Transcript- Episode 94: What The Next Generation Of Workers Need To Thrive With Abby Snay, Deputy Secretary, Future of Work at California Labor & Workforce Development Agency Episode 94
May 23, 2023
00:00:00 Abby
Many, if not most of the jobs that are going
to exist in the next 10 years don't even exist yet. And so,
point-by-point training is just not going to be possible.
00:00:10 Abby
And so instead, I'd recommend that students
focus on their core skills in critical thinking and problem-solving
and communication that they could take in multiple directions and
not focus solely on a specific narrow occupation.
00:00:29 Christina
The workforce landscape is rapidly changing
and educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing
students before they enter the workforce to make our communities
and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education.
00:00:42 Christina
But we need to understand how to change and
adjust so that we can begin to project where things are headed
before we even get there. So, how do we begin to predict the
future?
00:00:54 Salvatrice
Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of
Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College, and
host of this podcast.
00:01:02 Christina
And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co-host
of this podcast.
00:01:05 Salvatrice
And we are starting the conversation about the
future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner
with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of
our highest goals; more internships and PCC students in the
workforce.
00:01:20 Salvatrice
We at Pasadena City College want to lead the
charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning
and what the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This
is a conversation that impacts all of us. You the employers, the
policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a
whole.
00:01:40 Christina
We believe change happens when we work
together, and it all starts with having a conversation. I'm
Christina Barsi.
00:01:47 Salvatrice
And I'm Salvatrice Cummo, and this is the
Future of Work.
00:01:53 Salvatrice
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Future of
Work Podcast, I am your host, Salvatrice Cummo. In today's episode,
we'll be learning more about the California Labor and Workforce
Development Agency, and some of the work they are doing. We will
also talk about the state of labor in California in areas such as
agriculture, healthcare, and education, and how employers and
educators can work together to better the future of work.
00:02:20 Salvatrice
With that being said, we are excited to
welcome Abby Snay, Deputy Secretary for the California Labor and
Workforce Development Agency. She leads workforce strategy for the
labor agency, driving program partnerships and initiatives for
higher impact, job quality and equity.
00:02:37 Salvatrice
She has worked to increase economic mobility
for immigrants and refugees to create a new healthcare workforce
initiative in partnership with the California Health and Human
Service Agency to expand apprenticeships in California, and to
develop training and workforce opportunity through the state's
climate strategies.
00:02:58 Salvatrice
Before joining the Labor Agency, Abby served
as CEO of the Jewish Vocational Service in San Francisco for over
35 years. Abby, thank you so much for joining us today, you've got
so much on your plate and I am honored to have you as a guest on my
podcast to talk about all things labor and workforce development,
welcome.
00:03:23 Abby
Well, thank you so much for having me
Salvatrice, I'm excited to be here and to talk to you.
00:03:28 Salvatrice
Excellent. Well, let's just dive right in. All
of your experiences have led you as the deputy secretary for your
current role there at the Future of Work for California Labor and
Workforce Development.
00:03:40 Salvatrice
And you correct me if I'm wrong, I almost feel
like it's prepared you so much so based on what we've experienced
with California just most recently. And we all experienced this
crazy weather and major, major weather conditions that have
affected the entire state with a strong impact specifically on
agriculture.
00:04:02 Salvatrice
And so, based on your experiences, what's kept
you interested in this work and solving or being very proactive in
solving this issue with the impacts to agriculture - what is being
done right now based on what you can share to help these workers
who have, A, been out of work due to the weather conditions, and B,
have lost their employment due to the flooding and loss of
crops?
00:04:32 Abby
Yeah, you're right, Salvatrice. As the winter
storms were creating flooding and havoc, especially in rural
counties, the impact of those storms on farm workers has been
profound. They've lost their jobs and have also lacked access
frequently to disaster response services and income support.
