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EP11: Closing the STEM Talent Gap, A Conversation with Ashley Szofer of STEMconnector

Transcript

Participants:

Michael Young, Host

Ashley Szofer, Senior Director, External Relations & Strategic Brand Engagement

Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

As economies move toward more knowledge-based work, the issue of getting more students interested in STEM education is vital and no one institution or initiative can solve the STEM talent challenges facing society and industry. But by sharing insights and best practices, we can close the gap to STEM talent, education, development and retention. My guest today is Ashley Szofer, senior director at STEMConnector where she leads external engagement in brand strategy. And in case you're unaware, STEMConnector is a research-driven professional services organization that provides its members that are corporations K through 12 and post-secondary educational institutions, nonprofits, governments with support council strategies to meaningfully develop and improve the scale of their STEM talent strategies and initiatives and STEMConnector does exactly what its name implies. It connects leaders who have a passion for and a vested interest in collectively re-envisioning the STEM workforce, bringing them together.

Previously, to her role at STEMConnector, Ashley served as associate director of strategic communications for the University of Chicago's Urban Education Initiative. Ashley definitely has a passion for youth having spent six years as a teacher in Chicago where she taught high school English in both urban and suburban schools. Ashley holds a Bachelor of Science from Miami University of Ohio and a Master's in education policy and management from Harvard University. Today we talk about the STEM talent gaps, how organizations can think about and take action around STEM education and improving participation in STEM, why every organization is a technology organization, the role that STEMConnector plays in convening corporate partners for shared learning within its network. We talk about their initiative called the Million Woman's Mentor Program. Ashley shares about some of the work that STEMConnector members are doing both in the United States and globally, organizations including PepsiCo, Walmart, Deloitte, S&P Global, the U.S. State Department and also Tata Consultancy Services or TCS. And it's through TCS that I actually got introduced to Ashley and we're doing this podcast. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Ashley Szofer of STEMConnector. Ashley, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Ashley Szofer:

Thank you so much, Michael. I'm so excited to be here and be part of the Purpose Inc. Podcast e-family here. Excited to get started.

Michael Young:

So, Ashley, one of the first things that caught my eye when I looked at STEMConnector was the report, The State of STEM that you did a couple of years ago that highlights five STEM talent gaps. Could you walk us through that please?

Ashley Szofer:

Absolutely. So, a couple of years ago when we had a leadership transition, one of the first things that we set out to do was understand better what this STEM talent gap actually is and what actually makes up what we consider a STEM talent gap. We were hearing from industry leaders that they had a challenge in securing STEM talent, attracting STEM talent and also retaining some talent. So, we wanted to better understand that idea of a STEM talent gap. And what the lead researcher on that report, Erin White found as she dove into the existing research on the STEM talent ecosystem is that there isn't just one idea of a STEM talent gap. It's really this series of five gaps that really come together. It's a confluence of gaps that really come together to create what we know and consider the STEM talent gap.

And what those subs gaps are are the demographic gap. For decades, we have been trying to solve this problem of there just aren't enough women and people of color in STEM roles and that is a demographic issue. But then there's also a geographic gap. We have areas of population where there are no jobs and jobs available but there is talent there. Likewise, we have areas where there is an abundance of STEM opportunity but people aren't sure how to reach to the local talent and make those positions available. We also have just a fundamental skills gap that people are graduating from high school and college without even so much as the basic literacy and numeracy that they need to be successful in today's workforce.

