November 12, 2019
Byron Auguste, CEO and cofounder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social enterprise expanding access to career opportunities, was the keynote speaker. Auguste said the disconnect in the workforce is an opportunity gap — not a skills gap.
August 14, 2019
No market is more broken than the labor market, or with such dire consequences. In particular, 100 million-plus adults without four-year college degrees are deeply disadvantaged, screened out of millions of good jobs. Right now, workers without degrees might as well be in a different country to those with a B.A.
July 28, 2019
“The idea that there’s some uni-dimensional merit that can be determined by how selective the school you go to is not only a bad idea,” said Byron Auguste, former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, “it’s an untrue idea and it’s a dangerous idea.”
July 3, 2019
Today’s hiring practices are biased against people who do not have a college degree, says Opportunity@Work’s Byron Auguste. “We should not and cannot tell black people or women or older people that they can’t apply for a job. But employers can – and do – say that if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, we don’t care about your skills. We don’t care what you can contribute. We won’t hire you.”
Read moreJune 26, 2019
We often say today’s economic shifts are “unprecedented.” But there is a precedent – the American high school movement. A century ago, we adapted and built the strongest middle class the world had ever seen. Now we can create a lifelong learning system to rebuild our middle class for the age of AI.
Read moreMay 19, 2019
Mastering code and applying it in business, some experts say, holds the promise of becoming the modern path to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees. And nonprofit programs like those used by Ms. Ball are considered central to getting people there.
“Tech jobs can be seen as the new manufacturing jobs,” said Byron Auguste, chief executive of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit group that focuses on work-force issues.
Read moreMarch 19, 2019
Enterprise would certainly resist that notion of sorting by signal, as would others. But this isn’t crazy talk. The same week the admissions scandal broke, Byron Auguste, an economist and the founder of Opportunity@Work, published an article in Forbes that questioned the signal of the degree. “Far too many employers use a college pedigree as a crutch — a simplistic shortcut when they lack an efficient way to narrow down their applicant pool,” he wrote.
Read moreMarch 14, 2019
Despite earning better wages than those without degrees, college grads have increasing economic anxiety. Perhaps their concerns are a reflection of career insecurity rising from the bottom of our economy up. Maybe the success of those with college degrees is more tied to those without than we think.
Read moreFebruary 7, 2019
A growing cynicism around the future of work tells us that workers in so-called low-skill jobs intrinsically lack the intelligence, ambition, and ability to master the skills needed for 21st century work. However, low wages do not mean low skill—and we devalue these workers at our own peril.
Read moreSeptember 5, 2018
What really distinguished the environment in 1970 were the more effective policies and practices for navigating economic and technological changes. Put differently, it was more the rules of the game that created better pathways to the middle class — often making technology an empowering tool in the hands of workers like my father. This was not because of luck. It was because of deliberate choices, including long-term investments, by our government, industry, and citizenry.
Read moreJuly 5, 2018
Jobs Day tomorrow will once again evoke a never-ending debate around school, STEM, and salary. None of them explains the underlying patterns of dysfunction in the U.S. labor market. Here’s what you need to know about the skills gap and how you can solve it.
Read moreJune 27, 2018
Byron Auguste of Opportunity@Work has documented the number of jobs that require technical or advanced degrees that can be done by non-academic credentialed people—if only they get the opportunity.
Read moreJune 26, 2019
One reason that businesses struggle to find capable workers is because they have increased their hiring from top-level universities, said Byron Auguste, CEO of the workforce training nonprofit Opportunity@Work. The problem is that these schools haven’t increased the number of students enrolled to match the demand, he explained.
Read moreJune 4, 2018
Employers ought to do more as well. They rely too much on automated hiring tools that exacerbate the bias against workers who lack four-year degrees. To address this, 1,300 companies have partnered with Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., to create a platform for training and certifying non-traditional candidates for available IT jobs.
Read moreMay 17, 2018
There are about 6.5 million job openings in the U.S., a record high. The number of people looking for work without success is falling as well, and this combination means that the economy now has close to one active job seeker for every open job. The unemployment rate is below 4 percent — another indication that workers who are actively looking for jobs can find them.
Read moreApril 24, 2018
Auguste is CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a non-profit organization expanding access to technology career opportunities for overlooked and underrepresented job seekers. Auguste spoke in San Francisco at the inaugural Workday Opportunity Onramps, a workforce development conference with a mission to connect driven individuals from diverse backgrounds with unfilled jobs.
Read moreDecember 21, 2017
Automation isn’t inherently a boon for those with means. As Byron Auguste—the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, an organization that connects people who lack credentials to jobs—said on a Brookings Institution panel earlier this month, it doesn’t “naturally empower the top of the economic pyramid.” Nor, he argued, is automation like gravity—a force of nature that can’t be stopped
Read moreAugust 21, 2017
The guiding creed behind skills-based hiring is “if you can do the job, you should get the job.” Whether you learned web design by maintaining your church’s website, or you learned to code in the army reserve, or you graduated with a degree in computer science from a top-tier four-year college, equal skills should mean equal opportunity. And what’s exciting is that following this approach is win-win. It broadens access to our economy and promotes social justice. And, at the same time, companies that tap into this pool of applicants who took less-traditional paths to build their skills find that they have uncovered a significant competitive advantage, especially in markets where the cost of the most sought-after tech hires is constantly escalating.
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