154. Cultivating, Building, and Scaling Sustainable Career Pathways with Maurice Jones of OneTen
Pathways to Advancement
Not having a college degree has become a huge hindrance for people not only being able to get a job, but to get a sustainable job with opportunities for advancement.
And it’s a significant roadblock to advancement for Black people.
This hindrance to employment is increasingly being recognized, but what roles can we play in changing the statistics?
Maurice Jones of OneTen joins Erica and India for a discussion of the realities of the job market, how OneTen is working to evolve the employment ecosystem to open up pathways of sustainable achievement for Black people, and what we can all do to support that evolution.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How degree requirements create systemic barriers to advancement and reinforce wealth gaps
How small businesses can shift their hiring and advancement practices to support a more equitable workforce
Why we need to shift to a skills-based hiring process rather than checking boxes with credentials
Four elements of a sustainable job
A Career in Communities
OneTen CEO Maurice Jones was raised by his grandparents in a rural southern Virginia community where his family had a tobacco and corn farm.
Before OneTen, Maurice served as the President & CEO of Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), one of the country's most prominent organizations supporting projects to revitalize communities and catalyze economic opportunity for residents.
At various points in his professional career, Maurice has served as Deputy Secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Commissioner of Virginia’s Department of Social Services, and Deputy Chief of Staff to former Virginia Governor Mark Warner. He also served as the Secretary of Commerce for the Commonwealth of Virginia and under the Clinton Administration on legal, policy, and program issues at the Treasury Department.
The Degree Barrier
On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Maurice Jones says that the events of 2020, from COVID to the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, inspired a group of corporate CEOs to come together and work to contribute to “a more perfect union.”
That group recognized that to address disparities along “race and place,” access to quality jobs had to be part of the equation.
“You look at jobs that pay $60,000 and above on paper; 79% of them require that you have a four-year degree to even compete for the job. If you look at jobs that pay $40,000 and above on paper, 71% of those jobs require that you have a four-year degree to get into the game to even compete.”
On the other hand, he says, 76% of Black people in the workforce ages 25 and above don’t have a four-year degree, and that number jumps to 83% for Latinx people. And even for white people, 66% of the overall white workforce doesn’t have a four-year degree.
Degree requirements create a “systemic barrier to earning your way into the middle class in the form of this credential, this four-year degree.”
The motivation behind the OneTen coalition is to “move corporate America…to a skills-first approach…What this is about is saying, let’s focus on skills and the multiple pathways through which people can come about the skills needed to do a job on day one and the skills needed to advance along a career path.”
He says a skills-first approach helps us achieve a more diverse and inclusive workplace. “We actually take folks who are now on the sideline and get them into our enterprises, our companies, so they can help to actually improve the trajectory of their families and their communities and the country.”
Credentials and Checkboxes
Even when people without a four-year degree are able to get in the door, the lack of a degree still creates obstacles.
Maurice says, “the easier piece of this is the hiring. The tougher piece is removing the obstacles to advancement and making sure that you’re creating a culture and a climate in which all talent can thrive and all talent have a pathway.”
India says that in her experience, having a degree has always been a “box to be checked to decide, am I even qualified to get the interview…It’s just ‘do you have a degree,’ We don’t even care what it’s in, as long as it’s a bachelor’s degree.”
Maurice says that in most cases, that checkbox is used to keep people out. It winnows the pile of applications, and “we don’t even have to look at what skills you have and how you came about them.”
That weeding out based on credentials mentality is why OneTen focuses on skills rather than degree programs. “We’re literally leaving talent on the sidelines with this credentials focus.”
Family Sustaining Jobs
But employment alone, Maurice says, is not enough.
He says that support in the form of transportation, mentorship, childcare, mental health care, etc., is also vital to “putting together an ecosystem that talent can actually leverage through life, throughout jobs, throughout a career pathway.”
Without that support, “the risk of a bad day, of a bad season, of a bad year, really throwing you off track, they just multiply. This is the kind of ecosystem you need for resiliency.”
OneTen also emphasizes that more jobs need to be“family-sustaining,” meaning they must pay a living wage, must not require a four-year degree, must not require more than five years of experience as a gateway to entry, and must not be at risk of being overtaken by automation in the short term.
India notes that the five years of experience requirement is another major barrier to access, “that’s a long time to expect someone in today’s society to have been in the same role.”
And, Maurice says, those requirements disproportionately impact people of color.
He says that employers need to get better at articulating the skills they’re really looking for and understanding the multiple pathways a person might take to get those skills.
Scale and Collaboration
Erica asks how an emphasis on skills and family-sustaining jobs can be scaled down for small businesses.
Maurice says that the OneTen coalition is made up of both companies with upwards of 50,000 employees and small businesses that hire five to ten people a year and that businesses of all sizes are necessary to meeting their goals.
A key aspect of shifting to skills-first hiring and advancement for small businesses, he says, is collaboration with other small businesses for sharing resources, support, training, and development.
“We need folks who can be in the business of hiring and promoting people, we also need to equip talent for these jobs…We also need organizations that can provide the wraparound supports, the childcare, the transportation, mentors, and coaches…This is literally about building…an ecosystem of a variety of organizations who can make a contribution here.”
Maurice adds a reminder that when “we fix this problem for Black talent without four-year degrees, we actually fix it for the overwhelming bulk of the workforce in America…This is an effort that is ultimately about the global competitiveness of our country…We literally cannot be great as long as we’re leaving Black talent on the sideline.”
Ready to dive deeper?
Every hiring decision you make shapes your company culture and can bring you closer to your values. But first, you have to get explicit about what you support and how your actions align with that and support those you are seeking to impact.
If you want support on getting clear on what matters so you can chart a course that prioritizes your values and the impact they can create, join us for the From Implicit to Explicit Masterclass.
Learn more at pauseontheplay.com/explicit
Connect with Maurice Jones:
Connect with Maurice on LinkedIn
Twitter: @MauriceOneTen