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Hiring platform levels the playing field for job seekers without a four-year degree

A conversation with Kelcey Reed, chief technology officer, Opportunity@Work
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In this episode of the Work in Progress podcast, I am joined by Kelcey Reed, the new chief technology officer for the nonprofit Opportunity@Work.

Opportunity@Work’s mission is to rewire the U.S. labor market so that individuals Skilled Through Alternative Routes—workers and job seekers they call STARs—can work, learn, and earn to their full potential.

“You shouldn’t have to have a college degree to acquire a good-paying job. You should have the acumen to gain skills and utilize those skills to your fullest potential,” explains Reed.

“I don’t want to ever tell anyone college isn’t important, but college isn’t for everyone. We have to remember that—we see the numbers—70-plus million folks out there do not finish a four-year degree.”

In the podcast, Reed and discuss how these STARs who don’t go to a four-year school obtain their skills. “They go into military service, just like I did. They go into community colleges and do two years. You got that working mom that is trying to put food on her kid’s table, and she’s a single mother that can’t.”

“Should I penalize you because you don’t have a college diploma, you shouldn’t come work?” he asks. “No, we shouldn’t do that. We should really find ways to reward them for trying to get the skills that they need in order to be competent in their job and proficient in their job, right? That is key.”

To that end, in his role as Chief Technology Officer, Reed will oversee and expand the organization’s Stellarworx hiring platform which highlights and matches a job seeker’s skills to employers with open jobs.

“Stellarworx actually levels the playing field for STARs who otherwise are overlooked in recruiting channels that cater to college graduates—and are dominated by employers who rely specifically on pedigree as a proxy for skill—by allowing them to showcase the skills they have for a job,” he explains.

Reed’s passion to help STARs find a pathway to a good job comes from his own life experiences. “I didn’t have all of the resources to go into college, so I decided to go into the military where I could actually get money to go to college later, so I basically was postponing college.”

“When I went in the military, my job was fire direction control for artillery. It is a computer operations/computer programming type of role in which I learned a lot of skills in how to program computers, how to plot on a map, how to read a map.”

After eight years in the military, Reed says he “hit a brick wall. A lot of employers look for you to have a four-year degree before they let you come in and get higher-paying jobs like a management type of job. Although I was managing troops, the employers was not looking at my military experience or the skills that I gained in the military.”

Reed was able to find employers who valued the skills he learned in the military and later in the civilian workforce. He doesn’t want it to be as hard for others as it was for him.

“People shouldn’t be faced with the same challenges that I was faced with, especially if you’ve gained real hard skills that can translate for you to be very productive inside of an organization. That’s what we need today.”

You can listen to more of Reed’s personal journey and his plans for the @Opportunity@Work’s Stellarworx platform here, or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode 197: Kelcey Reed, chief technology officer, Opportunity@Work
Host and Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, editor-in-chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.
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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.