“Go to school, get a degree, get a good job,” is the path that so many of us were placed on and yet, in 2024, 50% of the workforce face barriers to those jobs because they don’t have a degree. That’s not to say that these are “unskilled” workers, in fact, most often this population are skilled through alternative routes, which is why TearThePaperCeiling.org refers to them as “STARs”. Join host Jennie Brooks in conversation with Katie Hermosilla, a Senior Vice President in Booz Allen’s Civil Sector as they shine a light on how apprenticeships have helped Booz Allen to tap into the diversity of educational backgrounds to meet our collective need for a skilled workforce that includes everyone. Learn more about what Booz Allen is doing to develop talent in the 2023 ESG Report: https://esgreport.boozallen.com/
“Go to school, get a degree, get a good job,” is the path that so many of us were placed on and yet, in 2024, 50% of the workforce face barriers to those jobs because they don’t have a degree. That’s not to say that these are “unskilled” workers, in fact, most often this population are skilled through alternative routes, which is why TearThePaperCeiling.org refers to them as “STARs”. Join host Jennie Brooks in conversation with Katie Hermosilla, a Senior Vice President in Booz Allen’s Civil Sector as they shine a light on how apprenticeships have helped Booz Allen to tap into the diversity of educational backgrounds to meet our collective need for a skilled workforce that includes everyone.
Learn more about what Booz Allen is doing to develop talent in the 2023 ESG Report: https://esgreport.boozallen.com/
Jennie Brooks:
Welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's Unstoppable Together podcast, a series of stories that unite us and empower each of us to change the world. I'm Jennie Brooks with Booz Allen Hamilton and I'm passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Please join me in conversation with the diverse group of thought leaders to explore what makes them and all of us unstoppable.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Unstoppable Together Podcast. I'm your host, Jennie, and today I am excited to be joined by my colleague and friend, Katie Hermosilla. Katie is a senior vice president in Booz Allen civil sector. She operates as Civil's chief growth officer and helps federal agency clients more effectively deliver digital products and services to citizens and other stakeholders. Katie, welcome to the podcast.
Katie:
Thanks, Jennie. Glad to be here.
Jennie:
So good to see you, my friend. I want to reference over the summer to start, we did an episode with Bridget Gray, the chief customer officer at the nonprofit opportunity at work. And in that Unstoppable Together episode, she talked about the more than 70 million Americans who are "skilled through alternative routes" or more commonly known as stars. Stars tend to face what's called the paper ceiling because they don't have a traditional four-year degree. And since that episode, this conversation has only gotten more critical and more relevant, and our civil team is doing some incredible work for the federal government on this front. So, I want to open it up to you, share a little bit with us about this topic and what Booz Allen's doing in this work.
Katie:
Sure. It is actually quite exciting work and really born out of a very multi-decade relationship with the US Department of Labor. So that department broadly is responsible for workforce development, labor law regulation, set of activities, really around making sure that we as a nation have access and have the qualified workers to do the work that we need as a nation to drive economic prosperity. We've been, again with them for several decades and it's been interesting because this program that I'm going to talk about really started and really signaled us moving more deeply into a mission enablement stance with these clients. We had worked for years with them on their back-office IT and on their mission support work, but in 2016 we got a call and had been, at that time, it had been 10 years, we had been maintaining all of their agency websites and how they communicate their mission and their services out to the world. And we got a call from a mission director called the Office of Apprenticeships, and they were being asked by the administration to really reframe and reinvigorate their apprenticeships program.
The apprenticeships program had always been sort of a state agency driven activity, so states could raise their hand and say, hey, we want to be a part, we want to use apprenticeship programs in our state to drive our economic development goals. And that had been working and had been in place for a very long time. The new administration had come in and said, hey, we want this really to be employer directed. We want to create new types of programs. We want to really reinvigorate how we're thinking about where apprenticeships are needed and how those who want to be apprentices and those employers who want to benefit from that educational path connect. So, we started working with them both on their program design and how they were going to expand it, but then also on the technology that they use to sort of communicate out and make those matches.
