Good morning, everyone. We're so excited to have you here for day two of our XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling finalist team summit. My name is Monica Groves, Program Manager for XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling, and we are so happy to have you here. As you guys probably already know because you've been following us since 2020. We launched in January 2020 and we are a $5 million 30 month competition to quickly reskill under resource workers for the digital revolution. We're really looking to forever change the future of work and with our amazing finalist teams, we're imagining a future in which all workers can rapidly attain new and more relevant skills to their current workplace and their next one. The novel solutions developed by our finalist teams are really going to uplift the labor market in the US and close that widening skills gap. Looking at the under resource communities here in the US, they are really face a systemic barriers, such as learning mobility and progress and core problems impeding effective workforce development include of course that widening skills gap, a deteriorating job quality and a lack of collaboration between players in the labor market. And with an unprecedented disruption due to COVID-19, we're really looking at opportunity to radically change the lives of millions of workers here in America. And so we're so happy to have you. Yesterday we started off with a great session. We had a session with niche, a career he spoke about the broader context of achieving scale and reskilling really encouraging words from our sponsor new profit and a lively and informative round table discussion on adult employment and engagement, advances in ed tech, as well as partnerships and funding with Lassie Freeman, Jeff Wald and Holly Heikinen. So we're really excited to get started today. But first up, I want to give some, we'll share some remarks from our ex prize CEO, Anusha Ansari. Here's the video. Hi everyone, Anusha Ansari, CEO of X Prize Foundation. And I am excited to be here and to share with you the story and the accomplishment of the five finalist teams in our rapid reskilling competition and how they've tackled the challenges of closing the skills gap. The training they've offered has been empowering workers and increasing accessibility to full time living wage jobs. And that has radically transformed lives of individuals and has brought abundance to their lives. The finalists are reimagining how job training and career development is done, and they're leveraging destructive technologies like artificial intelligence and VR and demonstrating it with tangible results and how these types of technologies can really change and be effective in a fast paced training programs. Congratulations to all of you finalist teams. The five finalists teams we have, of course, are Aledo, Dignified Work, Team Isotonic, SHIFT-A360, and VITO. You have all done an amazing job and we're so honored that you are participating in this competition and happy to see what's next for you as you move toward the finals. Thank you. Yes, and thank you, Anusha, for being able to record those remarks, although she couldn't be here today. She did pop in live yesterday, so we're really excited to move this along and get into the meat of the program, which will be around our finalists. But first, we have something for you. Are you looking to join us in revolutionizing the future of work? We are seeking outreach partners who are willing to amplify and help us recruit and scale and employ workers who successfully complete the 15 training opportunities that will be available between our five finalists. So if you're here and you're interested, scan the QR code or you can email us at rapidreskilling.xprize.org. So I know you guys are here for the finalists teams. It's the moment you've all been waiting for. We're really excited to bring them on and have the finalists teams be able to speak a little bit about themselves and who they are. So what I'm going to do is just tell you a couple of names and then they're all going to go into session. So we're really excited to have teams here. They'll have about 10 minutes to speak. They're going to be some slides, going to get some really great information, and it's great to see and learn the teams 101 and the great and amazing work that they're doing with their reskilling solutions. So I'm just going to tell you the order and then I'm going to pass it over. We'll have in this order, Dr. Lewis Johnson from Team Laila, Nate Azuka from Team Dignified Work, formerly Dignity of Work, Dr. Nirmalesh Kumar of Team Hire Me. Then we'll have Nelya Ibrahim of Chief of 360 and Sanjeev Bada of Team Vital. So Dr. Lewis Johnson, take it away. Thank you so much. Glad to speak with you all today. Let's have the first slide. We'll get started. So we, Laila, we're based in Los Angeles. We now have a new partner, LoopCV, who's based in London. Our focus at Laila is to help people quickly learn new skills by role playing them with avatars, AI driven avatars in simulations of real work settings. We find that this approach helps people to learn new skills rapidly. And it's also very effective because learners get opportunity to practice in simulations of real world situations so that when they encounter them on the job they're fully prepared for them. We place an emphasis on soft skills and effective communication because these competencies are very important for a variety of occupations in the post pandemic economy. And we've been applying this to a range of different occupations. We've provided training to government and military personnel. We provide training in the healthcare industry. And now we are expanding to sales customer service and other customer facing occupations with 500,000 trainees to date. In the next video, we'll show you how the approach works, how you can practice by interacting with avatars on a computer or device. The world is changing faster than ever, and if we're going to get people back to work and prepare them for the modern workforce, we need a better way to rapidly teach them new skills. That's where a Laila comes in. We believe a Laila's AI driven experiential learning is the key to large scale rapid reskilling. Learn more at alaila.com. So the key to the approach is that you as a trainee get to practice role playing your skills in real world context at your convenience in a safe environment. No one is judging you know you have no reason to feel embarrassed if you make a mistake. You can get comfortable applying occupational skills, but at the same time, our end skill platform is analyzing the trainees responses to provide feedback to provide formative assessments on their progress, and also to select personalized learning activities for each trainee based upon where they're having difficulty. So this combination of practice and personalized learning is very powerful for rapid upskilling and reskilling. We also provide analytics to trainers to trainees to training organizations so that they can track the progress of trainees through the program. Next slide please. So in X, X prize in round two, we retrained underemployed workers for jobs in community health in the Hampton Roads region. We did this in collaboration with the Hampton Roads Workforce Council was very helpful for us in this project. And then afterwards after we placed the workers in jobs, we got feedback from the employers who said that the new hires exceeded expectations in terms of the ability to to work effectively on the job. Now in our preparation for round three, we are working to scale up our solution in part by inviting loop CV to join us. They have a platform