Inclusive STEM Career Pathways

Boston’s growth careers are not accessed by its students. Only ~3% of STEM jobs in Massachusetts are held by people of color. This gap harms students, communities, employers, and our city’s sustainability.

Our solution provides students with a learning trajectory that ties directly to industry needs. It supports employers with a talent pipeline trained in their highest value skills. It adds coherence with system intelligence that tracks needs across industries, maps career pathways across employer organizations, and analyzes student behaviors to drive continuous improvement.

This posits a new approach to student skill development, side-stepping traditional education-based solutions. It targets the two users who have the most to gain: students who seek tracks to careers; and employers, who need a well-trained talent pipeline. At scale, it shifts the city’s workforce development and education approaches, providing access to careers to students who may not seek or thrive in a college-going trajectory.

There is a triple STEM opportunity gap in Boston:

1. Students are not benefiting from the STEM economic opportunity. The economy is heavily reliant on STEM-related professions.  40% of jobs in Massachusetts are technology-related, while only 3% of STEM-related positions are held by Black or Latinx individuals.

2. Employers have developing workforce gaps. The projected technical job shortfall in Eastern Massachusetts by 2026 is over 200,000 positions.

3. The city faces lost opportunities should this gap widen. Job growth mismatched to the population impacts all aspects of the Boston economy. 

This impacts the workforce at large, but our immediate focus are Boston Public School’s 16,000 high schoolers. Of BPS’s total population, 72% are economically disadvantaged, 43% are Hispanic and 33% are Black, and 32% are English learners. While a majority of BPS students go on to college, only about 40% attain a degree within 6 years. It is clear that current pathways aren’t serving students.

We find mutual benefit across stakeholders to tackle this systemic problem. Our analysis has led us to maximize effective channels (direct employer to student connections) while eliminating reliance on traditional channels that have struggled in their solutions (public education).

Our solution has three layers.

Student:

The student experience is a 4-year, out-of-school learning trajectory. Based on an initial interests and strengths audit, students are provided learning trajectories that support career pathways. Early experiences develop transferable skills; further along their trajectory, they build industry-specific skills and gain experiences with employers. Experiences are delivered via an innovative online platform that enables hybrid delivery, skills and competency mapping and analytics, and embedded supplemental experiences such as interactive career maps.

Employer:

We collaborate with employers to clarify skill needs and career paths. We aggregate and analyze existing employer data to create skill and career maps, both within an organization and across an industry. This empowers employers to support our programs with a common "blueprint" to drive the development of employer relevant learning trajectories and industry contextualized course material.

System:

We have instrumented analytical environments that evaluate the drivers of student engagement, skill acquisition, and overall learner experience. 

• Learner: helping students understand how they are gaining competencies that build a bridge to jobs and careers.

• Employer: aggregated dashboards that allow workforce planning and visibility into talent pipelines.

• Course designers & instructors: engagement and learner analytics to improve program design and reach learner segments. 

We are targeting students for whom college may not be the best path. These are students with technical aptitude and interest, who seek direct application of their learning. We are engaging students in our development work as co-designers. The high school students on our team will work with us to learn about the needs of students and to shape experiences to these opportunities. Benefits include:

• Intentional career pathways: Helps students understand how STEM technologies are relevant to their community, exposes students to STEM professionals and careers, provides employment opportunities.

• Applied competencies: Students learn skills as framed by employers, with success measured through observable results.

• Equitable learning opportunities: Provides skills-based career path for students not on a college-going path, introduces students to technologies often reserved for out-of-school programs and students in higher income brackets, engages students from a strengths-based perspective.

We are working with employers in Boston’s high growth industries, already feeling the labor market crunch. Employers are partners in strategy and content creation. The benefit to employers will be:

• Direct access: Provides a pipeline for pre-professional development

• Employee experiences: Offers an opportunity to engage employees in support of BPS students

• Brand development: Demonstrates commitment to Boston community

This market-based approach shapes student learning by basing trajectories on skills and career maps developed in partnership with industry. 

The need we are addressing is strategic and long-term; we’ve found that many employers are not tackling it -- responsibility for this type of emergent workforce development gets lost between HR and business planning silos. 

By supporting employers in clarifying their critical skill needs and available (often invisible, non-linear) career pathways, we’re able to make evident the developmental needs for students. Over time, the data and insights that our solution generates will also offer vision, direction and information to the ecosystem.

