The Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) is a founding sponsor of the inaugural Human Potential Summit, which will bring together employers, investors, innovators, and education providers to catalyze a talent development movement that centers on the individual and unlocks potential through skills and strengths. The summit, set for October 14-16, 2024, is the brainchild of Human Potential Capital Founder Taylor McLemore. CKF’s Executive Director Ryan Stowers sat down with McLemore to discuss the summit and the principles that animate the human potential movement. This article is the second of two. Read the first article here.
Stowers: Taylor, in the first half of our conversation, we talked practically about what the Human Potential Summit is. Now, I want to step back a bit and talk about why it’s necessary. Could you start by telling me how employers have traditionally evaluated talent, and why that system has left so many behind?
McLemore: Of course. Over the last few decades employers have become deeply reliant on the signaling mechanism of four-year degrees. I don’t think we should be overly critical as to why they started doing that. In theory, degrees offered data and insight into a person’s experience and the skills they had to do a job. It makes sense.
The problem is that now we assume the only way to gain marketable skills is by going to college. That’s absurd considering a supermajority of Americans don’t actually have a four-year degree. Sixty-five percent of Americans did not graduate from college or a university, but more than half of job descriptions require that, or more. We have a total mismatch of where our population sits in terms of education and training and what employers are asking of them. That leaves people behind.
Employers need to find other ways to think about the skills, competencies, and alignment with the principles, values, and culture of an organization that will help people succeed in it. There are a lot of options and that’s what we’re excited about. There’s a panorama of people exploring different ways of thinking. We want to bring them together.
Stowers: What you’re talking about is a bottom up approach to unleashing human potential, and we’re making progress along these fronts, but we run the risk of missing the mark if we don’t do it in a principled way and look beyond just skills. What sort of mentality do employers need?
McLemore: We commonly think education happens only on a campus and it’s separate from work. The truth is that employers play an equally important, if not more important, role in what we think of as traditional education. If you look at the number of people in our traditional four-year system, it’s a fraction of the people who will find themselves in the workforce. Every employer has to be an educator.
Many already are. Many have training, mentorship programs, but what we need is for employers to see themselves as a core pillar of the education system in this country. To ask themselves, “What if we embrace education and training to unlock human potential as part of our business?”
Stowers: I imagine this transition sounds daunting to most employers. How do you ease their minds?
McLemore: It’s definitely daunting. Using a proxy like a degree basically allows employers to let other people do the work of validating potential. Employers who don’t rely on proxies will have to do more themselves. Now, to reassure them, that doesn’t mean they have to do it manually. Technology can give scale and reduce the cost of evaluating potential.
And, while in our society there’s not many examples of measuring aptitude at scale, the U.S. military does do it — and they do it for tens of thousands of people who have little education after high school or professional experience. Somehow, though, they figure out what each person may be good at. The military also embraces the idea that aptitude is not a single lane that stretches in one direction forever. They embrace the idea of having many jobs over a term of service because they know that’s how a person evolves.
Stowers: I love that example, and obviously, it’s worked. So, tell me, how does evaluating based on potential — and less on actual skills — help employers? What’s the profit case for putting human potential at the center of a business strategy?
McLemore: When employers think about talent differently, it makes their businesses stronger, which makes our economy stronger, and can make them an employer of choice. I really think if employers experiment to find the right solutions within their organization, it will have a positive impact on their bottom line and the lives of their employees, which will, of course, have cascading effects for our society.
If everyone has unique talents, but we’re using proxies that only measure pedigree or skills, that necessarily excludes someone, even entire groups. Evaluating based on potential gives employers the chance to build a talent pool where all lived experiences — where you grew up, income level, or who your ancestors were — are represented. If we really mean diverse experiences matter, evaluating talent based on potential is a way forward.
Stowers: That’s a great way to segue into talking about how this movement affects people. What’s in this for workers? We live in an age of rapid technological innovation, which makes some workers nervous. How do you allay their fears?
McLemore: Well, the robots haven’t taken over yet, and I don’t think they’re going to. Businesses cannot make technology work without people. They also cannot raise resources and capital without people, they cannot sell, or anticipate customer’s, or effectively interact with the community. What really elevates a business is people, and people are not just skills. In fact, skills are just the tip of the spear. It’s our humanity that helps us do jobs well and pivot to new ones that add value. Smart employers get that, and it is why the human potential movement has so much promise. Technology is a tool and nothing more, and I think the human potential movement gets at the heart of that.
Stowers: You’ve been exposed to many employers who’ve gotten talent development right. Do you have an example of one? Bonus points if they’ll be at the summit.
McLemore: Definitely. Amazon is a great example, and it dovetails with what I said about people being more important than technology.
Amazon couldn’t find enough people to maintain, fix, and manage the robots that allow the company to scale what it does. It needed humans. So, the company partnered with a skills-to-jobs marketplace called Unmudl and a community college to build a custom course that offered applicants a chance to build the skills they needed to work with the robots. Then Amazon said to applicants, if you go through this course, you not only get credit within the education traditional system, you’re guaranteed an interview. It flipped traditional model, which says, “get a degree, and maybe you’ll get an interview.” Instead, the interview promise came first. Amazon created a true connection between education and an opportunity.
We’re going to have Amanda Willard from Amazon and Unmudl CEO and Founder Parminder Jassal sit down and talk about how they found each other and the steps they took to success.