for automated job placement. So combining our end skill, automated training with loops CVs automated job placement, we think we have a very powerful and scalable training approach. We are targeting new to new target occupations within X prize sales personnel, as well as human service assistance. And so as you can see these are occupations where soft skills and communication skills are very important. And we see, and our customers tell us repeatedly that this virtual role play that we provide addresses the increasing shortage of opportunities to engage in live role play training. In some ways live role play training is a is a well established way of developing these skills, but people have less and less opportunity to do it, particularly if they are studying remotely. So this helps to address that and compensate for that limitation. Next slide, please. So we ask you now if you are part of the workforce development ecosystem we invite you to join us. If you represent employers who have an urgent need to re up skill your workers. We invite you to talk with us. If you are part of a workforce intermediary and you work with workers who have an urgent need for retraining. We would like to talk with you. If you see a role for a lay low technology in your training pipeline, we would be interested in talking with you. So, I want to emphasize, as I said at the beginning, this approach addresses competencies that are relevant for a wide range of occupations but we could not possibly train them all so we would like to work with other training partners to improve and enhance your training solution. So, again, we invite you to work with us the reskilling problem is very big. But if we work together, we can make progress to solve it. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. I am happy to be here. My name is Nate and I am with team dignified work. We are a joint venture of two organizations career path services, and whole story, and we are located in Washington State. For us, this project has really driven us to a space of clarity as we have tried to reconcile some work done by our own governor here in Washington State around poverty reduction, about reskilling, and about lifting people out of poverty and the lack of that sufficiency and sustainable wages and long term lifestyles. One of the things that he pointed out, and that organizations in our state have been charged with is advocating for and reducing the pockets that folks face in poverty around social isolation. And that's tough to do when you're working in an environment around rapid reskilling and in technology. So the challenge that we've taken on and have tried to face head on is how do we work towards reducing social isolation in a technological age, connecting people both to employment quickly with new skills and most importantly to one another. That is where dignified work stands. We believe in a rapid reskilling of participants who are entering these three fields, construction, which is what we did in the last round, and adding medical administration so think medical training that is not necessarily clinical but could lead that way but medical administration and in the helps industry around health and human services. We can move to the next slide as well. So kind of the big idea for what we're doing is we have created a social capital soft skills platform that people are able to join into this particular platform as folks opt into it is a space to create community is a space to be empowered around your own personal life and stories so within our target populations folks are encouraged through the platform to connect to one another and in cohort type models but also to develop an understanding of how to tell their story as a piece of empowerment story centers our entire work. So an individual story is their leaping point to employment. So through the platform individuals are exposed to other stories stories like their stories that are different. Learning how to tell their story in a meaningful way and connect that to an empowerment state a state of moving forward a state of being able to advocate for themselves into the workplace. We take a whole approach that an individual's whole story, no matter what came before or what's going on now is part of their empowerment. So we have combined this a program that we've had in the past called GPS or growing personal skills and added that to our friends at whole stories platform and created what we believe is a dynamic space where individuals both connect with one another and most importantly to their own story themselves. As we are doing this what our belief system is is that folks are, of course, obtaining the skills in these tracks. And we'll talk about that in a second for occupation but but also connecting to the mean their own personal meaning quickly, and to one another. And as we, as we see it, as people connect to each other and move forward into work into occupation. You know, 10s or 20s or 30s or hundreds. They're more likely to stay engaged as they'll have built in accountability encouragement. And that again that isolation of being disconnected from job or poverty will be combated. So as we move forward again to the next slide. We are our as folks enter into this platform they're connected to this learning this story, and then also to these occupational tracks. So over a couple week period of time. Empowerment around your own personal story being blended into these occupational tracks. Our hope would be that an individual enters into employment empowered, confident and ready. So what we learned in the last round that we're taking into this round is that it can be messy when we still are prioritizing individual relationships and people, and it can combat the idea of efficiencies, especially in a rapid reskilling process. So how do we do that, we have to rely upon our people and and those in the training track to hold one another to that space. So we will be empowering peers mentors throughout this and be broadly serving the Pacific Northwest region of Washington, Idaho and Montana through this effort. One more thing I would love to say in the next slide if we could, is that our, or maybe disappeared is okay I'll just say it now, no worries. Our customer is not just our job seeker to we believe that for this to really work. So that is our community and the businesses we serve as well. And so one of the uniqueness is that we are trying to add into this is in this platform where people are connecting to one another and to occupational training. They're also connecting to business that is bought in in a meaningful way, providing things like supportive on the job trainings, work experiences and placements so we're encouraged and excited. It's very privileged to be a part of this competition and we think the committee and our honor to be here. Thank you. Hi, this is from my stomach. I still think we have a unique story. Even as part of the express competition. I would like to say that we merged cutting edge technology and you know, bring in digital learning breakthroughs, but honestly as a team, we came together just as the competition was put forth. So we are a team of we started off as a team of volunteers on each of them from different parts of the world connected with a common impact goal. But the unique thing or the advantage we had was 95% of a team were CEOs of large corporations. All of them are YPO members, which means we could look at the unemployment or the displaced worker problem as job creators. And we started from scratch we started from ground zero thinking, how can we solve this problem. How can we bring a multi dimensional approach to it. And that's how the story of isotonic and hire