And I think there's a post-secondary gap where we know that industry leaders are looking for credentials but it's often very difficult for young people to navigate the pathways that lead them to those industry credentials. And I think one of the most important gaps that was uncovered in this work was the sense of a belief gap. We are not the first people to talk about a belief gap but what that is is that young people and the people around them have very different ideas of what people are capable of and a lot of that stems from stereotypes and cultural norms that say things like math is for boys or if you're a young African-American boy on the south side of Chicago, it's possible that you've never seen an engineer who looks like you. And without seeing those role models and without having access to that body of work and also without having adults in your life who also believe in you, it's very unlikely that those young people are going to feel confident pursuing those STEM pathways and that's why we call it the belief gap. And it's not that these gaps work in isolation. Like I said, it's a confluence of gaps that create the STEM talent gap. You see a lot of issues where a geographic gap actually causes the demographic gap or the belief gap. And so, this report was really about creating a common framework and a common language for industry leaders to be able to share in what they needed to think about and where they should invest and we hope that it serves as that foundation for leaders to think about how they inform their own STEM talent strategy.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And then I want to move to organizations and corporations and their role. And in particular, I've heard you talk about organizations have different needs. They're diverse. How should organizations be thinking about their action around STEM education and pulling new talent into this arena? What's the role of organizations and corporations in doing that?

Ashley Szofer:

I believe that corporations and employers have a huge role to play in preparing the future workforce. We hear a lot that it's on K12 to be better preparing students for the current workforce and creating more experiential learning opportunities and what does that look like. But without the influence of industry leaders and employers, K12 doesn't have access to the right resources and the right networks to actually make sure that they are preparing those students. And it actually is interesting that corporations and industry leaders have opportunities and resources that you don't see in K12 or that you don't see in some after-school programming. They have employees that can serve in the community as those role models and mentors and volunteers, working with students, helping them understand the current workforce, interestingly, really being there to show what kind of jobs exist.

I know that when I was a kid and I think this is still very common, people would say what do you want to be when you grow up and kids would have this idea of oh, doctor, lawyer, teacher. And there's this very narrow set of job opportunities that kids are exposed to or understand. And oftentimes it doesn't go beyond what they see on TV or what they experience in their own homes or the homes of their friends. So, if we have industry leaders letting their employees and having employee engagement opportunities for those employees to be out there saying this is my job, this is what I do on a daily basis and this is how I got there, we're going to be able to invest in those different gaps like the belief gap and the geographic gap to show kids that there are a lot of opportunities that they might not have otherwise seen.

And this is very much in the best interest of industry leaders and employers because this is how they're going to build their talent pipelines. We know from industry leaders they can't get the talent that they need just from looking at traditional talent pools, the universities that they usually pull from, the majors they usually pull from. It is imperative that those leaders are looking at traditionally overlooked talent pools like rural communities, like people of color, women and investing their resources in those communities to ensure that the talent pipeline is actually robust and sustainable. One thing that we have heard from some of our members is we're always going to be competing for talent against some of these other STEM companies but wouldn't it be great if instead of competing for the same hundred people, we were competing for the same thousand people and just having that bigger pipeline. And that's why it benefits everybody and where I think industry leaders have a huge role to play in building out the STEM talent pipeline from the beginning.

Michael Young:

Well, we talked to Balaji Ganapathy at TCS and I want to get into maybe some of your members' work in particular if that's okay. And I want to talk about STEMConnector's role in convening corporate partners and the network effects and the best practices that you help organizations understand.

Ashley Szofer:

Absolutely. I mean so that's really what STEMConnector is about. I think our name says it all. It's really about connecting like-minded leaders to build a diverse and sustainable STEM workforce. You mentioned Balaji Ganapathy at TCS and he's doing so much work with TCS as the global head of CSR for that organization. But one thing that we know from our network is that no one industry, no one sector, no one company is going to solve these challenges alone. So, it's really by coming together and learning from each other and sharing best practices that we can be successful. Now individual companies might have different priorities. They might have different goals for who they're investing in. TCS has different ideas for how we work with them than, for example, Walmart. Walmart is a company that we work with who isn't necessarily seen as a tech employer of choice. You don't have a lot of kids who say I want to grow up and work at tech at Walmart. If they think they want to work at tech, they're going to use the typical Apples and Googles and Facebooks of the world when, in fact, Walmart is one of the biggest tech employers in America. So, how do we work with them to make sure that they are showing the kind of job opportunities that they have available? Whereas TCS is very much a company that's always just been bedded in the community as well and finding opportunities for their employees to be out in the community serving as volunteers, for example, for their Go IT program that's been completely successful in over a decade of work.

