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‘We have a labor market desperate for skilled people’

A conversation with Andy Van Kleunen, National Skills Coalition founder and CEO
By Ramona Schindelheim
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In this episode of Work in Progress, I am joined by Andy Van Kleunen, founder and CEO of the National Skills Coalition. We sat down in the “Bucky Dome” on the Aspen Institute campus at the Aspen Ideas Festival to discuss what is being done to upskill workers to fill the 10.1 million open jobs across the country.

Since 2000, the National Skills Coalition (NSC) has been advocating for what it describes as “a national commitment to inclusive, high-quality skills training so that more people have access to a better life, and more local businesses see sustained growth.”

Founder and CEO Andy Van Kleunen explains that the NSC was created as a reaction to what was happening in federal policy at the time. “There was kind of a bipartisan decision that training didn’t matter for low-income folks or folks who’d been laid off from their jobs or young people who were just out of high school.”

23 years into the mission, he says, he believes that there is a consensus that training is integral to economic mobility and prosperity.

Here is some of what he told me:

“I think there’s bipartisan agreement. The dynamic around why it is that we, as a country, should be investing in working people and why we should be looking particularly at folks who are not in that traditional high school-to-college full-time pipeline has changed dramatically.

“We have a labor market that is desperate for skilled people to fill a bunch of open jobs. Even coming out of recession, we still have shortages of skilled workers in really key industries. Now, it’s just a matter of getting some consensus about what government can be doing in partnership with industry and education trading providers to provide that.

“It’s not that the private sector doesn’t understand that we need to be investing in training in order to stay ahead of the tech logical curve. We need to get industry to start to invest in some of the folks at their entry levels because those are skilled jobs as well. Those jobs are becoming increasingly skilled, becoming increasingly digital.

“92% of the jobs today have some either explicit or implicit digital skill requirement. That’s basically every job in the economy. We are not investing in every worker to be able to be ready for all of those jobs. And I think industry needs to take that seriously and start to think about how to invest in their entry level and mid-level workers to help keep them ahead of the curve. And then government needs to do its part to make sure that we’re building a pipeline of folks who can move into those jobs.

“We’re going to have a whole $3 trillion worth of federal investment that’s going to be going into communities to finally rebuild our infrastructure in a number of different ways, which is going to create even more skilled jobs. I think everybody recognizes we’ve got a challenge and that we need to do something about it.”

Van Kleunen offers more specifics on these and many other aspects of the ongoing efforts – and opportunities – to upskill workers for good, family-sustaining jobs in today’s workforce.

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

Episode 278: Andy Van Kleunen, Founder & CEO, National Skills Coalition
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
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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