00:04:54 Abby
I felt proud of the administration and proud
to be part of it right away when we saw what was happening, the
Office of Emergency Services put together a priority populations
task force that met every single morning with groups from public
health, social services, Department of Aging, just to make sure
that elderly people, home bound people, disabled people and other
people at risk were getting checked out at home, were getting
essential services and were getting food and shelter.
00:05:23 Abby
But the impact on farm workers has really been
significant and continues to be significant. With the federal
disaster declarations, the Labor Agency has been able to secure
additional assistance for unemployment insurance to provide a
cushion between jobs, but that only helps workers with
documentation.
00:05:45 Abby
And so, we are working closely with our
networks of community-based organizations in the most affected
rural communities to make sure that farm workers get the services
and benefits that can help them get back on their feet and working
with partners inside the administration with private philanthropic
sources to figure out sources of income support to cover them in
periods of unemployment.
00:06:10 Abby
Looking ahead if I might, we've been really
thinking a lot about farm workers in the last year and want to
increase the investments in training that we're making, both to
help them advance within the agriculture sector to better paying
jobs in supervision and management roles as well as specialty areas
such as irrigation control.
00:06:34 Abby
And also look at jobs that can leverage the
skills they've built as farm workers and take them into adjacent
sectors such as forestry, such as wilderness management and to make
sure that that training always has components of building basic
English and literacy skills as well. And knowing that we're talking
within a community college context, I'm hoping that many community
college partners are listening in.
00:07:01 Abby
The community colleges and rural communities
have really stepped up and are offering certificate programs in
many of these skills and occupations but we need more. We need more
to serve more firm workers and especially, programs that integrate
contextualized English and other literacy skills into occupational
programs to really enable firm workers who are also English
language learners to accelerate their training and build their
English skills while they're learning specific work skills
00:07:32 Salvatrice
In the conversation around community colleges,
If I could ask a follow-up question to that would be what community
college, I think, in your humble opinion is doing it really well
that we can model off of because that's what we do.
00:07:45 Salvatrice
We model each other's best practices but also,
just wanted to add this layer is Pasadena City College specifically
my division, oversees the consortium of Los Angeles Regional
Consortium of the 19 community colleges, and we oversee that
operations through the strong workforce funding.
00:08:04 Salvatrice
So, hearing this makes me think, "Gosh, if we
could really study the model that's working in other community
colleges, the body of '19, although we're not super, super close to
agriculture here we could still make an impact.
00:08:19 Abby
That's absolutely right and the programs that
we've learned about that stand out tend to be in the Monterey
Peninsula area; Ridley College, some of the other community
colleges that are working closely with growers to help identify
ways in which the growers are using new technologies and working
together with the community colleges to build skills to enable
workers to advance to new jobs and to be more productive using new
technologies, and then to help the industry as a whole.
00:08:50 Abby
And I think that's where community colleges
really do their best work in partnership with employers, training
specifically to their needs.
00:08:58 Salvatrice
Yeah, it also makes me think about my work and
what I could be doing to inform instruction on the emerging
occupations within our agriculture based on what we've experienced.
So, I really appreciate you sharing that because that was an aha
moment for me to say, well, you can contribute too and that is by
sharing the knowledge and demonstrating the emerging
occupations.
00:09:20 Salvatrice
And another area that we've seen really take a
decline in workforce is the healthcare space. What is the
Department of Labor doing to address the lack of employees in the
healthcare field that we've seen?
00:09:34 Abby
In the fall of 2021, Dr. Mark Ghaly, who is
the Health Secretary for the state, reached out to the labor agency
saying a day does not go by that he wasn't hearing from healthcare
providers about the crisis in staffing and having enough workers to
meet the essential needs of California. Of course, just coming out
of the shock of COVID and the pandemic.
00:09:57 Abby
And so, our agencies joined forces and secured
over a billion dollars in funding in last year's state budget to
address these dire workforce needs, and also, to increase diversity
and linguistic and cultural competency in the healthcare sector and
to offer pathways to stable careers in healthcare for people in
low-income communities of color.
