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America is experiencing critical shortages in health care fields, despite a deep reservoir of skilled, immigrant health care workers. These certificate programs can bridge that gap.
Hamida Ebadi didn’t want to come to the U.S. She wanted to use her skills and training to help her own people in Afghanistan. She’d already served as the director of Maternal and Child Health, managing all the country’s maternal hospitals, and worked as an advisor to the deputy minister of public health. 
But the fact that she’d studied public health at Johns Hopkins in the U.S., and worked on an Afghanistan-based team coordinating with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, had drawn unwanted attention. “We heard some threats from our neighbors,” Ebadi says. Those threats on her life, plus a suicide bomb attack near her children’s school, finally pushed Ebadi and her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, to apply for visas and move to America in 2014 with their four children, then ages nine to 20. Ebadi herself was 49 at the time.
Highly-skilled immigrants like Ebadi face unique challenges when they get to the U.S. For many, the first and biggest challenge is that their medical degrees and other credentials earned in their home countries aren’t recognized here. “We know that there are many immigrants that were doctors or nurses in their country of origin that are working here as dietary service workers or otherwise,” says Daniel Bustillo, the director of the Healthcare Career Advancement Program (H-CAP), a national labor-management partnership devoted to innovation in health care career education. “We don’t have a good mechanism for translating their credentials into our system,” Bustillo says. That means that even as headlines lament worker shortages in crucial health care fields, there’s a deep reservoir of qualified workers who can’t access those jobs.
Finding a job was, of course, among the host of challenges Ebadi faced when she arrived in America. “It’s very hard for health professionals especially, who had good jobs in their country, but when they come to the U.S., they start from scratch,” she says. 
Through the International Rescue Committee, Ebadi was introduced to a program run by the Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Healthcare (BACH) which provides trainees with certificates that can help them get good jobs. This program combines classroom and on-the-job training, allowing participants to advance as quickly as they can demonstrate competency in certain required skills. It’s one of many such programs that are designed to help immigrant workers like Ebadi advance quickly into jobs that better match their skills. 
According to a 2019 report by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), supported by Lumina Foundation, adults of immigrant origin make up 30% of all working-age adults who lack postsecondary credentials, making this a crucial population to target with efforts to increase postsecondary attainment. MPI’s research has also found that non-degree credentials, including certificates like the ones Hamida received, significantly increase labor-force participation, particularly for first- and second-generation immigrant women. Amid the COVID-19 crisis’ historic levels of unemployment — the highest since the depression era — these efforts to empower and increase labor-force participation are more urgently needed than they’ve been in generations, with Pew Research noting that the unemployment rate for immigrant workers is significantly higher than it is for their U.S. born counterparts. 
The BACH program was designed in partnership with local hospitals, including Johns Hopkins, and with the Community College of Baltimore County, explains Kiera McCarthy, BACH’s Apprenticeship Manager. Participants start by taking an unpaid course in career readiness that helps prepare them for work in the U.S. BACH covers the cost of this course, so it’s unpaid, but free to participants, who receive a Community College of Baltimore County Continuing Education certificate upon completion. Then, they apply for an apprenticeship that provides on-the-job training while they work towards another certificate. 
“When they first start, they’ll start at maybe 50% of the final wage,” McCarthy explains. On-the-job training gives them the opportunity to demonstrate mastery of key skills, and as they progress, their pay increases. Participants can work through this program at their own speed, McCarthy says. “Hopefully, for immigrants, if they worked in the health care field in the past, they might be able to demonstrate mastery of those skills sooner,” she says. On the other hand, if English or another aspect of the program proves challenging, they’re not penalized for taking the time to improve. 
Ebadi went through the Environmental Care Supervisor track at Johns Hopkins Hospital, training to run a housekeeping team. Upon completing the program, she received a Journeyworker certificate from the Maryland Department of Labor. Ebadi says she’d prefer to be treating patients, “but because my credentials have not been accepted by the U.S. government, at least this position gave me some training to improve my managerial skills.” 
Once in the program, Ebadi appreciated the fact that she could get paid while getting up to speed on work culture in the U.S. “I had the opportunity to learn about the culture, to learn about some other processes like payroll processing and annual evaluations, training of the staff, grievance processes—a lot of new things,” she says. She’d managed people in Afghanistan, but found the work culture in the U.S. to be very different. “People here are very open, and they discuss everything openly with their managers and supervisors,” Ebadi says.” And there are some policies that get implemented here, like writing up people, disciplining, those kinds of things—it’s very strict here, and in our country, it’s not as strict.”
Certificates, apprenticeships, and other post-secondary credentials can be enormously valuable in creating pipelines into professions, Bustillo says. But there’s also a great need for programs that help people advance within a profession. “Especially in health care, we have tremendous occupational segregation,” he says. Bustillo says that as many as 70% of the home care workers H-CAP works with, for example, are immigrant workers, and there’s a real risk of segregating black, and brown and immigrant workers into these kinds of lower-paid fields within health care. 
The BACH program is designed to help both immigrant workers new to the U.S. health care system and internal workers who want to advance at a place like Johns Hopkins, McCarthy says. The initial idea was to focus specifically on immigrant and refugee workers, but hospitals also wanted to create ladders for internal workers, she adds. “From the employer’s perspective, they have found that nationally, the apprenticeship retention rate is significantly higher.” 
For her part, Ebadi appreciated the opportunity to move directly into a supervisory role. “If I compared this job with my previous job and my background, it would be frustrating,” she says. But she says that after three years at Hopkins, she’s now working as a Patient Referral Coordinator with the Baltimore Medical System. “My plan is to go back to Hopkins with the same position I have now or a better one,” Ebadi says. “I’d prefer to work either with patients directly or at least in a public health position. It’s not going to be easy at this age. But I will try.”
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This piece was produced in partnership with Lumina Foundation. Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. You can learn more about their mission to prepare people for informed citizenship and success in a global economy here.