me came into play. One of the important things here is we wanted to redefine the employer and employer relationship. And one thing unique to our curriculum or our training was, we had employers involved from day one, because we are going to train employees for a skill, and employers need to have a say on what curriculum is needed what skills are needed. And they were involved from day one, and the entire ecosystem did not have us just creating a technology platform for candidates. We created a roadmap of how different stakeholders that join the employee training process or part of the employee training process can interact with our platform. So the WDB scan interact with our platform the employers can interact with the platform. So does any other agency that wants to be part of it. And as the candidate takes the journey. It's not just learning for them. They get employer interaction, telling them about the job. They also see other pathways in which they can go forward. And when we look at a hybrid training model. We look at how can we use on make use of existing community college to give practical training sessions to our employees are to our candidates. And essentially, we are looking at how can we redefine learning itself. Next. So the solution. Again, I'd like to stress, we did not have an existing solution that we wanted to size fit for the given problem. Instead, we decided to unlearn everything we know about the situation and start solving problems that we face at hand. So we have argumentated air based immersive learning. And then we have an isotonic engine or an education engine, which helps us cater to different candidates learning styles. Not necessarily every candidate can excel well in the same kind of content that we provide them. So our AI enable system looks for gaps gaps with the candidate and presents the content of the skilling content in a specific manner. That'll be easy for the candidate to absorb and train on. We have procterps candidate for skilling assessment. And the thing is, we have a gamification of entire training system, which means the candidates who train with us are motivated to skill faster. Right. And this in turn also has shown that their memory retention or the skill retention is much higher when they are motivated to do something. The one thing which we are very certain about is not just technology can get all of our candidates to graduate a skilling program. We needed a human based approach. We needed to listen to the individual story of each of the candidates. These stories motivated us to put all in in developing the solution. And at the same time, we had a human based approach to increasing a graduation efficiency. And as I stressed, it's one platform that caters to all stakeholders, not just the candidates, you're looking to solve a problem and essentially see how can this problem. Make or at least put employees or put Americans back to work at a much quicker pace than they are being displaced. So the ideas, how can we have or go into a system and enable it in a much efficient way. Next slide. So I like to talk briefly about our journey so far. So in round two, what we have done is we were training in medical, now the healthcare sector. And initially, we reached over 25,000 candidates about the program we offered and the solution we're trying to provide. Of which 8000 candidates were directly interested in the solution. And all of the candidates had to be assisted in terms of the skill gap or the affinity towards the job role. Of which, we had 500 or 550 candidates accepted into the training program over the course of time. And our training received so much response from employers. So we started training sessions or started giving upskilling sessions for employers within the state as the competition was going. One thing we are very proud of is at least for a engine or a education platform that did not exist before the start of this competition is that we had a 96% graduation rate, of which 78% of them were placed in jobs. And one last thing is the WDP that we worked with was a very, very integral part of what we were able to achieve. And they did value all of the skill we delivered in less than 90 days at $2 million to the state. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Medjula Ibrahim. I'm with the shift of 360 team based out of San Diego, California, and we're reskilling for thriving careers, particularly focusing on the vulnerable communities such as the refugee and immigrant communities here in California. So some of the barriers that the communities we work with, we're experiencing in finding not only employment but career pathways as they've transitioned into a new society. And just something that is applicable to all adult learners is really the lack of flexible training programs. And with our 360 reskilling solution, we were able to provide it at a very flexible and adaptable modality. And people were able to access it, you know, digitally on the learning management system and be able to access it whenever they needed to, as well as being able to work around their own schedules. Additionally, there's a lot of, for most trainings, there's usually a pretty high cost of training and effort and time that has to really be put on but with our training our 360 solution that wasn't the case. There's no cost to the trainee. Additionally, the way that traditional educational systems are set up. There's really not a way to engage and it's not really culturally or linguistically appropriate. But we took the approach of using animations and get gamifications to engage. And we've incorporated virtual reality educational tools into the curriculum. And this is something that made the experience not only effective. But also really enjoyable for the trainees. Additionally, a lot of the times entry level skills don't pay a living wage and I think the goal of the XPRIZE rapid reskilling was really to get people into careers that would provide a livable wage and not only were we able to assist trainees and getting into career paths that provided that but we also connected them to internships that could give them really valuable experience and for them to be able to develop relationships and network so that once they left the training, the training, the four week training they could really go out into the real world and have all the tools that they needed. Additionally, a lot of times, community members who are even adults who are really just trying to get trained into a new skill path or career path. It's really overwhelming and a lot of the times it's hard to know where to start, but through the networks and relationships and partners that we've, we had and fostered and developed. The trainees were really able to seamlessly find their footing and able to have relationships outside of just the training curriculum. So I think that was really valuable to them. And then life challenges I think this is something that's really important and even really goes back to the name of Shippa 360 Shifa in many different languages means healing. But the 360 part is really, that really summarizes our mission and our goal to provide a holistic comprehensive approach to workforce development. And so we were really acutely aware of all the challenges that people were experiencing whether it was socioeconomic transportation, just barriers, a lot of psychological social issues that that was really at the forefront of their lives as and as a priority. And so trying to find ways to make this fit into their existing life and make it as easy as possible for them, as well as providing resources as an organization we worked with communities who had many challenges like this and so connecting