Employer investment in workers pays off for everyone

A conversation with Jaime Fall, executive director, UpSkill America

January 12, 2021

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All this month, we’re taking a deep dive into the findings in our WorkingNation American Workers Survey. In this Work in Progress podcast, we look at the role businesses play in upskilling the workforce with the skills needed for a good job or career. My guest is Jaime Fall, executive director of UpSkill America, which describes itself as “an employer-led movement to expand opportunity for America’s workers.”

According to Fall, the movement promotes training and advancement practices to help workers progress in their careers and move into better-paying jobs.

I share with Fall this survey finding: 66% of the workers we talked to said they had never been offered skills training by their employers. He says he is not certain if that number correlates with the actual number of businesses offering training, but “it doesn’t matter. If that’s what people perceive to be the case, then that’s what it is. And we really do believe that there needs to be a lot more of this happening.”

He says that UpSkill America believes that when employers invest in the skills of their workers that they will have a better-prepared workforce. “Employers need to really understand the value to the individual, to their company, and to their communities in investing in workers and really giving them opportunities to advance,” adds Fall.

UpSkill America’s Mission

UpSkill America began in 2015. The Great Recession was over, but the recovery was not equally spread through the economy. “There were so many people who were not experiencing the recovery. Things were fine for a lot of executives and others within companies, but the frontline and entry-level workers, they weren’t seeing wage gains and they weren’t seeing job creation and they weren’t really having opportunities to advance,” explains Fall.

He says, in many cases, companies had cut their training and education budgets severely after recession. At first, a network of organizations helped bring employers to the table and commit to understand the importance of investing in workers.

“Since that time, we’ve begun working directly with employers. Typically, we work with large national employers, employers that can have a big impact in the workplace. They can affect a lot of workers and also their brand recognition can help get the attention of a lot of other companies and get them to participate in the initiatives. What we do is work with employers to really create, expand, or improve programs.”

Fall and I also talk about some of what he’s hearing from business leaders about the impact of COVID-19 on the current workforce needs and skills demand. A lot of the discussion is centered around UpSkill America’s latest report released just yesterday.

Of course, I encourage you to learn more about the report from the podcast, which you can listen to here, or download and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this Work in Progress podcast here.

Episode 163: Jaime Fall, Executive Director, UpSkill America
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.