Deep collaboration between higher education, business, and local government is creating new pathways to success for Detroit workers.
“Life happened.” That’s the short version of why Shawnte Cain left Wayne State University with only one class left to take before completing her degree. The longer version: she was working multiple jobs and taking care of her grandmother, who was ill. “I just didn’t end up going back,” Cain says now.
Even with only one class remaining, a lot had to happen for Cain to complete her degree. When she inquired about going back, in 2017, she learned another class had been added to the requirements for her program. She also owed Wayne State money. “I didn’t even know what my outstanding balance was, I just knew that I had one,” she says. That debt would have to be settled before she could re-enroll. 
Cain was determined to finish her education. It was part of her life plan with her fiancé, Brandon Hall. But one Monday night in 2017, just a few days after the couple had moved in together, Hall complained of chest pains. He’d been born with a heart defect, but didn’t want to go to the hospital because he’d just gotten a promotion at work. Hall asked Cain to go out and pick up some medication for him. By the time she got back, he was dead.
With all these obstacles, both financial and emotional, it took a lot to get Cain re-enrolled at Wayne State. It also took a lot of behind-the-scenes work to create the programs that would eventually help her complete her degree. In 2018, the Lumina Foundation designated Detroit as a Talent Hub, in recognition of ongoing coalition work led by the Detroit Regional Chamber, Wayne State University, and Macomb Community College. Together, they had set a goal of re-engaging the region’s 690,000 adults who had completed some college but hadn’t gotten a degree. 
The Talent Hub designation recognizes communities that are doing innovative work to increase post-high school learning and training, with a focus on eliminating educational disparities for communities of color. Talent Hubs receive grants to support their work. “The Talent Hub [designation] brought us to this point,” says Dawn S. Medley, the Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management at Wayne State University. Medley says the city had applied to the program and been rejected, which made the coalition realize, “We had to bring our A-game.” 
Medley created one of the programs that enabled Cain to re-enroll and complete her degree: Wayne State’s Warrior Way Back program. She realized that outstanding educational debt often created compounding problems for students: “We just locked people out of higher education and locked them out of the opportunity to ever pay off that debt.”
“I’m an English major,” Medley says, but she found the math simple: forgiving some former students’ outstanding debt would allow them to re-enroll and start paying tuition again. That insight became the Warrior Way Back program, in which students with less than $1,500 in outstanding debt can re-enroll and “learn” off their debt at a rate of $500 for each semester completed. Medley says the program has generated roughly $750,000 for the university. “The opportunity to do what is right for the student has become an opportunity to do what is right for the institution,” she says. 
Working with this population of adults who’ve taken classes but haven’t received a degree is an obvious move for universities. But it’s also a top priority for the local business community, says Melanie D’Evelyn, the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Director of Detroit Drives Degrees: “Whenever we talk with businesses, the No. 1 issue that CEOs and our members say they are confronting is the issue of talent.” 
Coalition work comes with a host of challenges, but Detroit has been successful in bringing both business and higher education to the table. “One of the keys to our success has been starting out with the higher eds and actually proving that they are willing to implement big changes at scale,” D’Evelyn says. Building on that foundation, the Chamber and other partners, including local government and nonprofits, are also committing to make big changes. “That’s not a typical town-gown relationship, especially in a town this large,” notes Wayne State’s Medley.
Now, the Chamber and other partners are looking for more creative ways to work together, including taking the state of Michigan’s “Hot 50” in-demand jobs for the future and mapping them to local credential and degree programs. One big area of focus now is encouraging employers to offer tuition reimbursement for employees. “There’s a proven benefit to employers to do that,” D’Evelyn says. “It does help their bottom line.” The Chamber is surveying its members to see how many offer such programs and how many are interested. 
When Cain did re-enroll at Wayne State in 2018, she took advantage of both Warrior Way Back and a tuition reimbursement program provided by her employer, the MGM Grand Detroit. Warrior Way Back representatives “were kind of like my concierge team to make sure I had the best experience going back to school,” she says. With all this support at her back, Cain actually went on to take another two classes after completing her degree in public relations, allowing her to update her social media skills—and keep her son in WSU’s preschool, which is free for students. 
Returning to school as an adult was different, Cain says. “I approached it more with a business sense,” she says. Education and work “are not two separate entities when you’re an adult,” she says. “This is like another way of training on the job.” 
Now her new boyfriend is also enrolled in the Warrior Way Back program, and Cain herself is thinking of pursuing a master’s degree. “My dreams were torn apart,” she says, but “sometimes you have to step out of your dreams to create a better reality.”
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This piece was produced in partnership with Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis that is committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. You can learn more about their mission to prepare people for informed citizenship and success in a global economy here.