them to resources wasn't too far of a stretch for us and we had a lot of relationships of partnerships and resources available for the trainees so that that these barriers really wouldn't get in the way of them becoming successful and getting this experience. Next slide please. So the three pathways that we took was the career pathways was the community health worker initially, and right now we're proposing medical secretary pathway. So more of that medical administration pathway, as well as the motor vehicle operator driver pathway. So with community health workers, I think this is a, all of these are actually low, you know barrier to entry and really high demand positions and jobs that lead to careers for the community and really be like a launchpad for them to explore where they want to go next so with community health workers I think provide a lot of opportunities for them to engage with the social service industry, the nonprofit industry, the healthcare industry and eventually gain even higher positions in management. And then with medical secretary really gravitated towards this because as we, as we formed relationships of partnerships with the healthcare sector, it became pretty clear to us that a lot of these trainees who had amazing and valuable skills whether it was linguistic or just life skills could be could could be a great asset to many of the clinics and hospitals. And so having medical secretaries that were from these communities that were highly trained and trained was was really something that was very clear to us was necessary so creating a curriculum around that was one of the things that we're proposing for this final stretch of the competition and then lastly for the motor vehicle driver. And this industry that's really booming right now and it's something that's really attractive to many of our trainees, and it really does lead to them not only really great positions but eventually even becoming entrepreneurs themselves. And so there's something that we're really excited about launching for this part of the competition. And in terms of the impact, I think we I think having that experience with initially developing the community health worker training, as well as our, or even just our personal experience and organization of utilize and community health workers we've really seen the tremendous impact of community health workers, and what they've been able to contribute, just, you know, something very relevant to all of us with the pandemic. As an organization trying to reach out to vulnerable communities that oftentimes isolated, we utilize and leverage community health workers to do that work so in a typical year previous to the pandemic and having this workforce of community health workers maybe we were able to reach 10 to 20,000 community members but with with the ability to hire and bring on community health workers are highly skilled. You really trusted within their communities had amazing lived experiences. We were able to reach over 200,000 community members so just from our personal experiences and organization and nonprofit organization that's based out in the community. And we saw how valuable and amazing. It was to have community health workers be part of our staff. And so having community health works go through this training was something that was really a priority for us. And it really that experience also helped us strengthen our capacity to develop really effective workforce trainings. And this is really the simple path that we're planning on taking with this, with this, the, this project so recruiting community members who are usually under resourced and getting them into these trainings, having them be reskilled and with these three pathways that have been identified by the community is something really effective and really in demand and then with placement we are hoping to guide them to different internships and experience very experiential internships and opportunities. And I hope that through the relationships that we have with everyone here that's on the, the zoom call. We're really looking for partners that could help us provide a place for the trainees that are coming out of these training curriculums and we really are excited to be part of this competition so thank you. Thank you so much, Monica and Brianne for this opportunity. Yeah, I'm the founder and CEO of Bantry Global and leading the team vital effort on behalf of my company and two other companies. Our team really brings together three companies really focused at the forefront of upskilling and offering opportunities to non traditional learners. My company Bantry Global is based in Boston and has offices in London and Delhi India and is really a venture development firm focused on innovation scale up and growth, and we also are an early stage investor. Kola Berry is a social enterprise with headquarters in Boston. That really focuses on in demand technology and human skills training and a talent marketplace, all in one encompassing platform. Blici is our Swedish partner, which was instrumental in in round two and helping us deploy a VR training element to kind of simulate a clinical environment and they've been super helpful as we've worked through this process in round two into round three. Next slide. So, in round three. We look to add two new roles to really leverage all three of our company skills in round two we focused on medical sterilization tech. And this round will be adding sales representatives for the services sector and supervisors of food preparation server serving workers. And we really focus on these two roles, because we thought this was a huge area of hiring demand in the United States and and something we really wanted to focus on to test and deploy our systems and our technology. And at the at the core of what we do, we really focus on taking the hard scale training and actually using it to empower the learners through soft skills. And we do that through our job readiness boot camp, which is a critical element through video feedback learning of our of our platform. And it really serves three constituents the students educators teachers who are delivering learning experiences and then really a talent marketplace for employers but also an opportunity for employers to get to know the learners through actually seeing some of their videos and how they communicate some of the content they've learned. Next slide. Perfect. I think it's a deep dive because we think this is kind of our, our secret sauce but also an element that really I think has over the years really informed us and we've been working on further developing and proving it on a constant, you know, weekly monthly basis which is really our job readiness boot camp which is the soft skills portion portion of our training. So irrespective of the content that we're focusing on we can tailor may our job readiness boot camp to really focus on that. So it really goes all the way from a virtual apprenticeship to interview preparation to learning the different skills that will make the learner successful on day one and confident on day one, and really give them that career transition. So when they start their job, they are ready. They understand what is really going to be required of them as they as they transition into this new phase in their, in their life. And kind of just to take a step back and kind of walk you through the platform. You know as we mentioned it really serves all three constituents, we have a dashboard that is centered to each of those different constituents, and it's a customizable platform from a course content perspective. It can be linked into external content providers with zoom integration, but it also has a