Hidden Talent

AdeptID seeks to identify the right people for jobs and the right jobs for people. Also, Lightcast predicts a rising storm of labor shortages and misalignment between education and in-demand jobs, a crisis that will require creativity and flexibility from both colleges and employers.

From Dunkin’ Cashier to Pharmacy Tech

If skills-based hiring becomes a real thing, technology will be a big part of the reason, experts predict. Specifically, skills-first optimists point to AI-driven tools that can determine the skills of jobseekers and then help to match them with open jobs that are a good fit.

One company to watch in this emerging field is AdeptID. The Boston-based public benefit corporation was created in 2020 by data science veterans. It seeks to identify the right people for jobs and the right jobs for people.

“We've demonstrated that the way to identify more talent more accurately is to look for transferable skills that more superficial methods would miss,” says Fernando Rodriguez-Villa, AdeptID’s CEO and co-founder. “Looking at skills is a better way to identify talent than looking at degree attainment or even past job titles.”

The fastest way to understand skills is through inference gleaned from real employment experiences and results, he says. This approach beats manual or survey-based skills-mapping exercises. Most people intuitively get this strategy, in part through their own anecdotal stories of gaining transferable skills on the job.

“We're building the tech infrastructure that takes that insight beyond anecdotes and lip service and puts it into the code base of every applicant tracking system, job board, and HRIS out there,” says Rodriguez-Villa.

For example, in its early work with Boston Medical Center, the company learned that cashiers at Dunkin’ Donuts could transition to working as pharmacy technicians. Common skills in both roles include working with point-of-sale software, providing customer service, and handling stressful situations—I get anxious just watching Dunkin’ workers deal with a morning rush of caffeine-deprived commuters.

“The data showed a high degree of skill overlap and that folks made that transition at a higher success rate than the industry overlap would suggest,” Rodriguez-Villa says. “The data is telling a story that the work environment of one is predictive of work in another.”

AdeptID’s play isn’t to create a new layer of hiring tools. Rather, it aims to build a talent-matching infrastructure that can be integrated with any existing tool in the hiring-and-learning space. As a result, AdeptID’s presence is invisible to its end users, in the same way most shoppers don’t know that Stripe works to make sure their credit card transactions are handled securely.

So far this year, 11M+ people have used tools that tapped AdeptID, up from 3.6M people last year. That means the company has made 11M job recommendations. “The more people use our matching, the more accurate and nuanced we become with our recommendations,” says Rodriguez-Villa.

The feedback loop helps employers to understand job candidates better and fill open roles faster. They also get a bigger pool of jobseekers, including skilled workers without four-year college degrees.

For training providers, Rodriguez-Villa says the technology helps their graduates find jobs faster, and find roles that are a better fit for their skills and aspirations.

The Kicker: “The U.S. workforce is about 160M, and we want our recommendations to be serving over 50% of them in the next two years,” he says.

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The Great Shrinking Workforce

It’s no secret that workers are in short supply in many fields—even those that pay well. Lightcast is out with a report this week that emphasizes that this problem isn’t cyclical, but the result of major demographic and cultural shifts that won’t change anytime soon. It’s the steady counterpart to the Great Resignation.

The Great Shrinking, if you will. 

To the initiated, the general thrust of the data will be familiar: Baby boomers are retiring much faster than expected, many working-age men are unable to work or are choosing to sit out the job market, and increasingly educated young adults don’t want or are overqualified for a lot of the jobs on offer. All that means that while the labor force is technically growing, it’s shrinking relative to our population.

The new report is chock-full of data, but a few points stand out:

• Over the next eight years, population growth in the U.S. is expected to outpace labor force growth by 8 to 1, creating an even greater imbalance between the demand for goods and services and the workers to supply them.

• The country is expected to add just 2.6M prime-age (25 to 54 years) workers between 2022 and 2032—a tenth of what we saw in the 1970s.

• Two-thirds of those new workers are expected to have four year-degrees—while the highest demand will be for jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s in the food industry, care services, and construction.

This analysis dovetails with another recent report, out of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, which found colleges are falling far short on graduating students qualified for middle-skill jobs.

The Big Idea: Mismatches between the supply of knowledge and skills and the demand for them is frustrating for Americans who are looking to use education as a way to move up economically. And it’s one reason about 40% of bachelor’s degree holders start out underemployed. 

Such mismatches also are bad for the basic delivery of goods and services. If you thought supply-chain snarls and short-staffed hospitals were a thing of the past, Ron Hetrick, a VP and senior labor economist at Lightcast, and his colleagues suggest you think again. “Already, the demand dwarfs the supply—imagine what will happen as a growing and aging population needs more food, and more housing,” they write. 

“The shortages and inconveniences of 2021 and 2022 gave the U.S. an excellent glance into its future.” At least if we don’t act. 

But Wait—Can’t Robots Fix This? The Lightcast analysis suggests a range of possible solutions—including many within the education sphere, such as rethinking the programmatic mix at colleges, boosting earn-and-learn opportunities, and getting more adults who aren’t working into reskilling programs. The authors don’t put much faith in artificial intelligence to fill these roles, however.

“The tools simply aren’t there yet,” they write, “and the industries most in need of workers are those least likely to be replaced with AI.”