00:10:20 Abby
And so, we are really excited about the silo
busting and the very deep partnership that's emerging between our
two agencies and among a dozen different departments. And we are
building out training programs that will expand nursing education,
closing the gap between training and education and the actual
clinical workplace, and to support advancement into nursing
specialties where shortages are especially dire; surgery, OB,
psych, those shortages again, are really critical.
00:10:53 Abby
We're also, and this is through the CHHS side,
expanding the numbers and use of community health workers as part
of primary care teams in community clinics in other public health
and provider settings, and working really closely with people in
the community around health education, health coaching, and other
services.
00:11:17 Abby
And some of the changes California made in the
last couple of years through CalAIM is expanding payment directly
for those services, really increasing the demand for community
health workers in ways that are going to make health services much
more accessible to people in underserved communities, and also,
create new pathways into healthcare as community health
workers.
00:11:39 Abby
We are also building high road training
partnerships with employers and unions in allied health careers
such as medical assistants and certified nursing assistants to
advance existing workers into better jobs, and then creating new
opportunities for new workers to move into new jobs.
00:12:00 Abby
We are also very excited about a program we
learned about a couple of years ago that is an emergency medical
technician, an EMT program in Alameda County, which recruits
at-risk youth and trains them for EMT roles. And these are often
stepping stones into other roles in emergency services as well as
other roles into healthcare. And we hope through this state
investment to be able to replicate that program in 7 to 10 counties
around the state.
00:12:32 Abby
We're also really excited about a program
component that is working in very close partnership with the
community colleges through the chancellor's office, and the adult
schools to create accelerated training and education programs for
English language learners in healthcare through training models
that incorporate English language instruction into vocational
skills training.
00:12:57 Abby
So, that somebody who is learning English
doesn't have to spend a year or two getting to a certain English
level to be able to then start a medical assisting program, to be
able to really contextualize and integrate both of those sets of
learning at once.
00:13:11 Abby
We hope over the next three to five years to
really make a big difference in the healthcare workforce with goals
of training up to 50,000 new healthcare workers.
00:13:22 Salvatrice
Excellent, excellent. And I'm so happy to hear
the momentum around that already, and the anticipation for more.
This is really good information because again, what you're sharing
now is so crucial to our work and it keeps us informed on not only
what is happening but what you anticipate to happen so that we
could best prepare to be better partners to the state. And so, I
really appreciate that.
00:13:45 Abby
All of what you shared of course, involves
funding. And so, I wanted to touch on that just a little bit
specifically around the expectation or the expected funding for the
state from the Federal Infrastructure Act, the 45 billion that's
expected to arrive. Can you share what you can, what will these
funds be used for and will funds be allocated to provide any
training opportunities for the public?
00:14:16 Abby
Yes, yes and yes. The Federal Infrastructure
Act offers truly a once in a generation opportunity for California
and other states to strengthen roads and bridges and broadband, and
make broadband accessible to every community in the state, and to
create a climate resilient infrastructure. And we can see from the
storms and floods and wildfires how critical building a
climate-resilient infrastructure is in our state.
00:14:43 Abby
The Infrastructure Act also creates
opportunities to train thousands of people, especially young people
and other workers who have been left behind for the jobs that will
be needed for this work. Both the construction jobs needed to build
roads and bridges, and the technician and operator jobs needed to
keep them running and keep them repaired.
00:15:04 Abby
We, at the Labor Agency with our partner the
California Workforce Development Board, working in close
coordination with the governor's office, and the governor's office
is infrastructure taskforce, have really been working and a lot of
work also with the California Transportation Agency and Caltrans on
a two-pronged approach so that we can really leverage this funding
as an opportunity for equity and access.
00:15:33 Abby
Really, the first being to make sure that the
jobs that are created with the billions of dollars that will be
going out in contracts include provisions for apprenticeship
requirements for including apprenticeships, for community workforce
agreements so that people in our communities have access to skill
building and access to these jobs. And our partners at the
Workforce Development Board are really working with agencies and
departments to educate them on ways that their contracting
standards can build job quality and equity.