community. And it's really a social platform. It brings together a community of your peers of your other learners, specifically within your specific content or field of training, but also a broader network of peers of mentors that can really be there to answer and give feedback. Look at your videos that you're producing and give feedback, and also kind of give you experience about where they found success. In addition, it has this video feedback system. And I think we can go to the next slide. Perfect thank you. So the video feedback system and this is this is a student named Cajove, who was a returning veteran, trying to readjust and find a path as they transition back to, you know, normal traditional life at home, and went from really being a TV technician to a quantitative analyst after six months of training, and saw about a three x salary increase. And our video feedback system and we'll show you a short video at the end but as you can see it really shows how you start with automated interviews and presentations and how you use your hand gestures how you use your tone of speech, how you use specific words. So some of what our system does is it, it really has AI driven automatic parameters, gesture movement tracking.  Are you looking directly forward. There's no human intervention required in our system. So transcribes voice to text, your interviews, so you can then go back as a learner, look at what you said and work on improving how you communicate and what you say and what are the words you use. And the system really searches for filler words if you're using too many filler words. It has a word cloud system that, as I said tracks over usage of terms words, but also looks, are you not using specific technical terms that are relevant to your work that would be really helpful. And it allows for unlimited video recording for the students as they go through a week by week video process in this feedback system, they can keep each week they can do 10 videos if they want and keep improving and keep practicing. We have found that this system has been a difference maker over the years and as we've been slowly and slowly and slowly improving it and making it more automated. We found that this really empowers the learners to be successful in the interview process, but even more so be successful on day one of their job they feel confident. They feel confident that they have the knowledge but they also more importantly have the ability to take that knowledge, synthesize it and communicate it, and, and really be confident that they can share their voice. And I think we've been able to find that a lot of our learners have been able to fast track to more senior positions, because I think this confidence that they've gotten through this program really transforms how they start on day one and what that means for their future growth in the organization. You know the next slide. Thank you so much. So this is a video of that video and AI driven parameter system and how it works. Go ahead. Sorry. Hi, my name is Eddie, I'm here to explain the difference between. Hi, my name is Eddie, I'll be explaining to this software development lab cycle. Hi, my name is Eddie. So today, I'll be discussing about some. Hello, my name is Eddie. So today, I'll be discussing about how. Thank you. And that's kind of just a small clip of kind of how the system can work and works. And we've really been able to experiment a lot and improve it as we learn different facets that we can automate. And for us really, we're super excited as we go into round three. And we really are excited on how we can deploy this at scale with 5000 plus learners, and really leverage the soft scales job readiness group camp, especially in the sales and services field the restaurant hospitality field, and the medical sterilization to really give them that those elements of communication skills, managerial skills, customer service, and really empower them from day one so that so that so we are team vital and we thank you for your time and for listening and we look forward to engaging with all of you. Thank you, Sanjee. We really appreciate all of you guys taking the time to get on to tell us and world about what you're doing and the great work that's coming out of your learning management systems and apps. We're really proud of you to see where you started in 2020 with applying and where you are now as a finalist in enterprise rapid rescaling. We're excited to see you joining the high ranks of teams will come before you have done really great work in the competition and outside of the competition with the solutions that are developed for the competition but also outside of the competition and looking at how we can leverage the x price ecosystem to help you guys scale help you grow and help you change the world so thank you so much for taking the time today. Thank you, Dr. Johnson, Sanjeev, you have near Milesh, Nate, and we all have to have Nigel I thank you so much for taking the time to come today. And with that we finished a little bit early actually which I'm like you guys are with it, you're rapid in rapid rescaling. So we do want to allow a little time for a break. So we will have some time where you can guys can get something to drink something to eat, 10 to the kid or the dog, we know we're all kind of in a hybrid work from home situation. Sometimes the little bit of time that you have is very valuable to continue to move things forward. So with that, we're going to take a break we will be back at 20 after the hour. So if that's in California that's at 1220. Now in standard time 120, you know, so and so forth I'm not going to go that much into detail and just being silly, but we thank you guys so much for coming. Please stay plugged in stay on go get something to drink go get a bite and please do come back because we do want to talk a little bit more we have a great keynote speaker from Dr. Peter Blair coming up in a little bit as well. And we just want to make sure that we're plugging a great opportunity you have to see the teams again. So coming up next month, we will all be at the CoA conference that is in Seattle is the coalition on adult basic education. And so we're really excited to have you guys come, we'll have a panel will be talking more about the great work that the teams are doing at once again ways that you guys can all plug in. So please do please come back at 1020 Pacific standard time, 20 after the hour wherever you guys are. So thank you so much, and we'll see you in a little bit. Hello everyone we're excited to have you guys back from break.  