And it's been a really exciting journey over the past now, I guess it's been almost seven years. So registered apprenticeships, there are about 25,000 of them across the nation today that we help and the tools that we have built and the program design that we have implemented. But the Department of Labor administers, they serve and create over 800,000 apprentices per year and across a range of industries. I'll just share that. I had a, one of my children is studying agriculture, and I thought, well, this is funny for the kid from the suburbs, how is she going to understand what a farmer does? There's an apprenticeship for that, so if she would choose, she could go be an apprentice to a dairy farmer. And it's interesting when you see in what is common across about the 10 industries that they have is that there is clearly a succession planning need or there is a volume of guild labor that is needed to continue to drive economic prosperity.
So, 10, 11 programs. The ones that I think are most interesting for us to think about are cybersecurity and information technology and the Department of Labor has a set of registered programs around apprenticeships for there. And in fact, at the VA, we helped the VA establish the first federally sponsored registered apprenticeship program for veterans around cybersecurity, which is really pretty exciting to have. It’s sort of that crossover in between the mission of one agency of Department of Labor into the mission of the VA and supporting veterans as they return and helping them find employment and receive benefits for their service. So, it was really exciting to build that program. I think the other piece that's exciting too is that we are also a beneficiary. Booz Allen has a relationship with Develop Carolina, which is a registered apprenticeship program in South Carolina, and we actually are one of the beneficiaries in that we employ and utilize and train apprentices.
We take on apprentices through Develop Carolina and we bring them onto our software development team. They work with us. We structure, we have an entire program where we do a lot of developmental training. We help them understand how to work in an agile development environment. We help them build their coding skills at the end of the apprenticeship. They learned a lot about us. They've learned a lot about how we approach the software development business that we have, and many times there's a match and we make a full-time job offer to those candidates. So, it's really pretty exciting when we think about the different pathways that we saw. It was work that we had supporting a long-term client, but to actually see ourselves and see other clients benefiting from that workforce is really exciting. And I just want to make a quick point about why it is important that we access different type of, that we need workers from all sorts of educational backgrounds.
Our focus in this civil business is really on driving digital transformation. I talk a lot about with clients of that, the systems of today, be it some in person and some based on desktop systems versus mobile systems. I mean, there's not a member of Gen Z that is ever going to call on a phone and wait for someone to give them support. And so, the government or the federal civilian government really has to modify their thinking about how do they reach, how do they create the digital experiences that the next generation of Americans expect to have. That needs an infusion of all different perspectives on how accessing those services will go. And so, we find it not only that we need to, we've benefited from having apprentices working with us, and we certainly see it as a program that we want to do more with. But we also need that perspective for our clients to bring it to them and to help them build the experiences and the way transactions happen with those who need the benefits from the federal government. We need those perspectives in our business.
Jennie:That was leading me right into my next question, which was going to be, we talk about diversity of thought, we talk about diverse representation. Ground us in why this conversation around diversity of educational background is important and how the impact and benefit it can have broadly in the workforce. Specifically, we're talking about shredding the paper ceiling as part of that.
Katie:
So, when I think about it, and again, these are the economic development and continued securing our economic future is one of the main roles of civilian government. And when you take a look and you say, okay, well what does that look like 10 years, 20 years, 50 years from now? Our collective need as a nation for a skilled workforce is only going to continue to expand by leaps and bounds. At the same time, we know that there are going to be migratory influences across the globe, and we are going to be, continue to have people with different experiences different from ours today, different with different educational backgrounds or not participating in our economic vitality.
When you look at the skills that those, it will be needed in that future, they are technology based. They are ones that have to make sense of. I was thinking one of the programs skills programs that we've been involved with for a long time is Anthem, the National Science Foundation, a program created in the fifties that actually get more skilled scientists pay for their doctoral educations through grants, and we've worked with that program for years.