00:16:06 Abby
What we're also working on is leveraging
funding through the federal infrastructure funds themselves and
other federal and state dollars to expand apprenticeship and
apprenticeship in construction and some of the other skills that
will be needed for the infrastructure job.
00:16:24 Abby
We're also working closely with the
chancellor's office to align funding and deepen connections between
the state's network of high road construction careers, which really
sit on the labor side, and all the training and education that is
going on at the community colleges.
00:16:42 Abby
The Illumina Foundation has supported a few
pilots that have really deepened those partnerships. For example,
there are so many people going through construction
pre-apprenticeship programs who are really great with their hands,
but in order to pass an apprenticeship exam, they have to know
algebra and they have to know test-taking techniques so that they
can pass those very rigorous apprenticeship exams.
00:17:09 Abby
And so, partnerships with community colleges
have really bolstered some of the math skills and study skills and
test-taking skills so that we're really leveraging that expertise
for the benefit of pre-apprentices in those programs. And the
chancellor's office will be issuing a solicitation and I guess,
here's a heads up for you on funding to increase those partnerships
in construction with the state's 13 high road construction
careers.
00:17:38 Salvatrice
Fantastic, that's a nice heads up. I really
appreciate that and I'll keep an eye out for it and share with my
colleagues too. We've spent some time really talking about the
programmings and the training and all the wonderful work that is
happening in your area, but I want to just maybe pause for a little
bit and really talk about the state of labor itself in
California.
00:18:00 Salvatrice
And I'm curious to hear your perspective about
not only what it looks like now, but your perspective on what it
might look like 5 to 10 years from now based on the information
that you know and the research, and the momentum that you're
building as we just heard. And the second part of that question
would be what could we do as educational institutions to really
shape that projection in a positive way?
00:18:27 Abby
So, despite the layoffs in the tech sector
that have really been so visible on the news lately, the state of
unemployment in California is not bad. As of February, it was 4.3%,
slightly higher than the U.S. unemployment rate. California has
steadily been adding jobs since the spike of layoffs in the early
days of the pandemic in 2020, and has added over 3 million jobs,
really nearly all of the jobs that were lost then.
00:18:57 Abby
However, these positive trends really mask
income inequality which is among our greatest concerns and a major
concern for all of us in California. California is among the states
in the country that has the largest gap between high and low income
families with families, at the top of the income distribution. And
this is according to the Public Policy Institute of California,
earning 11 times more than families at the bottom. And wealth is
more unevenly distributed than income.
00:19:34 Abby
And so, at the heart of this challenge,
really, is inequity, economic mobility and low wage work. About a
third of the workers in California (and this is from 2019) earned
less than $15 an hour. The majority of those people were full-time
workers and we know that workers of color are over three times more
likely than white workers to live in poverty. And women make up the
majority of workers in California who earn less than $15 an hour,
and they're overrepresented in low wage jobs such as jobs in
long-term care and childcare.
00:20:10 Abby
One of the first things that our governor did
early in his tenure was create a Future of Work Commission. And
that was one of the reasons I was brought on to the state. And the
Future of Work Commission issued recommendations in early 2021, and
those really focused very globally and very aspirationally around
eliminating working poverty, raising the standard and share of
quality jobs, ensuring that there are enough jobs for everyone who
wants to work, and future-proofing California with jobs and skills
that prepare for changes in technology and climate, and other
shocks such as the shocks we experienced in the COVID pandemic.
00:20:57 Abby
And so, it's really these recommendations that
drive our work at the agency, the core of which is increasing
equity in our training programs and expanding access to good jobs.
And in doing this, and we've talked about this already, is relying
on partnerships we have with community colleges and other
educational institutions around the state to make that happen.