So many things you could have done during that break, but make sure that we're giving time. We fully know everyone's in a hybrid work environment and there's many things happening at home or at your office so wanting to take the time so you can reset and be ready for our keynote and we're so excited to have a great keynote for you guys here today. So moving on, we have Dr. Peter Blair here today, and I'll give you a little bit of information about before we get started so Dr. Blair is on faculty in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, where he co directs the project on workforce. He serves as faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the principal investigator at the be lab. It's a research group with partners from Harvard, Clemson and University of Illinois, His group's research focus on the link between the future of work and the future of education, labor market discrimination, occupational licensing and residential segregation. Dr. Blair received his PhD and applied economics from the warden school at the University of Pennsylvania, and his master's in science theoretical physics from Harvard University and his BS in science in psych, well that's not psychics, physics and mathematics from Duke University. So everyone without further ado, Dr. Peter Blair. Monica, thank you so much for this incredibly warm welcome and I want to say thank you to everybody on the X prize team, organizing committee, Brianne and I have had the opportunity to interact a lot. And for those of you who are joining us I'm super excited to chat with you because I've read about the amazing companies that you've started and I feel very privileged to get to witness the future of reskilling a labor market right in front of my eyes. Because we're in a virtual environment and because I'm a teacher in an ed school I like to be interactive, because I want you to write what's your second most favorite thing that has happened today during the proceedings of the X prize. So just pop that in the chat what's been your second most favorite thing that's happened today. So let's see who's going to be the first person to pop something in the chat and don't be shy. The music. Yes, I have been feeling the music other folks like what's what's been. What have you been taking away so far. I have an eye on this to hearing the power of story for job candidates yeah that's important. Monica's color coordination yes, it's on point. I think it's so important that when we're in this hybrid world that we find ways to to leverage the multimodality of it if we were in a standard meeting, and you are having this type of conversation it would actually be distracting, but the fact that we have this. The chat is zoom technology we can see people we can have side conversations I like to lean into that and I'm going to try to make this presentation today. Very interactive so I'm super excited to be here to chat with you about some work that I've done with some of my colleagues and how do we think about reskilling within the context of the US market. The insights here however we think can expand to a lot of other contexts and in fact, some of the work that we've been has started to inform the way that scientists in Kenya are thinking about who's qualified to do stem related fields. And so for those of you who are tuning into other tuning into this this call from other contexts I want you to know that the ideas that I'm going to put forth today are not just relevant in the US but we think about them as having global import in terms of how we think about redeveloping the skills that workers have. So let me kick off, I'm going to share slides with you in just a moment. So today I want to talk to you about skills, degrees and labor market inequality. And this is going to be based on a lot of work that I've done with some colleagues that opportunity at work popular de Broglie, just in fact, I'm buying a piece and the entire team of labor market work, which is a nonprofit in DC, that is focused on the scaling. I'm just to tell you like a little bit about my own work. So I think a lot about imperfections in the markets education, and the way in which they impact labor markets, and what are some of the ways in which we can propose alternative labor market signals that can remedy some of the gaps that we face within our educational and labor markets. This is a picture of the PhD students in my research group.  The motivation for a lot of our work is that most of the job postings in the United States today require bachelor's degrees closer to 60% of these job postings. When we look at who has bachelor degrees, only 40% of Americans have bachelor's degrees. And so there's this huge mismatch in terms of what are the skills, or at least, what are the credentials that the labor market is requiring of job seekers, and what are the actual credentials that job seekers have. And oftentimes this is this is this is referred to as the skills gap. But what we're going to do is we're going to try to turn that notion on its head. And we're going to we're going to try to understand how do we solve for this gap. It's impossible just to create a bunch of bachelor's degrees in order in order to satisfy the demand for quote unquote skilled or degree labor, right, you would need to increase the capacity colleges by a factor of about two. That is not going to happen overnight. And even if it were to happen, it would not be cheap. So what we're going to propose is how can you identify workers from the population of people who have high school diplomas who are skilled through alternative routes, alternative relative to degrees. We're going to call them stars, skilled to alternative rights I want you to pop in the chat stars just type that in I want you to remember that acronym. And this is important because the way in which we talk about workers is going to frame who we think is capable of doing what kind of work, and who we want to invest in as companies but also who do you want to invest in as a society. So the goal of identifying these stars who are workers with high school diplomas who don't have college degrees is to try to understand the skills that they have based on their current work and to see whether those skills are sufficient to have them transition to higher wage work. One key component of this approach is that the population of workers who were stars are going to represent predominantly workers of color and women. And there's also an equity lens to this reframing of how we think about the skills that workers have in the context of a labor market. I like to start off by thinking about stories I know that in in the chat we saw, we saw a comment about how stories are incredibly important, and I want to reference that by pressing into this story by a woman in Joanne who's a who's an office administrator. She said in an interview that we have with her. I worked at a community college for two decades. I was among the first to be laid off when COVID hit, even though I had more experience and skills than many of my colleagues. My previous supervisor once told me that had I gone to college, I would be running this community college. I want us to sit for a moment with Joanne story. How do you know like Joanne, who have the skills there in a job where they're doing the work, but they're not being promoted because they don't have a degree, not because they don't have the skills where they don't have the ability to do a higher wage work, but precisely because they don't have that college degree. And this is what we're going to be focusing on. In this figure here, you see over time, the percentage of job postings in the United States that requires a bachelor's degree, versus the fraction of workers who are currently in those jobs who have a bachelor's degree or higher. And so what you can see is that many of the job postings that are requiring a bachelor's degree are requiring it for jobs where the people currently hold those jobs don't have bachelor's degrees. It's not that these jobs themselves need someone with a bachelor's degree to do the job because the person doing it now doesn't have a bachelor's degree. And we call this degree inflation. And so this is something that is contributing to the perception that there's a skills gap when in fact what there is in the labor market is an opportunity gap in terms of recognizing that college degrees aren't needed to do, aren't needed to do every type of work within the labor market. This degree inflation translates into a wage gap by educational status. If you look over time in the past four decades, the wages of workers who have high school diplomas but not college degrees who we're calling stars have remained relatively stagnant at around about 19 to $20 per hour. In terms of the bachelor's drafts the wages of workers with