That said, AI’s impacts are still a big question mark. The fast food industry has been experimenting with AI ordering, and the tech is already taking on many call center roles in places like the Philippines. Brent Orrell, a workforce development expert and senior fellow at AEI, does see a near-term possibility for robots to automate some of the most dangerous and physically repetitive jobs.

“Robots are coming for some jobs, and for that, we can be profoundly grateful,” he recently wrote.

And as the article above shows, AI is already helping to improve job matching, especially for those without a four-year degree.

While some of the most hard-to-fill jobs are low-paying and repetitive, others could be the kinds of jobs people want. The Georgetown analysis, for example, identified 107 different middle-skill occupations that only required a certificate or associate degree—and that were also high-paying.

And in almost every major metro area, colleges weren’t producing enough graduates to fill them.

Goodbye Status Quo: The demographic reality the country faces will require a new kind of creativity and flexibility from both colleges and employers, the Lightcast analysis finds. That message may be getting through at more community colleges. 

“We’re seeing a much-needed awareness that the design of our colleges needs to be not from the inside out, but the outside in,” says Karen Stout, president and CEO of Achieving the Dream.

Colleges from Oceanside, Calif., to Eunice, La., to Brooklyn are reworking the certificates and degrees they offer based on local demand, she says. And as dual enrollment grows in popularity, colleges are reshaping those programs to focus more on middle-skill pathways.

Some of this change is being driven by federal and state investments.

For example, a year ago Texas rolled out a new community college funding formula that emphasizes “credentials of value” and greater alignment between college programs and the state’s high-growth jobs. Alabama, meanwhile, has become perhaps the national leader in rethinking how its community colleges interact with industry—moving toward competency-based education and building a statewide talent marketplace that connects students, workers and would-be ones, and employers based on skills. 

And the federal government—through investments like those in the CHIPS and Science Act, and to a growing extent from the Energy Department and the Pentagon—has provided substantial support to community colleges to build programs and other capacity to support in-demand middle-skill jobs.

“Those programs are requiring colleges to look at their offerings in a new way—not only their own programs but other community colleges in their region, four-years, and even other sub-associate certificate providers, both nonprofit and in some cases for-profit,” Stout says.

Employers are also going to have to stretch. Hetrick and his co-authors point to promising examples like a Texas-based company that matches manufacturing workers and companies with “gig-like flexibility” to give people more control over their schedules. The company has attracted a different profile of factory worker—almost 50% are members of minority groups and 66% are between the ages 20 and 40. 

In the end, the authors conclude there won’t be one answer. “In building a future-ready workforce, flexibility is key.” —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Apprenticeship in Indiana
A cross-sector coalition in Indiana seeks to dramatically ramp up youth apprenticeship, with a goal of serving 50K students across the state over the next decade. The new plan is from CEMETS iLab Indiana, a 200-member coalition including leaders from business, K-12, higher education, and government. The plan’s top priority is for industry to speak with one voice about its talent needs, so educators and policymakers can develop responsive systems.

Information and Data Jobs
San José State University has launched the College of Information, Data and Society to expand access to degrees that crosscut information and data sciences. The university says the new college, which is home to its School of Information (iSchool), adds to SJSU’s workforce development capacity across fields such as AI, information and data sciences, big data analytics and ethics, instructional design, and cybersecurity.

Allied Health Training
Futuro Health has been awarded a $10.2M grant from the Elisabeth D. Deluca Foundation to offer tuition-free training to 2K learners across Connecticut and Florida’s Tri-County area. The nonprofit training hub focuses on allied health, and will use the new grant to offer programs in those regions in allied and behavioral health. Since its creation in 2020, Futuro has enrolled roughly 9K students in training to become medical assistants, surgical technicians, and other roles.

Degree Requirements
“For far too long, our nation has encouraged only one path to success: a four-year college degree. Our nation needs to recognize the value of other paths—additional paths, such as apprenticeships and technical programs,” Vice President Kamala Harris said last week at a campaign event. If elected, Harris pledged to eliminate “unnecessary” degree requirements for federal jobs. The Trump administration made a similar move with an executive order.

Fabs and Data Centers
Intel will spin off its chip-making business, creating a subsidiary with “clearer separation and independence.” The company says it’s moving forward with manufacturing projects in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, and Ohio, which the new Intel Foundry will manage. Meanwhile, Microsoft and BlackRock are creating a $30B fund as part of an AI partnership to invest up to $100B in new data centers and energy infrastructure to meet demand for the technology.

AI Agents
Salesforce is investing $50M to make its premium, instructor-led courses on AI free for now on its Trailhead platform—and to open training facilities in San Francisco, Chicago, Tokyo, and Sydney. The company’s philanthropic arm also gave $23M to schools and nonprofits, including aiEDU, CareerVillage, Code the Dream, and the Competency-Based Education Network, to expand AI skills. The news follows on Salesforce’s move to roll out new AI bots that it says can act autonomously.

Large language models are poised to make a next leap in their capabilities, achieving a new form of scale with a “thinking” process, writes Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School and prolific expert on AI. Mollick describes the current state of play with frontier LLM models and says broad use of independent AI agents is likely just around the corner. “These systems will be able to handle complex tasks with minimal human oversight, with wide-ranging implications.”

Believe it or not, we had plenty more news to include in this edition. We’ll get there next week. Thanks for reading. —PF