and bring promising practices back to the research that we’re doing to hopefully learn from and maybe find ways to commit some support to those practices.” He and his Fed colleagues around the country have also developed tools to help people research job opportunities that do not require a degree and discover options for career mobility based on their skills. 

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Dr. Sunita Mutha, Director of Healthforce Center at UCSF: Bridging Cultural Gaps to Provide Better Care

Dr. Sunita Mutha thinks if health care providers consistently asked themselves one question, it would lead to reducing health disparities based on race, income and other factors: “Who does this advantage, and who does this disadvantage?” In her extensive research at the intersection of health disparities and quality improvement, she’s come to understand there are predictable things providers do that influence inequities in care. Looking at the current COVID vaccine rollout provides a fresh example. “If your main strategy is to reach out to patients electronically, it leaves out people who don’t have online access, who might be monolingual, who might be elderly and isolated. You could have predicted who you would leave out by the strategies you chose to use.” As director of Healthforce Center at the University of California San Francisco, Mutha works with organizations nationwide to reduce disparities and build a culturally-competent workforce, but also to address a wide range of other challenges in healthcare, from the impact of electronic health records to nurse staffing ratios. As she explains to Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan in this episode of WorkforceRx, training emerging leaders is another special focus at Healthforce Center. “They are the glue that keeps an organization functioning and effective. They mobilize the frontline teams. So, in our training we try to instill in them both confidence and skills so they can be really effective.” Check out this episode for an expert view of current and future workforce challenges in healthcare, and the role of research and capacity-building to meet them.

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Howard Brodsky, CEO of CCA Global Partners: Capitalism with a Heart

What if there was something business owners could do to boost employee retention 65%, increase worker loyalty and perfectly align company and employee goals? Oh, and by the way, give people a sense of hope and increase their wealth at the same time? Well, according to Howard Brodsky, that “something” is using a shared ownership model. Brodsky, a globally recognized pioneer in cooperatives, co-founded and leads CCA Global Partners, one of the largest retail companies in America serving over one million family businesses. The profitable $12 billion organization is the parent company for 14 other businesses in flooring, carpeting, lighting and other sectors, including child care. In this revealing conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, Brodsky describes creating a new economic environment where instead of subsidies to repair the damage caused by chronically low wages, there is shared ownership and prosperity. “I think there has to be more distribution of wealth at the base level, not distribution after somebody makes a fortune and they decide where they want to give money to. People need opportunity, not subsidies.” Brodsky says the model is much more resilient in tough economic times, too. With an estimated 25-30 percent of family businesses failing in the U.S. during the pandemic, the closure rate among CCA Global’s members is only 1- 2 percent. This is a conversation that will leave you thinking.

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Jamie Merisotis, CEO of Lumina Foundation: The Robot Zombie Apocalypse is Not Coming

“We know from history that technology both creates and destroys jobs, and we don’t know what will happen this time around,” says Jamie Merisotis, author of the new book Human Work in the Age of Machines, “but I do think we should be more interested in the work that humans can do, because that is clearly something we can control by better preparing people for that human work.” That preparation needs to focus on nurturing “foundational human capabilities” that set us apart from machines – compassion, empathy, ethics and creativity to name a few. As he reveals in his book, Merisotis believes the end result can be a collaborative relationship between workers and technology. As President and CEO of Lumina Foundation, Merisotis has been a driving force in increasing access to post-secondary education not only for its economic benefits but because of the role education plays in cultivating the critical thinking essential to a functioning democratic society. Check out this revealing conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan about rethinking how we can restructure education, work and benefits to better meet the challenges and opportunities upon us.

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Dr. Ashwini Davison, Director of Strategy and Transformation for the Informatics Education Program at Johns Hopkins University – Data’s Big Impact on Care and Careers

For someone interested in the interplay of technology and healthcare, the timing has always been right for Dr. Ashwini Davison. Implementation of Electronic Health Records was just starting to take off when she was an internal medicine resident at Johns Hopkins a little over a decade ago. As the adoption of EHRs and digital health applications rose, so did the potential for big data as a tool to advance medicine. Opportunities opened for her to help healthcare companies analyze data to enhance efficiency and improve patient outcomes. “My career naturally progressed to being at the cutting edge of the ‘next big thing’ whether that be clinical informatics or, subsequently, online education and precision medicine.” She’s now at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine and the School of Public Health creating learning programs and opportunities for students at the intersection of healthcare, technology, education and research. If you’ve wondered how AI, precision medicine, cloud computing and other innovations are impacting patients, you’ll want to check out this dynamic conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan. You’ll also learn about a collaboration between Johns Hopkins, Futuro Health and Coursera to create a new entry level path into health IT careers, how virtual reality and mobile technology is applied to healthcare, and what she describes as the “challenging, exhilarating and rewarding” experience of helping professors and students successfully manage the abrupt transition to online learning made necessary by COVID.