Yes, our initial target is the Greater Boston business ecosystem.

Agncy is a team of six full-time staff, with an extended network of contractors and collaborators. The team for this program includes:

• 3 FTE Agncy staff

• 2 FTE Julius Education staff

• 1 FTE BPS staff

• 2 part time student co-designers

• 2 part time educator co-designers

With ⅔ people of color, Agncy has sought to build a team that is diverse: racially, spiritually, economically, neurologically, and otherwise.

Our culture intertwines with our design practice. This includes leaning into design’s inherent optimism to create shared opportunities for change; valuing that expertise and wisdom are found in non-dominant people and places; always questioning roles, power, bias and cultural articulations; and recognizing that we cannot separate the doing of the work from the outcomes of the work.

“Our organization” is super porous, as all of our work is with communities. This culture is not about the six of us alone, but about the communities that we facilitate, the teams that we partner with and the ways that we design spaces that center these values.

There are an abundance of players in the Boston landscape, supporting students in elements of our solution. The innovation of this solution is not in the need or in its programmatic components -- but in the glue: the systemic, data-driven, industry-led response that provides coherent, navigable, achievable pathways for students and their families.

Boston has programs focused on STEM learning (e.g. after-school coding), organizations focused on career access (e.g. summer internships), skill development opportunities (e.g. skill badging through summer learning), and much more. The challenge is that these programs:

• are not integrated in their approach

• are not focused on intentional career pathways, as defined by industry

• are not equitably distributed across Boston’s schools and student population

• are not providing a clear pathway or career goal for students

• and may emphasize “sparkly” students, those who are already tracked to college paths

Our approach seeks to leverage this wealth of resources, harnessing intent with a data-driven framework that uses industry insight to build learning trajectories for students. We recognize that the need is not necessary to recreate all of the components, but to provide a common scaffold for elements to hang from: a clear, contextualized, industry-derived map of the skills students need to navigate a range of career pathways.

Based on this skill insight, student learning trajectories will be industry-focused, include bespoke employer offerings, and integrate a range of learning experiences, from online coursework to internship opportunities, provided, when appropriate, on our platform or offered through existing programming when available.

The Julius Education Platform connects learning to job skills and careers.  The  digital learning platform provides:

• The Career Map & Skills Map Builder: proprietary machine learning models for skills articulation and transferability and custom interactive web tools to engage learners in exploration 

• Workforce Readiness Gauge:  a competency based analytics environment that allows for the analysis of competency progression across various sources of content.

• Custom course development based on deep learning science: team has expertise in developing engaging and effective learning objects.

The novel process here is the orchestration across the full value chain of career development -  pathway navigation, targeting learning paths, employability support - with a teaming that can deeply understand both needs of students, employers, and the community.

The solution is already deployed at publicly traded companies, major trade associations, and public sector organizations.

The solution is currently used by a range of organizations, focused on adult learning and workforce training. This opportunity leverages the platform’s proven capabilities for student application. A real-time demonstration of the Julius Education Platform can be easily arranged.

The impact we seek to have is a reduction in the STEM opportunity gap in Boston. STEM-related professions are growing and lucrative, yet for ten plus years there has been no increase in people of color entering STEM-related professions. We will see this impact in the following outcomes:

• BPS graduates in STEM-related professions

• Boston residents-of-color in family-sustaining wages 

We accomplish these outcomes with the following activities that are focused on bridging the needs and incentives of employers and students. We disrupt the typical education-based approach to skill development, instead using an organization/industry based approach -- so that skill needs are targeted, contextualized and build to tangible career opportunities.

• Using our skill and career mapping capabilities to help employers be clear about their needs in terms of mid- and long-term hiring, career paths and priority skills. We’ve found that this is a major stumbling block: many employers haven’t done this strategic work.

• Delivering multi-year out-of-school learning trajectories to students that connect directly to career pathways in Boston (developed through the employer work described above). We’ve found this to be lacking: the many programs available in Boston today are disconnected and don’t ladder directly into employers. This includes:

  • Career exploration and matchmaking

  • Online skill development delivered over Julius’ platform (ranging from transferable employability skills to specific technical software skills)

  • Intentional integration of pre-existing programs, with clear connection to career/skill goals 

  • Direct employer-to-student opportunities

  • Year 13 opportunities, offering university-based one-year post-secondary learning, directly tied to industry needs.