bachelor's degrees has increased tremendously with this time period. And so they're very real material consequences to being locked out of jobs where you've access to higher wage work. It's income inequality. And that's one of the reasons why we want to focus in on on stars. There's another reason why this population of workers are important when we start to think about how do we reskill within our labor ecosystem. We have the 161 million folks who are in the workforce, close to 71 million, 71 million of those are stars. They complete a college, but they don't have a college degree. And we want to focus in on what does it look like to provide opportunities for upward mobility for this population of workers, precisely because they can help us to solve some of the skills gaps that we experience in the labor market. The proposal that we do in our work is very simple. It's predicated on the idea that workers will learn by doing, and that they in turn possess the skills that are associated with their jobs. And that transitions are possible between jobs with very related skills. Let me give you an example from my own experience. I'm a college professor. The very first time that I taught a class was when I became a college professor. So I learned on the job. I was given the opportunity to learn on the job because I had a PhD. And in many contexts, a college degree functions as a door opener to give you the opportunity in order to learn. If you look at somebody who was a lawyer, for example, many times when they graduated law school, they don't yet know how to file a brief. They don't know how to argue a case in front of court, but they're given that job and on the job they learn all of the skills that they need to from people who have that experience. And so our labor market already functions as a place where people both earn and learn at the same time. The question is how do we allow for folks who are stars to both earn and learn in the same way that people with bachelor's degrees and higher can do that on the market. What we've done here is to zoom in on two jobs. So the first is a retail salesperson, which is a low wage job. The second is a customer service representative, which is a medium wage job. And we focused in on the nine top skills that are needed for those jobs as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And for example, persuasion is something that both a retail salesperson need and a customer service representative active listening speaking service orientation. What you notice here is that the top skills that are needed for a retail salesperson's job, which is a low wage job are very similar in terms of the ordering but also the intensity of the importance of that skill as manifested in the customer service representative job. And so our proposal is that workers are learning these skills on the job that they currently have. If we can see them as being skilled through these alternative routes, namely their work experience, then we would say, if I'm looking for somebody to be a customer service representative, I can look in the population of workers who have a retail sales person as their job experience, even if that person doesn't have a college degree. And so this is a really important thing to to meditate on is like, how do we look beyond whether somebody clears the credential hurdle and then look at the actual skills that we have, which we can infer from their prior role and the skill content of that prior role. This is what we do in our work. I want to share with you the story of a star Lashana Lewis, who is emblematic of what can happen when we, when we look at somebody based on their skills and not their degrees. It's time that we change the way that we define talent. Lashana Lewis, I am CEO of Elton Lewis Consulting. I don't have a college degree, but I'm a computer geek. Lashana grew up in East St. Louis. She had a passion for computers, but she wasn't able to get a college degree. And because she didn't have a college degree, she couldn't even get an interview for a tech job. Despite her coding skills, so she was working as a bus driver. I've been working on computers since I can remember, but I always found myself in low wage jobs. And then I always got pulled into doing jobs and duties that are mid to high salary range. So I was able to find a program called Launch Code to help me. And from that, I ended up getting a full-time position at MasterCard working as an engineer there. After MasterCard, I did start my own business, but at the same time, I got offered a position as a CTO of a startup and director of aerospace IT at a different startup. Not everyone has a four-year degree or can't afford a four-year degree, but everyone should have an opportunity. So maybe we need to look past the pedigree and look more at the skill base. And that's what the STARS movement drives home. STARS are skilled through alternative routes. There are millions of STARS like me just waiting to work and all they need is an opportunity. Let someone take the first step in changing your company or your organization into something that's more aligned to where the future is going to be. My name is Lashana Lewis and I'm a STARS. Value potential over pedigree and join the STARS movement. I want you to pause for a second and contemplate Lashana's story.  So in the context of, so you understand that the basic idea, which is that people learn on the job and they learn the skills that are required for that job. And you can measure the content of a person's skill based on what's the skill content of the job that they currently are working at. However, there could be adjacent jobs that can provide higher wages that have very similar skill content. And what we do in our research work is to develop an algorithm that allows us to look at the skill contents of a worker's current job. And then identify what are some adjacent jobs that pay higher wages but that have very similar skill contents. And by doing that we can recognize what are the opportunities for upward mobility for STARS within the legal market. There are some technical details in terms of how we go about developing the algorithm, which are described in this bullet point here, but that's not important for understanding conceptually what it is that we do. At the end of the day, what we can get from this procedure is an inventory of the number of STARS based on wages in their origin job. So we can look at workers who are STARS and we can see are they starting off in jobs that are low wage jobs, middle wage jobs or high wage jobs. And then based on the skill content that they have, given where they're currently working, we can see are there medium wage jobs or high wage jobs that they can move to that are not too far removed from their current skill content. And this is going to power a lot of our analysis in terms of describing what is the state of STARS in the legal market. We've come up with a taxonomy that allows us to think about STARS of three different categories. The first are shining STARS. So these are STARS who are already working in high wage jobs where they're in the top one third of the income distribution. Remember, there's 71 million STARS. Of that 71 million, only 5 million are shining STARS in the sense that they're already working in high wage jobs. When we look at the population of rising STARS, these are STARS who are starting off in low wage work, but they have the potential based on their skill content to move into either medium wage work or high wage work. About 30 million of STARS are reflected by rising STARS. And this is where there's a lot of opportunity to identify who these rising STARS are. Maybe your company is developing a