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Dr. Soon Joo Gog, Chief Futurist at SkillsFuture SG – Staying Ahead of the Skills Curve

“We want to empower every citizen to be able to make a decision about how they want to invest in themselves and the kind of career they want,” says Dr. Soon Joo Gog, Chief Futurist at SkillsFuture SG in Singapore’s Ministry of Education. That’s obviously an ambitious goal, but this small city-state has a reputation for pioneering new approaches to building a skills ecosystem. To achieve it, the government gives every citizen 25 years of age and older $1,000 in credits toward education and skills training. That jumps to $1,500 in credits once you reach 40. The credits belong to the person, not an employer, making them portable throughout their life. She describes SkillsFuture, where she is also Chief Skills Officer and Chief Research Officer, as a national movement that later developed into a government agency offering job skills insights for individuals, businesses, education and training partners, and policymakers. One of her most important strategies is engaging with companies considered innovative to find out how their use of technology changes worker skills over time so SkillsFuture SG can work with educators to align training programs with future labor needs. Check out this fascinating conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan and one of the world’s leading workforce innovators to learn about the “trinity of partners” essential to her work, and the role smart dustbins are playing in Singapore’s high-tech, high-skill economy.

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Marsha Sampson Johnson, Diversity Advocate and Former CHRO of Southern Company: Diversity Can’t Just Be a Program

Spurred by heightened activism in 2020 against persistent racism in the U.S., many business leaders are engaged in a reckoning of their own policies, behaviors and corporate culture to determine how those might be contributing to systemic inequity and exclusion. Marsha Sampson Johnson, a leading diversity advocate and veteran corporate leader, has advice for those undertaking this work. “Diversity and inclusion can never just be a program. It can never be a department. If it is not incorporated into every aspect of the organization, it will never be successful.” Sampson Johnson, a retired senior executive from Fortune 200 energy giant Southern Company, has had an extraordinary career as an executive, mentor, writer and international speaker. In this trenchant conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, she shares insights gained from decades of providing leadership in HR, Talent Management and Diversity, discusses the impact of the pandemic on women in the workforce, and touches on the value of leadership development programs such as those sponsored by the International Women’s Forum where she spent many years as a Global Director.

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Andy Van Kleunen, CEO of National Skills Coalition: Finding Common Ground on Job Growth

As a longtime observer of the Washington political scene and a “go-to” expert on workforce and education policy issues, Andy Van Kleunen thinks that despite the country’s deep political divisions, it’s possible to make generation-defining investments in education and training to spur major employment growth. “There’s not a lot of partisan divide on investing in the retraining of somebody who’s been laid off and now has to look for a new occupation. We’re talking about 80 to 90 percent approval for greater public investments in those kinds of efforts.” Drawing on lessons learned from previous recovery efforts, Van Kleunen believes more needs to be done this time to make sure economic gains are inclusive from a racial and socio-economic standpoint. The organization he leads, National Skills Coalition, also urges policymakers to follow what they have found to be the most effective formula for increasing skills and growing jobs: let localities and states in the nation’s 300-400 regional economies bring stakeholders together to determine where investments should be made. In this timely conversation with Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan, Van Kleunen taps into the knowledge gained from his national network of business, education and labor leaders to share the most effective formulas for economic development in this unique political moment.

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Eva Sage-Gavin, Senior Managing Director of Accenture’s Global Talent & Organization/Human Potential Practice: “The Workforce Has Changed Forever.”

Workers are showing the strains of social isolation, disrupted work and family routines, and sustained anxiety for personal safety — all induced by the pandemic. Fortunately, employers are taking note according to Eva Sage-Gavin, a former Fortune 500 executive who now advises C-suite leaders on talent strategy for Accenture. Sage-Gavin says employers are realizing they need to take a “whole human” approach to HR to navigate through this crisis of human resilience, and address employee needs for connection, relationship, and purpose if they are going to keep their workforce productive. In this revealing episode of WorkforceRx, Sage-Gavin and Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan – who first met a decade ago serving on President Obama’s Skills for America’s Future initiative – discuss a new global partnership to connect displaced workers to jobs, the worrisome “she-cession” as women drop out of the workforce, the enhanced impact of modern boards, and a key ingredient to helping employers solve problems in these extraordinary times.

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