We're now at this tipping point of that the technology has been created, right? We're at this technology with all the promises of greater efficiency and things that we hadn't done before. Now we need to get to how do we apply it, and that's not the job of a few people. It's the job of many people, and it does take that diversity of experience of a framework of how you look at the world because it can't be, oh, only if you have a certain educational credentials can you understand that technology that's in front of you. That is not the case. And so, I think we have to embrace that, and I think our clients actually have to embrace that because figuring out all this great technology, the AI, the cyber, the things that we're going to be able to do requires that sort of very wide diversity of thought. That only comes from people across the entire spectrum of diversity down to and including educational background.
Jennie:
Thank you, Katie. That's very helpful. I am sort of reflecting on the personal side of this. Can you share with us some of your thoughts or perhaps a story about the impact that stars could have on the employee base, on the people themselves?
Katie:
So, I'll share, I've had the luck to work with many people from different educational backgrounds. I hired them, maybe they have a two-year technical degree, maybe they don't have a college degree, but they have worked for a long time in the industry and come with some great skills, and so I've had many of those experiences. I'll start a slightly more personal one. So, I'm married to a first generation American. He is also the first college attendance in his entire extended family here and abroad. He went to a state university, fully paid for by his parents with no financial aid, despite the fact that his dad was a coal miner and there was a pretty large, it was a big expense for them to cover him going and studying at a university. When he joined the federal government, he was a part of a training program.
I was a part of it too. That's how we met, but it was essentially an apprenticeship program that for semi trained college graduates who needed to actually understand telecommunications, right? You were enrolled in a bunch of classes that would complement the understanding or really would extend and help understand how the federal agency who hired him, what they needed to build out their cell communications networks, how they operate. His experience was marked with so much chance and luck and sheer determination that when I look at what we're facing as a nation in the face of need for continued economic growth, new challenges around, be it national security or climate or migration, he was very lucky and very blessed for what his father who had an eighth grade education and mother who had a 10th grade education was able to provide. We can't hope that that's the norm anymore.
We actually need to build the programs where we have the workforce, the skilled workforce that we need to generate the economic prosperity that everyone, that we all deserve in this new age of technology and advancement. So, while it's a slightly different one, when he and I had a very different experience growing up, and so I look at that and I say, we can't. This is so important. It has to be more systemic; it has to be more lasting. And we in Booz Allen, and that's why I get excited when I think about our support to the office of apprenticeship or our opportunity to create an apprenticeship program. We want to take what we learned from developed Carolina and say, “Hey, we really need to invest here and do that.” That's very exciting for me. I think it takes out that element of chance that it may not work out because we as a nation need skilled workforce and it can come in all shapes and sizes. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a traditional type.
Jennie Brooks:
I mean, that's so insightful, Katie. And just to punctuate what you're saying, according to Pew, approximately 60% of lower income workers have health insurance, 59% have a 401k type of plan. Meaning that if we're able to hire more stars, it could have real influence on generational wealth and health for families. Not so much relying on the luck, but really having concrete impact for generations to come. Katie, this has been very insightful and inspiring. We're so grateful to have you join us today. At the end of every podcast, we give our guests some free space to share their final thoughts with those listening. What would you like to leave with our audience today?
Katie:
I'd like to talk a lot about the wave of technology and how we're dealing with it internally within Booz Allen and sort of on a national scale. I am so phenomenally excited about this next phase of sort of the development for our business in civil, but also what we will be facing. When I think about all the investments that have happened, say over the past 60 years in the new science, in the things that are now coming fully to bear. It has really an exciting time to be helping our clients and helping our nation benefit from that. And I really, that is why I get up in the morning to be a part of that and to bring some of that transformation around technology to our clients and to all of us as part of this nation and what we do. It's that I am struck by in this conversation of empowering people to change the world. I feel very empowered to help us and to help our fellow citizens and residents take advantage of this new technology that we're seeing today.
Jennie:You inspire me. Katie Hermosilla, thank you for everything.
Katie:
Thanks, Jennie.
Jennie:
Thanks for listening. Visit careers.boozallen.com to learn how you can be unstoppable with Booz Allen. Be the future. Work with us. The world can't wait.