Rise with the STARs: Building a Stronger Labor Market

A conversation with Papia Debroy, SVP, Insights, Opportunity@Work

February 8, 2022

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In this episode of Work in Progress, Opportunity@Work senior vice president, Insights, Papia Debroy and I discuss Rise with the STARs, a new report from the nonprofit.

If you are not familiar with the term STARs, it is a word championed by Opportunity@Work to describe the more than 70 million workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

“There are a lot of different pathways by which our workers gain skills that are valuable for work,” explains Debroy. “Those pathways include community college. They include military service. They include volunteering in your local community. The most common way that workers learn is frequently on the job, by showing up to your job every day, doing the tasks required of your specific profession, and getting better at those skills.”

Debroy points out that STARs are often overlooked when a job requires a four-year college degree, which creates an opportunity gap. One of the major conclusions of the new Rise with the Stars report is that it takes a STAR 30 years of work experience to earn what someone with a college degree earns at the beginning of their career.

“This is the heart of one of the many challenges that this part of our workforce is experiencing in this generation. When a STAR entered the workforce in 1989 at the age of 25, they were earning less than the worker with the four-year college degree. That has traditionally been the case in our U..S labor market. What’s stunning for this generation is that the STAR doesn’t catch up. So 30 years of work experience is not allowing them to earn in wages what the bachelor’s degree worker was earning on day one of their career,” Debroy tells me.

It’s not just the worker who is missing out. Employers are missing out on untapped talent by putting up what Opportunity@Work describes as a “pointless barrier.” The report offers up a couple of tools to remove the barrier to opportunity, including the Star Mobility Index and 30 Jobs to Turn the Tide.

You can read about these and other observations and recommendations in the report, and here about them in this podcast.

Please check both out, as I leave you with these final thoughts from Debroy.

“It’s important to recognize that more than half of our workforce are STARs. These are workers with the high school diploma without the four-year college degree, but who have incredibly valuable skills in the U.S. labor market. In fact, there are more than 30 million today in our U.S. labor market who we term to be rising STARs. These are folks who, based on skills with their current job, actually have the skills to do significantly higher-wage work in several other occupations. That’s an incredibly important insight, because for us to now recognize those skills means that we have to think about how to open up access and opportunity to this population of STARs.”

Episode 218: Papia Debroy, SVP, Insights, Opportunity@Work
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and 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.