A national nonprofit is spearheading an effort to help residents without college degrees in South Florida gain access to jobs and careers in the banking and financial services sector. The initiative is in its early stage in the region, but aims to set up a training and credentialing ecosystem that prepares workers for jobs such as entry-level tellers and customer service representatives.

CAEL (Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) helps working learners by supporting the creation of education-to-career pathways. The organization’s Build Better Careers is a six-year initiative with funding from the Truist Foundation intended to help 6,000 adult learners in various cities gain upward mobility by providing access to good careers.

Earl Buford, president of CAEL, says its advocacy for adult learners is steeped in the fact that people are career-minded and want to have a pathway.

“Usually, historically, it’s been the higher education system that was the biggest advocate for that, yet people don’t graduate for a variety of reasons. We’re really there to help with the on- and off-ramps of that career progression.”

Buford explains the intention is to work with local stakeholders and create a regional ecosystem to support the financial pathway efforts. Among CAEL’s partners is OIC of South Florida (OIC-SFL).

“[We want to] test drive the impact from recruiting, career guidance, and overview of the opportunities to set up training and credentialing programs to laddering with our local education partners. It’s a full-scale extended pathways approach that we want to model out and show that it can grow across a local region and eventually become a national model,” says Buford.

Generally, jobs in the banking and financial services sector that may require a bachelor’s degree pay an estimated median annual salary of $79,050, which is higher than the $48,060 median for all occupations nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the goals for bringing financial industry employers together is the development of – not just the career pathway – but a competency map. Ashley Wilhelm, senior director of workforce and economic development initiatives at CAEL, says, “We ask them to focus on five to eight occupations that are high-growth, high-demand, and currently don’t require a bachelor’s degree.

“We go through the skills that are needed for those jobs with those employers. And then we map those into what someone needs before they get into that role. Not everyone is necessarily ready to jump right into that target occupation. So, what feeder occupation do we want to target for people?”

Wilhelm continues, “We go about two or three levels above that target occupation to show that growth. And then we map those skills into existing programs with those higher ed institutions to say, ‘Here are training programs that you can go into to get those skills as well as on the job.’ It accelerates that credit for prior learning pathway”

The Opportunities Industrialization Center of South Florida

With 31 affiliates in 19 states, the first OIC (Opportunities Industrialization Center) was founded in 1964 in Philadelphia by Rev. Leon Sullivan.

Newton Sanon, president and CEO of OIC-SFL, says “Founder Sullivan believed a job is the best social service in the world. Having a good career, a good job is so much more than about money. It provides a sense of self-esteem, models behaviors for your kids…alleviates vicious cycles of poverty.” OIC-SFL serves residents in Miami-Dade County and Broward County.

He explains, “We’re specifically a community-based workforce development organization. That means we’re intentionally focused on underserved communities who don’t just need to access the credentialing, but the other social services they need to help stabilize them – such as transportation and housing – to come into economic mobility.”

Sanon says it’s key for stakeholders’ visions of the middle class to be in aligned, “Are we all in agreement that a strong economic ecosystem is better for everybody? You can train people all you want but if the ecosystem isn’t friendly with jobs and the contributing factors such as housing, you never get there.”

Regarding the banking and financial services pathway, he says, “Sectors are evolving, and so you got to be very intentional about that because a lot of times when you get engaged with sector and industry, they’re not workforce development-minded strategists. You got to make sure that they’re growth sectors where there’s opportunity for jobs.”

“The data shows that it’s growing,” says Holly Ellazar, director of workforce development at OIC-SFL. “We’re seeing a 2% increase in the financial sector for jobs, and that’s just finance. That doesn’t include fintech – that sexy word that we’re starting to hear, especially with South Florida being a tech hub.”

OIC-SFL – earlier this year – completed an initial engagement where some people were trained and placed in the banking sector. Noting the placements were “moderate,” Sanon recounts, “We said, ‘You know what? It’s time to really elevate this thing.’ CAEL stepped up, brought more resources, brought tools and assessments, and due diligence. Now, this is what I would call 2.0, the next iteration.”

Elevating the initiative includes convenings of the stakeholder partners. Ellazar says review of the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis will help determine how the partners can better work together, as well as lay out action items.

“As we go into 2025, it will be taking a step back and saying, ‘How do we relaunch so it’s successful and people can go through and get connected to employment at the end.’ And take the learnings from our meetings to say, ‘Okay, these are the resources that the people need once they start the program.’”

She reminds, “Through our work with CAEL, [identify] different roles that might not need that associate or bachelor’s degree and could be an entry-level career pathway for these individuals.”

Growing the Ecosystems

CAEL’s Buford says of the Build Better Careers initiative, OIC-SFL is its third market. The first being Memphis, Tennessee and the second – Charlotte, North Carolina.

OIC-SFL’s Sanon says, “I can’t stress enough how it’s important for the broader ecosystem of everyone trying to create jobs, having a thriving economic ecosystem to continue to iterate because we’re in a very dynamic and evolutionary season of not just our country, but the world coming in from the global economy.

“Gone are the days where workforce development professionals thought in our own little bubble – train people, place them, train people, place them. There are other contributing factors that either impact positively or negatively rounding out a strong, viable economic ecosystem. This is no spectator sport. We all got to get our hands dirty and figure everything out.”