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Making career navigation more transparent and more accessible

A conversation with Maria Flynn, president & CEO, JFF
By Ramona Schindelheim
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My guest this week on the Work in Progress podcast is Maria Flynn, the president and CEO of JFF, a nonprofit working to accelerate the alignment and transformation of the American workforce and education systems with the goal of equal access to economic advancement for all.

As we are all aware, COVID-19 has created a new urgency around issues such as closing the skills gap, the role of post-secondary education in developing the workforce, and equity and access to opportunities in education and work. With millions of people still out work—and as much as 40% of all lost jobs being eliminated permanently—helping people find a pathway to a good job has become even more critical.

“Career navigation as one of the largest challenges that we face as a nation. It is a weakness that is felt across the board. The question remains: how do we make this system of opportunities more transparent and actionable to folks?” asks Flynn.

Even as skills development is now viewed as a critical piece of our workforce infrastructure, more than half of the workers surveyed (56%) in our WorkingNation American Workers Survey say they are unaware of existing programs to acquire in-demand skills, or how to find existing programs.

While 21% of workers trust employers to help them gain the skills they need to compete and succeed in the job market, two-thirds of workers (66%) tell WorkingNation that they have never been offered skills training by their employers.

JFF Labs Career Navigation Market Scan

For millions of American workers, “the process of finding a career is chaotic, seemingly random, and ultimately broken,” says JFF. To address the challenge, the JFF Labs arm of the organization, recently issued what it calls a Career Navigation Market Scan which examines more than 1,000 tech-based companies that are trying to solve the career navigation gap that exists in the ecosystem.

The study highlights companies deploying new technologies to help workers navigate the complex world of career search and planning and address the recruitment, hiring, and talent development needs of employers.

“We identified 18 innovators to watch, 18 companies that we feel are really approaching this issue of career navigation in some interesting ways,” Flynn explains. The scan looks at “how the information is flowing in a user-friendly and interactive way, making sure that it is aligned with employer needs, that it is equity driven,” she tells me in the podcast.

“Like most things, the students and the workers who are kind of struggling to make ends meet and may not have the social capital and the connections that more entitled folks may have, are feeling this disconnect even more and are really struggling to find the information that they need to make a good choices about what comes next for them,” adds Flynn.

The Role of Business and Education

Flynn believes that companies have “a critical role to play and can really start to make a huge difference in the market by continuing a shift towards skills-based hiring versus a focus on traditional degrees.” She suggests that changing how job descriptions are worded, taking degree requirements out of job postings, and engaging in a hiring process to prioritize a focus on skills and how to assess those skills, are all forward-looking steps that businesses can take.

On education, Flynn says “we are really hoping to see a redesign that makes higher education, post-secondary education opportunities more agile, more accessible, and more connected to the labor market.” She says JFF is seeing amazing pockets of continuing innovation in larger institutions, such as Western Governors University, and in smaller organizations, such as Merit America. She says they have an important goal in mind: strong labor market outcomes.

As always, our conversations goes in-depth into these and other issues around workforce development. You can listen here, or download Work in Progress wherever you get your your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this podcast here.

Episode 159: Maria Flynn, president and CEO, JFF
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.

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