And it's very much about how those companies can learn from each other. Lockheed Martin is thinking actively about their STEM staff talent strategy, investing in two-year colleges, looking for new talent pools. These are things that these companies while they are very different and they might have different products and be completely in different sectors are also able to learn from each other. And so, that's where we really operate as a convener both to bring people together physically and also to bring people together in terms of sharing their work and creating opportunities to amplify their best practices across the network, make direct connections when we think there are opportunities for thought leadership and partnership and really just to bring people together into the room over shared interest and mission. Because we know that this is very much about collaborative interest. To the point about working for the same thousand people instead of the same one hundred people, it is in every company's best interests to work even with their competitors on building out this talent pool and that's why STEMConnector is all about bringing those individuals across networks together.

Michael Young:

Yeah. That's a really great point that it's not the hundred or the thousand but the 10,000 and all of those that may have never even considered a career in STEM finding those opportunities. And I think the point you're making also about corporations have people who are in those roles who can go into K through 12 and talk to people about this is what the future is. And I think that's one of the things that I heard from TCS really loud and clear is there's a whole new set of skills that are required and they're out there talking about that and a lot of other people are talking about that. And then you mentioned some of those companies that are not typically considered as tech employers. There are a lot of companies that are tech companies masquerading as retail, as finance, as logistics. Right? Tech is central to every business these days.

Ashley Szofer:

Absolutely. I think you're touching on something that is fundamental to STEMConnector's mission and vision which is people will always ask us about the STEM acronym and should we add the A for arts or we've heard things up to stream where you include religion. I mean so we always say it's not about the acronym and it's not about careers that fall squarely into a STEM category. Sure, you have your computer science jobs and your engineering jobs. But name a career nowadays that doesn't require a basic foundation in STEM skills. And so, that's where it's very much about how do we actually make sure we're honing in on those skills and helping young people understand those skills and how to develop them. The employability skills are in most cases just important if not more important than some of those technical skills when it comes to on-the-job work. And I think that's where the industry leaders working together and helping us better understand that need is where we're going to see the greatest impact.

Michael Young:

Could we hop to Million Women Mentor and talk about that for a minute?

Ashley Szofer:

Absolutely. So, this was something that our leaders came across and decided to create in 2014 actually very much alongside TCS and Balaji Ganapathy. And this was something that we knew—our company was founded in 2011 and it was very much about the broader STEM talent ecosystem and bringing these leaders together. But one thing that we consistently saw was that despite all of this investment, there was still a consistent lack of women's participation in the STEM workforce. So, women make up 50% of the workforce but only 24% of the STEM workforce and on top of that, 50% of those women leave STEM careers within their first 10 years. So, we wanted to come up with something that we could create opportunities to get more women to build their confidence and interest in pursuing STEM careers and leadership opportunities. And the lever that we decided to use for that was mentoring. So, to the point that I've made earlier about how having access to those role models and mentors is really how you can challenge the belief gap, this was something that was critical for women.

And so, this movement came together and has many components of it where we have companies who have said yes, we're going to create mentoring programs and have our employees out in the community mentoring women and girls. Both men and women can be mentors. I think that's a very important piece of this work. Yes, Million Women Mentors is the title and it's about women at the end but everyone is a part of the solution. So, we need to create those cultures of inclusion. We need men to understand the role that they play in building up women's confidence and helping them feel that they have a place in STEM careers and that's very much what this movement is about. So, we have our companies who have mentoring programs and their employees are serving out in the community as those volunteers. But then we also have a volunteer network that is active in over 40 states where each of those states has a volunteer state leader who is aggregating mentoring efforts in that state, using governors and lieutenant governors in many cases to use their platform to amplify the importance of mentoring as a solution for women and girls in STEM. This is not a political movement. So, when we're working with political leaders, it's very much about this isn't about it's a Republican or Democratic issue. It's that you have a platform and you can be using that to share this importance. So, they have steering committees and networks of leaders who are all combining their resources to make sure that we have more opportunities for women and girls in STEM.