00:21:20 Salvatrice
Thank you. And on that note, speaking of the
student, what advice do you have for students on how they should
prepare for their future careers knowing that this is the outlook
within the next 5 to 10 years?
00:21:35 Abby
I would give three major recommendations.
First, to recognize that many if not most of the jobs that are
going to exist in the next 10 years don't even exist yet. And so,
point-by-point, training is just not going to be possible for every
job.
00:21:51 Abby
And so, instead, I'd recommend that students
focus on their core skills in critical thinking and problem-solving
and communication that they could take in multiple directions, and
not focus solely on a specific narrow occupation.
00:22:07 Abby
I'd also recommend building technology and
presentation skills that cut across all sectors as well as fluency
with online and self-directed learning.
00:22:18 Abby
The successful employee of the 21st century
will be an employee who takes charge of his or her own learning and
development and will be resilient and able to be resilient in the
face of continuous change, and who can adapt to that change and
continue to build skills and seize opportunities as those
emerge.
00:22:41 Abby
And then the third recommendation really
simply is work, work, work. Work as much as possible in jobs or
internships related to coursework or in other settings. Every job
is a learning opportunity, every job is a chance to build
experience, references, and connections. And every job can really
help students build a network of supervisors and coworkers, and
stay in touch with them for advice, for support.
00:23:07 Abby
I wouldn't underestimate how much people
really want to help and following up with a supervisor for a
suggestion on job leads, "I'm really interested in this field, who
else do you know who I could talk to?" People really want to be
able to help and I think as students, whether they're young people
or working age adults really are often shy to ask for help, but
people want to help.
00:23:30 Salvatrice
They sure do. Speaking of help, this is the
Future of Work Podcast and I ask this question all the time to
conclude our conversation and to wrap things up is; if you had one
thing that you would like our listener to understand and our
listeners are students and faculty and employers and industry and
government, I mean we have a beautiful group of listeners - about
the topic that we've been discussing today, about the future of
work, what might that be?
00:24:00 Abby
Sure, and I think I can pull together some of
the threads we've already talked about in our conversation. The
future of work is not preordained and all the projections around
the robot apocalypse and AI taking our jobs, we can shape the
future of work through policies, and for us at the state and
funding and programs that do tackle inequality and create good jobs
and then pathways into them.
00:24:26 Abby
And we can seize the moment as we've been
talking about in addressing climate change, strengthening our
infrastructure, building a healthcare workforce to make sure that
we're creating good jobs and then creating pathways into those jobs
in advancing into better jobs for the people who've been
historically left behind.
00:24:45 Salvatrice
And that's certainly going to take a diverse
group of organizations and agencies and people to do that. And I
think I can speak on behalf of our team here, really appreciate the
work that you're doing there at the state and we want to stay
connected, we want to stay informed. So, please, if there's
anything that's important to us to understand, know and learn,
please forward that over, happy to share it on this podcast of
course, and our channels of communications and networks.
00:25:13 Salvatrice
Thank you so very much, and speaking of
staying connected, if our listener wanted to connect with you,
what's the best way to do that?
00:25:20 Abby
Sure, it's simply abbysnay@labor.ca.gov, and
thank you so much for having me. Thank you for this conversation
Salvatrice, and thank you for really sharing insights and
perspectives about the future of work in your whole podcast series.
This is really important and I'm just so grateful for the chance to
be part of the conversation.
00:25:43 Salvatrice
Well, I suspect that the dialogue will
continue, that we'll be having more conversations to come in the
future and I again, thank you as well. And with that we'll be sure
to insert your contact information in the show notes and again,
thank you very much. We'll see you soon.
00:25:59 Abby
Thank you.
00:26:02 Salvatrice
Thank you for listening to the Future of Work
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00:26:10 Salvatrice
You can reach out to us by clicking on the
website link below in the show notes to collaborate, partner, or
just chat about all things future of work. We'd love to connect
with you, all of us here at the Future of Work and Pasadena City
College wish you safety and wellness.