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Tear the paper ceiling. Give STARs greater economic mobility.

A conversation with Byron Auguste, CEO & co-founder, Opportunity@Work
By Ramona Schindelheim
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In this episode of Work in Progress, Opportunity@Work CEO and co-founder Byron Auguste joins me to discuss the new Tear the Paper Ceiling ad campaign launched last week by Opportunity@Work, the Ad Council, and nearly 50 partner organizations, including WorkingNation.

Approximately 70 million U.S. workers have in-demand skills and experience, but they are being overlooked for higher-wage jobs because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. Employers requiring job seekers and workers to have that four-year degree before being hired or promoted have created a “paper ceiling,” an invisible barrier to upward economic mobility.

The new campaign calls for employers to tear down that paper ceiling and let STARs – workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes – shine.

“STARs don’t have bachelor’s degrees. They typically have high school diplomas and they’re working,” says Auguste. As the name explains, they’ve gotten their skills and experience other ways, through some college credits, the military, or certificate programs. “Most of all, STARs have gained those skills by working. It’s intuitive. If you think about it, most of the skills we deploy in our own jobs – whether we are STARs or not – are skills that we have learned by working,” he adds.

Auguste tells me that while school is important, generally what you learn on the job is the most relevant and important. He says Opportunity@Work data shows that of those 70 million STARs, 30 million have the skills needed for those higher-wage jobs, if only they were given the chance to use them.

A college degree can be a bridge to opportunity, he adds, but “it shouldn’t be a draw bridge that pulls up and if you can’t cross it there is no other path to opportunity. You don’t have to be against college to be for so many different routes for people to succeed.”

Auguste says he doesn’t like to say that a job “requires” a bachelor’s degree. “Take an executive assistant, for example. That is a job that requires a lot of organization. It is a very skilled job and an incredibly important gateway job. Admin assistants become project managers and more. To this day, two-thirds of these assistants do not have bachelor’s degrees.

“So, how can something be ‘required’ when two-thirds of the people doing that job don’t have one. It is more than of a ‘screen’ that is arbitrarily reducing the number of folks who can come into a field.” he argues.

Tear the Paper Ceiling

Opportunity@Work and Auguste have long championed the advancement of STARs in the workforce. That’s the mission behind the Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign – getting employers to remove the bachelor’s degree screen in jobs that don’t really need them.

“Companies should value skills, however someone got them. I think the smartest companies get this and more and more you’re seeing companies actually say ‘we want ways to find skills, whether you graduated from college or not.’

“We understand that a company can’t interview everyone who applies, so you need to have some way to create a short list. We are working to create ‘screen-in’ signals. What are all the ways – the diverse ways – you can tell that someone has a skill set that’s relevant for a job. That’s what we need to do both for companies for entire industries and for the economy of this country. Because if half your skilled workforce is shut out or – barriers are put in their way before they can even get started – that’s a pretty terrible way to run an economy. And we need to move past that.”

You can listen to the full podcast here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Read more about the Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign.

Episode 245: Byron Auguste, CEO & Co-Founder, Opportunity@Work
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa Panzer
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0
Download the transcript for this podcast here.
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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