And so, we were very excited to be in a position in 2014, the goal was to reach 1 million mentors in five years and that has passed now. So, as we entered 2020, we were beyond excited to say we'd actually surpassed 1.7 million mentor relationships. So, nearly doubling the initial target really and that's another place where just coming together has been so important. We always say that it's not about competition here. It's very much about collaboration. This is something that benefits everybody and it's something that we need to work on together. And so, we've been working with nonprofit partners, we've been working with state leaders, we've been working with companies to really bring together all this mentoring work and all this goodness that's happening around supporting women and girls in STEM together under this shared umbrella of Million Women Mentors.

And now going into the next phase so to speak, we're excited to be taking what we have learned in the United States and take that model globally. So, where we've had this robust network in the United States, some of our companies had already been working with Million Women Mentors globally. PepsiCo, for example, had launched PepsiCo Million Women Mentors chapters and countries like Ireland, the UK, Canada, Mexico, India and Saudi Arabia. But now we're actually taking a very active approach to how do we build out regional partnerships with Million Women Mentors including the United States State Department, including corporations who have a presence on the ground in these countries and bringing together this model that we have seen tremendous success with in the United States and taking it globally. So, last year we actually launched in Pakistan which I think has been very exciting and very successful. We work with Radhika Prabhu at the U.S.-Pakistan Women Council out of the State Department on that effort. And in our first year, we have 27,000 commitments to mentor already from companies like S&P Global and PepsiCo, Zafa Pharmaceuticals, KFC, The Hum Network. These were companies that said we are committed to women's economic empowerment in Pakistan. In particular, they want to support women entrepreneurs. And so, we helped them set up and connect to companies and create their mentoring programs.

Building off of the success of what we've seen in Pakistan, we were excited to launch our Million Women Mentors India platform actually at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year alongside Johnson & Johnson, TCS, Deloitte, S&P Global, PepsiCo. So, it's been really exciting. We're also working with the State Department on that initiative and this is where I think the network and being able to say we have these amazing companies, you have these great resources is so important because this is how we will actually affect change across the world. Because at the end of the day, this is not a United States problem. This is a global issue and I'm excited to be in a position to be able to bring some of these companies and leaders together to make that impact happen.

Michael Young:

Yeah. That's a really big point about no one company, no one country can do it. Right? It's got to be a collaboration and I think that's a really interesting point. Back to individual companies for a moment if you would, Ashley, how should companies think about measuring their performance against some of these goals and metrics? Right? Every company I've talked to has specific metrics and you mentioned the fact that women may fall out as their life or their circumstances change. But how can companies measure and think about improving women's participation in particular?

Ashley Szofer:

Absolutely. And I think that's the exact right question because any company as they're thinking about whether it's their CSR investments, whether it's their HR investments needs to be able to say this is the impact we have for the investments that we have made. And thinking about how something aligns to their corporate priorities is always going to be something that's important. So, we do have actually our second research report that we released last year was called Input to Impact and it was a framework for helping identify how you measure the impact of those investments. And one of the biggest things that companies need to consider when they're making those investments is what their R actually is in their ROI. So, if you're looking for I want talent in the door tomorrow, investing in first graders is not going to give you that impact. However, if you're thinking I want to be successful in building a long-term talent pipeline, maybe I do need to make those longer-term investments. And so, I think it's first of all identifying what return you're actually looking to have because you can't just come out and say well, I want more women in the workforce. I think you need to be more specific about how you're reaching that.

PepsiCo, for example, has set goals that they plan to have 50% of their leadership worldwide be women by 2025. So, Million Women Mentors and their investment in that is how they're seeking to reach that goal, is to show them first of all as a company that is very committed to gender parity but also be out in the community trying to build that talent pipeline and working with high school students and post-secondary students and early career participants to ensure that they're creating that pipeline. So, it certainly varies from company to company how they think about those investments and how they think about that ROI. But at the end of the day, there's tons of research that shows that employee engagement is actually one of the biggest things that you need to have your company be successful. So, it affects your bottom line and mentoring is something that benefits the mentors, the mentees and the companies that have these programs.