proprietary algorithm that can allow folks to look beyond someone's degree and then identify their skills to match them to jobs where they can earn higher wages and even get opportunities and access to more skill development. And then the balance of STARS are forming STARS who don't yet have the skills. And there's also space in the ecosystem to say how can we provide these forming STARS with the relevant skills that they need in order to move to higher wage work. When we break this down demographically, we can see that women who are STARS tend to be focused, tend to be overrepresented in low wage work as opposed to high wage occupations. We see the same thing for STARS of color. STARS of color tend to be concentrated in low wage occupations, low wage origin occupations as opposed to high wage occupations. And so when we begin to reconceptualize who is skilled and how we measure skills, there are profound equity implications along with racial lines and gender lines. By seeing STARS, we are going to be seeing the skills of women and people of color in an even clearer way. In addition to the research component of the work that we've done, it's very important to think about how do you engage the ecosystem. We need to start with fundamental insights about the nomenclature of how we talk about workers without college degrees. That in turn is going to inform the extent to which we see them as either having the skills or having opportunities to be reskilled. And then once we reconceptualize the way that we're thinking about talent within the ecosystem, then we can start to move to say, what are some ways in which policymakers and businesses can begin to respond to this new understanding of who is skilled in order to provide a more equitable access to job opportunities within the market. During the summer of 2020, we all witnessed the very brutal and heinous murder of George Floyd and there were ways in which that ignited this country, our country to think very deeply about issues around racial justice. One thing that my colleague shot on that and I did was to think about what are some ways in which companies that are committed to racial equity can do something to promote better access for for minority workers. And what we pushed companies to do in the soft bed in the Wall Street Journal is to say that you can go beyond just giving money to to the black community that you can actually change the way that you hire and train talent by hiring based on skills and not degrees. And that would allow you to get access to the population of stars who have the skills to do highly work within your within your job within your company. We've seen this work and the work of many others in the ecosystem impact public policy, where the federal government passed an executive order in 2020 to emphasize the hiring based on skills and not degrees. We saw very recently about a week ago in the state of the union address where President Biden talked about the increasing importance to have workers we turn through entrepreneur through through apprenticeships and through alternative routes, and for companies and the federal government's hire based on skills and not degrees and so there's increasing momentum in the pages of our leading newspapers among policymakers in terms of what they're doing, and even among Fortune 500 companies. And recently the one 10 initiative brought together a coalition of 37 Fortune 500 companies to say we're going to hire based on skills and not degrees, and in particularly use that as a way to drive racial equity by finding talent where in the past we previously did not see talent, which is in the population of stars who have been disproportionately women and people of color. And I want to end by leaving you with a charge as I've read over the amazing companies that you founded the amazing teams that you've assembled, you are committed to reshaping the way that we think about scaling the existing workforce and reskilling the existing workforce and shaping the work and the skilled ecosystem of the future, all five of the companies that are represented on this call. And I want to challenge you as you think about your work to think about the ways in which the companies that you develop the algorithms that you pioneer, how they can pay a specific attention to the opportunity that you have to recognize the skills of workers who are in the workforce, stars with skills to alternative routes they don't yet have a college degree, but they have skills based on their current work, and through that the opportunities to move to higher wage work. I want to say huge thank you for this amazing opportunity to share with you today, and I'm excited to see the rest of today's work. So thank you so much for having me here. Thank you. Thank you so much. Dr. Blair for making the time we really appreciate it. And hopefully our teams found some great value in that, and just knowing that you guys are on the right track to making a lot of people's lives better and really tapping into stars and putting stars in the pathway they need to really, you know, have the future that they want the career they want and make the best life possible for themselves and their families. So we move from that gap being filled with love and opportunity. Exactly. Thank you. And that looks like we are just about done for the day. We're really excited that we got the opportunity to come together to talk to fellowship to joke about my coordination of glasses and shirt. That's always a good time. And we're really, really happy to see what our finalist teams will go on and do. So thank you to Dr. Peter Blair. Thank you to Dr. Lewis Johnson. Thank you to Nick Mazzucca. Thank you to Dr. Nimalesh Kumar. Thank you to Najla Ibrahim. Thank you to Sanjiv Yadav. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time today to come and tell us more about you. We learned a lot even during the finalist team presentations. And I want to thank the people behind the scenes, David and Elizabeth and Bree, they're behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz making everything run smoothly, even with the smooth jazz Philly sounds you've been hearing on our breaks. We appreciate the attention to detail thinking about the music and how to set the mood for this great event and really, really appreciate it. And we just want to make sure that we remind everyone that we will be at the CoA conference April 13. So if you're in CoA in Seattle, please do stop by our panel. We'd love to have you going to have our finalist teams speaking to you more about their work, their solutions and ways that you can work with them. And also, if you're interested in being a recruitment partner, definitely reach out to us at rapidreskillingatxprize.org. And you know we also have an opportunity to network after this. We're really on the platform wonder, being able to network you guys also should have received an email in your inbox check it now to be in there, jump on over and we can have more conversations and keep the party going, and getting to know each other getting to meet each other maybe we can collaborate, buy new friends, buy new colleagues. So we're really, really happy to be here and happy to have you today. Thank you so much to my colleagues, Bre Ward and Dr. Monique Golden. Very happy that we were able to have a very successful finalist team summit virtually and we are very happy to be able to see each other in person next month at the CoA conference. And if there is nothing else thank you guys so much for coming once again and jump on over to the wonder platform starting at 1115 am Pacific's time is when we'll be over there so thank you again, and I'll see you guys and wonder in a few.