In the near- and mid-term, we expect to see the following outputs that will be early indicators of movement towards our ultimate impact. 

• In the short term, we want folks to be excited about the solution and its potential.

  • Student interest in career pathways of focus

  • Student engagement in learning activities

  • Student re-enrollment 

  • Student relationships (cohort and employers)

  • Employer engagement

• In the medium term, we expect tangible growth. 

  • Students skill acquisition

  • Student on-the-job experiences

  • Employer programming support

  • Applications from program participants

• In the long term, we expect hiring outcomes. 

  • Employer/industry partners hiring of program graduates

Spring 2021

• Future of Construction pathway and 4-year student trajectory co-designed with students, industry, academic partners

• Initial Pilot Course launched within Future of Construction pathway (Introduction to Project Management). In partnership with local construction industry collaborators, we will run multiple rounds of this pilot course to test its content effectiveness, learning experience and resonance with students.

• The impact at this early stage will be small, but it will help us to shape the solution design.

Fall 2021 

• Suite of 10th grade Future of Construction courses built out and launched

• 11th grade Future of Construction courses in development

• Assessment tools in place for continuous improvement

• Second industry (e.g. Future of Medicine) partners being tapped to begin work on additional industry pathway and 4-year student trajectory

• The impact will still be relatively small, but will provide proof-points for growth

Five year objectives

• Scalable learning model in place with analytics that provide evidence on its effectiveness. This will be scaled within Boston and can provide a model for replication in other local contexts

• Robust model for engaging industry partners

• Industry hiring proof points that demonstrate value to employers and to students

• System learning from application to multiple industries and from work with multiple years of student learning

• Additional Year 13 models in place, pairing industry pathways with local colleges and universities. These may include:

• 3D Printing: Formlabs and Ben Franklin Institute

• Cybersecurity: Rapid 7 and Northeastern University

• BioTech: Vertex and MIT

• Incoherent ecosystem: the landscape in Boston is scattered. While there are a range of programs that support students in piecemeal ways (e.g. specific STEM learning, internship opportunities), they are not connected in a manner that builds coherence and effectiveness or supports students in pursuing career pathways. Bringing a shared framework to this landscape of players will be a key challenge.

• Mindset shift: this offering requires a fundamental shift in perspectives. It proposes that education is not the driver in addressing this chronic problem. It requires that industry partners recognize the value of skill and career pathway mapping. And it transforms the value proposition we present to students, offering them clear and tangible careers to apply their learning to.

• Disruptive to standard players and ways of measuring success: post-secondary partners and traditional secondary folks may find this approach threatening to their values and success measures. For decades, the story has been that college attainment is THE path to success. This program shifts that objectives to open a third path that can obviate the 4-year degree. Post-secondary support of this offer and complementary Year 13 programs may be a challenge.

• Support and engagement: of course, engaging funding, industry partners and non-profits will be a critical factor ongoing. Because this is a collective, systems-driven solution that reaches its maximum potential when its full ecosystem of offers is developed, we’ll need to accelerate to build out these partnerships and the industry pathways they support.

We have experience doing disruptive work that requires mindset shifts across a disparate landscape of players. In 2017, we worked with a collective of Boston education stakeholders to develop a city-wide goal for high school graduation, detailing the competencies that the city expects for its grads. This range of players has adopted the definition and directed its programming towards this shared goal. Indicators have been established to provide city-wide baselines and annual measurement.

We know that the way that we engage folks in the process is as important as the outcomes we deliver together. We are embedding new mindsets and forging new values together. Our team’s relationships with folks across this landscape puts in a good position to engage them in disruptive work.

More tangibly, our progress with our Future of Construction partners means that we will have a proof point soon that can make the value clear to others. In the next few months, we will have a live 10th grade Future of Construction course, v1 of the accompanying skills and career maps, and preliminary learning analytics from a first pilot.

Finally, our systems-thinking approach leverages a range of design tools to help folks engage in co-creation, visualize the potential for impact and identify their roles in it. This system is poised for intentional interventions: the pandemic has threatened colleges’ business models and forced the adoption of online learning, all while making more pressing the need to offer high school graduates solid pathways into careers with family-sustaining wages.