So, women and men who actually serve as mentors are honing in their own skills and they're also more engaged employees. So, this is an opportunity for them to grow their own successful networks and to build on that. And the mentees, of course, have the benefits of having access to those role models of mentors, having the support as they go down the career pipeline. But the companies benefit from having these engaged employees. So, I think those are some of the ways that you can define your ROI. And one of the things that we really think about is that a successful mentoring relationship should be reciprocal. It shouldn't just be that you have a mentor or a person who is saying this is exactly the path that you need to take or this is what you need to do to get a STEM job. They should be learning from each other and really helping that mentee zone in on their own goals and understand their own pathway and what's going to work for them. And I think that's where some of those benefits really come from.

So, in some cases, it is hard to have a specific measure on ROI when you're talking about women's economic empowerment. It's hard to say sometimes these are the quantifiable metrics. But I think that being able to say this is what we've learned or this is the retention year-over-year that we've had in this mentoring program or these are the women and girls who have said that they are more interested in a STEM career because of this, those are some of the kind of metrics that you're going to need to use to actually show that this has been a successful practice.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And the point you made about—I talked to Alice Korngold who's an author and expert in this and does a lot of matching between corporate employees and nonprofit boards. And she makes a very similar point that you just made which I think is hugely important is that employees who participate in programs like STEMConnector come back with just a whole new experience, appreciation, new set of ideas that really deepen an organization's commitment. And I think that's really what I see, that this isn't a check-the-box initiative. Right? Well, we're just doing this to sort of make a move against UN SDGs. Right? That the culture of the organizations participating begins to change and evolve and start to see these issues is really resident and vital to their organizational future. I think that's just such a big point and I really appreciate you bringing that up.

Ashley Szofer:

Absolutely. I mean this is one of those issues too where we know especially as the newer workforce is coming in, employee engagement and volunteer opportunities are a big priority for Millennials. I think sometimes being aware of how the workforce goals and interests change is so important to companies to stay relevant and sustainable. So, young people are coming into the workforce and saying in some cases it's even more importance than what they're actually doing at work is well, what are my opportunities to give back to the community? That's something that has been proven to be important to younger generations. So, companies creating these opportunities benefits their incumbent workforce as well as the future workforce if you have been building that pipeline and being in front of young people early on.

Michael Young:

Yeah. So, companies being authentic in their corporate purpose is a huge employer branding issue. Maybe we should start a podcast to talk about it.

Ashley Szofer:

You don't say.

Michael Young:

Right? Yeah. That's a huge point about employer branding and being an employer of choice is don't just talk about this. Show us, the employees, how you're actually doing it and show us your commitment to this in real life. And I think that's an absolutely—it's a gigantic topic. So, I'm really glad we're talking about that.

Ashley Szofer:

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I mean and that's why it's exciting to work with so many of these companies I mean so just personally, my own background, I was a teacher for six years and before my role at STEMConnector, I worked at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute and it was always very much in this nonprofit world or directly working with students and having that piece of it. And I never really saw myself as someone who is going to be working with large corporations. But what's been so exciting about this opportunity is that I have had the experience and learning that these corporations, like I said, have resources and opportunities that you just don't have in the K12 sector or working in nonprofits. So, let's use those resources to do great things in the world and it's exciting to see the ways that companies are coming together and really and truly doing that.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And really appreciate. And we're going to have to leave it there, Ashley. But I really appreciate you coming on and talking about the vital critical connection that you're making at STEMConnector between K through 12 and in post-secondary and corporate interest. So, I really, really appreciate your time and talking to us about that today.

Ashley Szofer:

Well, thank you so much, Michael. It's been exciting to be here and talking to you about this work and excited to continue to spread our impact and company purpose.

Michael Young:

Thank you, Ashley. Have a great day.

Ashley Szofer:

You too.

Michael Young:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.