Area: Champions allies and partners

Skilling the future workforce: 8 recommendations for corporate leaders

Skilling the future workforce: 8 recommendations for corporate leaders

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
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Private sector engagement with skills-based hiring is increasing in response to employment gaps and escalating economic precarity. Between 2017 and 2019, 46% of middle-skill and 31% of high-skill occupations experienced material degree resets. And in 2022, 79% of HR professionals reported that scores on skills assessments are just as or more important than traditional criteria in hiring decisions.

These are positive trends from an economic and a social perspective. Skills-based hiring is critical to increasing equity and diversity in the workplace, as traditional credential-based hiring tends to screen out, disqualify, or exclude applicants without a four year degree.

While increased commitment to skills-based hiring is an important step toward a more prepared and more inclusive workforce, many companies are learning that in-demand skills do not exist in adequate supply. Some of those businesses are taking it upon themselves to develop the skill-based talent pipeline that will be necessary to power their organizations, industries, and broader market into the future.

To better understand how companies are investing in the skills-based training ecosystem, before hiring even comes into frame, we dug deep with nine organizations on the cutting edge of workforce development.

Through our conversations with leaders and practitioners, we uncovered a depth of contributions to changing and scaling the learning systems that are preparing workers for quality jobs. Our report compiles eight recommendations to provide guidance for private sector employers who are committed to skilling the future workforce and ultimately contributing meaningfully to a more just and equitable workplace. 

The eight recommendations:

 

  • Decide if you aim to be influential at a systems, sector, or company level
  • Position your strategy correctly within your company’s infrastructure
  • Lean into (and use) your company’s strengths
  • Build a well-balanced partner portfolio
  • Design for replicability and scalability
  • Mind the non-skills gap between learner and earner
  • Engage in pre-competitive transparency and collaboration
  • Bring rigor and patience to impact measurement
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Eight actions for creating catalytic cross-sector partnerships

Eight actions for creating catalytic cross-sector partnerships

EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
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Many of the limitations and challenges associated with cross-sector social impact partnerships are rooted in their points of origin. More intentionality, responsibility, and creativity are necessary to unlock a greater number of truly catalytic opportunities. 

As the field of corporate social impact matures, organizations are embracing cross-sector partnerships as a means to advancing social and environmental goals. With ample institutional resources and access to wide-ranging capabilities, corporations are able to envision and invest in big ideas. Increasing attention from the private sector is altering the architecture of cross-sector collaboration, creating new opportunities for ambitious projects and deepening value alignment. 

At the same time, exciting examples of partnership activity are often flanked by examples in which opportunities go unmet. Given asymmetries in resourcing and capabilities, partnerships are too often rooted in matching dependencies between organizations. When that’s the case, partners satiate certain needs while overlooking more powerful approaches to collaboration, leaving behind big, creative, and sustainable ideas. Partners also lower their ceiling for impact when they proceed with too narrow an understanding of their own assets within an ecosystem, stunting potential unlocks that bloom from outside – and occasionally unlikely – perspectives. And, when organizations neglect to systematically embed trust and accountability, underlying relationships risk failure – in turn jeopardizing catalytic opportunities. 

These barriers to a catalytic result are best addressed at or before the point of partnership inception. Anchored in interviews with social impact leaders representing large corporations, NGOs, and philanthropies, this report presents eight actions that organizations and their leaders can take to raise their ceiling for impact. 

The eight actions:

  • Bring on cross-sector expertise and perspective 
  • Place a premium on emotional intelligence (EQ) 
  • Mine ideas from business units and individuals beyond your social impact team 
  • Embrace third-party views of your capabilities and liabilities 
  • Open dialogue with partners-to-be about your asymmetrical advantages 
  • Interlock organizational incentives 
  • Engage outside facilitators during (and after) ideation 
  • Hardwire feedback loops
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Insights for impact: 2022 edition

Insights for impact: 2022 edition

This year-end report synthesizes the key learnings from each of NationSwell’s 2022 research publications and highlights several Studio projects with widely-relevant research deliverables. They cover a range of evergreen and emergent topic areas, including ESG, DEIB, community-centered philanthropy, corporate civic engagement, the future of work, catalytic cross-sector partnerships, and more. By focusing on solutions over exposition, and elevating the most urgent ideas, NationSwell’s insights reports showcase our deep commitment to valuing your time and delivering what you need to lead at your best.

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The state of play: U.S. philanthropy

The state of play: U.S. philanthropy

Philanthropy provides risk-tolerant capital in a way that government and business cannot. It is a necessary ingredient to solving the world’s social and environmental problems. A new wave of giving that can propel projects forward with equity and justice at the fore is increasingly contingent on funders not only donating their financial resources but also embedding the values of trust-based approaches into their overall strategy. This trend report describes five key trends for U.S. philanthropy in 2022:

The trends: 

  • Funders have increased their giving over the last two years, sometimes significantly, but growth in nominal giving hides the fact that funders are donating less of what they earn
  • Trust-based philanthropy found its foothold in the midst of crisis; today, funders are sustaining and evolving those principles
  • Funders are doing more to prioritize racial and social justice in their giving, yet BIPOC voices remain too marginalized in decision-making 
  • Funders are realizing philanthropy’s potential to support climate interventions, but their actual investments are incommensurate to the challenge
  • Collaborative approaches are gaining momentum and proving their impact, even among institutional funders; collective investing models adopt a power sharing approach, taking learnings from individual giving as well as trust- and place-based initiatives
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How Verizon engaged 89,000 employee volunteers in the middle of a global pandemic

How Verizon engaged 89,000 employee volunteers in the middle of a global pandemic

Between 2020 and 2021, Verizon mobilized 89,000 of its employees to volunteer over 1,000,000 hours, at an average of over 7 hours per employee. Far exceeding the industry average of 1.4 hours per employee per year and the average annual volunteer participation rate of 17%, Verizon’s success demonstrates how taking a human-centered and empathetic approach can tap into employees’ diverse motivations for Volunteering. This case study describes six elements of Citizen Verizon Volunteers that are critical to its success: 

  • Cascade volunteerism strategy from the organization’s broader societal purpose.

Verizon linked goals to the time and talents of its employees.

  • Develop a volunteerism-oriented RFP that’s empathetic and transparent toward applicants.

Verizon designed a partner selection process that mitigates legacy deficiencies.

  • Over-index to existing employee skills and organizational capabilities.

Verizon harnessed features intrinsic to the organization and its people.

  • Use metrics to elevate the strategic importance of volunteerism.

Verizon actively promoted the strategic value of volunteerism to the business, its employees, and the communities they serve.

  • Plan to tap diverse motivations among employees.

Verizon used a varied toolkit as opposed to relying on a single engagement lever to bring employees forward.

  • Make participation as easy as possible for employees and partners.

Verizon lifted barriers to entry for participants and created opportunities for engagement that were highly responsive to the current environment.

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