We capture data that drive system intelligence, such as:

• Skills mapping data

• Career mapping data

• Student interest & skills data

• Learning engagement data

Outcomes data help us understand the effectiveness of the program include:

Program engagement data

• BPS students enrolled 

• Students enrolled in internships at Future of... employers (this information is generally available across the ecosystem, but not centralized or tracked)

• Mentors Future of... companies offer

• Part-time jobs students have in Future of...employers

• Students applying to Year 13 programs

• Local corporations who allocate internal resources (not funding) to urban education initiatives

• Post-secondary institutions pursuing Year 13 programs

Hiring data

• Number of hires local construction companies attribute to the Future of Construction program

• Average first year starting salary of Future of Construction students entering the workforce with one year post secondary education

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Our team mimics the multi-pronged approach inherent to our solution. 

• Julius delivers cutting-edge training solutions to employers and employer associations. The organization uses analytical engines to identify priority skills and to build career mapping that scaffold online training direct to employees. Julius brings not only its tools and platform to the partnership, but also its connection to the workforce development needs and strategies of industry. 

• Agncy is a non-profit design firm that helps leaders, organizations and communities use design as a tool to make system change. The firm has worked deeply with Boston’s education ecosystem; its observations of, interviews and relationships with students, teachers, school leaders and district administrators were an impetus for this solution. Agncy’s founder and the lead on this program has a background in corporate innovation, so the organization brings its system approach, its co-design process, and its dual student-centered and industry perspectives.

• Boston Public Schools’ Excellence for All Program includes a STEM component that teaches 3D printing, Robotics and Coding. Excellence for All participated in a Future of Construction project with the City of Boston, Suffolk Construction and Autodesk in 2019. There are a number of BPS high schools and programs that could implement the Future of Construction.
  

We are currently working to pilot initial coursework for a Future of Construction pathway. This learning trajectory exposes students to the technology skills relevant to today’s construction jobs -- and the emerging technologies impacting construction. We have identified critical positions and are currently defining the necessary skill set, both baseline, transferable skills and specialized competencies, programs or tools that students may need to learn. The Future of Construction pathway is focused on the technologies required now in this field. It is important that the message regarding the Future of Construction is about how this industry has changed and is no longer a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ job.

We are collaborating on the Future of Construction with two major corporations in this field: 

Suffolk Construction - Suffolk Construction has been very supportive of Boston Public Schools’ efforts to expose students to the construction industry and the types of skills needed for a career, particularly skills related to technology which continues to transform the industry. Suffolk Construction has been collaborating with Boston Public Schools, Julius Education and Agncy on this Future of Construction project and has provided insight into jobs, skill requirements, and potential career pathways within the industry.

Autodesk - Autodesk is very committed to supporting education and has hired a former Boston Public Schools teacher to work with school systems. This is a breakthrough approach in that a large commercial entity has committed resources to directly support K12 education. Autodesk has provided CAD software and professional development courses to Boston Public Schools. 

The business model focuses on two key pathways to viable delivery of services: philanthropic funding and industry investment. 

We expect philanthropy to be motivated by the opportunities this solution affords students: access to a new “third track” pathway that provides viable career access for non-college-going and non-vocational students; focus on high-growth careers with family-sustaining wages; an experience that is co-designed with and for Boston’s student population.

Our key customers are Boston’s employers, who we expect to find multiple benefits to our value prop. First, they will have access to and relationships with a pipeline of students trained in skills that have been customized to their organization and industry. Second, they will have the “back end” skill and career mapping that we have used to drive the curriculum; this mapping can inform their other workforce development initiatives.

University partners may also become customers, interested in building out “Year 13” programs that offer short-term credentialing. The value to universities is in a differentiated offering during a time of economic pressure, a pipeline of students for both this new and their existing programming, and (we expect) connection with students who are prepared to perform well, boosting their key metrics.

We are launching a digital solution, with a pre-existing, industry-grade platform that provides channel flexibility and meets the needs of this pandemic-informed time. We can build upon this with in-person opportunities as we mature the pilot and the safety context shifts.

We’re seeking initial grant funding 2021 pilots.

Once the pilot has been implemented, a structured fund raising campaign will begin. As described in our business model section, we are exploring funding from a range of types interested stakeholders:

• Philanthropy: we’re exploring funders of both workforce and education programming. The space is very active right now.

• Employers: we’re already engaging employers in contributing time and learning resources. The next step will be to ask them to invest in the development of the learning trajectory for their industry. Our expectation is that we will pursue a cluster of related (but potentially non-competitive) employers to invest in a pathway as a collective. For example, a Future of Healthcare path may include a hospital system, a pharmaceutical company, an insurance company and a device manufacturer.

• Universities: university partners who implement Year 13 programs are another source of revenue, both during the Year 13 development process and as organizations who will benefit from the ability to tailor student learning objectives and experiences to their programming.

• City & state: with a pathway developed, we believe that the vision and scale of this solution will be demonstrated. At this stage, city and state economic development organizations will have reason to fund/accelerate additional pathway development. Models like Germany’s best practices in aligning industry to developing skilled workers offer great precedent as well.

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We’re seeking $100,000 in grant funding for pilot courses in the Future of Construction pathway, with pilots in Spring and Fall 2021. We hope to have this raised by February 2021.

Our expenses for the two rounds of pilot will be:

Equitable experience design (system design, co-design with students & teachers, educational equity consultant, formative research on course, reporting and oversight): $50,000

Participant support (teacher stipends, project manager, course delivery support): $26,000

Julius platform delivery (course development & iteration, course hosting & student data management): $23,500

We appreciate that both MFF and New Profit take an intersectional approach to bending inequitable systems. Our idea crosses sectors and we hope to find partners who understand the power of this and who can help us to think through how to maximize this potential.

It’s also challenging to secure development grants, for ideas that are disruptive and don’t fit neatly into programmatic silos or standard measurements. We’re heartened by what appears to be this team’s openness to disruption, to reframing the problems we solve, and to using its funding power to significantly push new ideas forward.

Finally, we are a team of entrepreneurs: Julius, with a focus on bringing the tools of higher ed to workforce development, Agncy, with a focus on applying design methods to systems change. Having partners who understand entrepreneurship and can support us in navigating the inevitable pivots of an entrepreneurial initiative is necessary. We probably won’t fit neatly into grant reporting templates.

Our strategic partnership goals:

Our business model partnership goals are to test our hypotheses around the value proposition to employers. We will partner with the key hiring organizations in targeted vertical markets based on Boston’s economic strength to understand whether the offering resonates. The Julius team has significant experience working on educational initiatives with major employers. 

Beyond resonance, uur funding and revenue model goal is to understand whether industry partners will value the benefits of this solution enough to invest money, human capital and intellectual resources.

Our monitoring and evaluation goals are to maximize the measurement and ecosystem analysis capabilities resident within the platform, while introducing a coherent framework that can integrate existing measurements. We will apply a systems thinking approach to ensure coordination between and maximize the contributions of several Boston-area non-profit STEM organizations who are currently operating assessments independently.

Business Model partners:

• Additional Construction Companies - to provide their perspective on the critical jobs they require in the coming years and associated skills required. 

• Morgridge Family Foundation - to provide guidance on how other entrepreneurial non-profit start-ups have scaled when there is a technology-based solution.

• Bain Capital  - to provide insight and recommendations that reflect ‘best practices’ of global non-profit organizations that have scaled successfully.

• Digital Ready/Wentworth Year 13 - to provide input regarding the types of academic support that would benefit BPS students entering Year 13.

• Timothy Smith Network - to provide guidance on the challenges facing how to scale in an urban setting. 

• Higher ed partners - to build career-aligned credentialing aligned to a key market verticals.

Funding and Revenue Model partners:

• New Profit - to provide their expertise in what are the critical infrastructure issues, e.g., management, equity, leadership that funders seek when making significant investments.

• City of Boston Economic Development - to secure funding and access to business organizations that provide career pathway guidance. 

• Boston Opportunity Agenda - to seek their guidance and support they have gathered from similar projects they have created in the past, e.g. Boston’s College Career and Life Readiness Project that Agncy also supported.

• Mass. Dept of Education - to identify the various efforts within this organization that can provide guidance.

• Urban League Workforce Development - to seek their guidance on working effectively with Boston’s minority community.

Monitoring and Evaluation partners:

• Boston PIC

• Boston After School and Beyond

• Renne Center

• Open Opportunity Mass

• Boston Public Schools