A global health crisis hurts even those who don’t fall ill, especially people with no formal education beyond high school who are caught in the economic riptide of soaring unemployment.
As tens of millions of adults find themselves among the temporarily or longer-term unemployed, certifications represent a promising path back to work. These industry-recognized credentials, usually awarded based on an assessment of skills and knowledge, represent significant learning and have great value in employment markets. Better yet, they can be acquired quickly and usually represent skills in demand by businesses and other employers.
For the first time, Lumina Foundation can include industry certifications in Stronger Nation, the foundation’s signature online report measuring progress toward the national goal of ensuring that, by 2025, 60 percent of working-age Americans have earned college degrees, certificates, and other credentials of value beyond the high school diploma.

When Lumina released its first Stronger Nation report in 2008, the nation’s degree attainment level was 38 percent, and the country had entered the Great Recession. At the time, it was considered the worst economic dislocation of the postwar period.

That recession transformed job markets in ways that made learning and skill acquisition after high school essential for millions more Americans. This demand has magnified in today’s pandemic-induced downturn — the most severe economic recession in nearly a century, according to the OECD. Individuals with only a high school diploma are more likely to face unemployment and are less likely to see their job prospects rebound without more education. In fact, virtually all jobs created since 2007 require some form of learning after high school.

The implications of this shift are profound and affect more than jobs. Earning quality credentials helps ensure that Americans — regardless of skin color or where they live — can buy homes, pay for health care, and save for retirement and their children’s education. Also, educated, economically secure adults tend to be more engaged in their communities, voting and volunteering at higher rates and showing greater appreciation for cultures different from their own.

When opportunities for learning after high school are limited, fundamental inequities develop and spread throughout society. It’s clear by now that we can only survive our current crises and prosper in the future if we make educational success a priority for everyone, especially Americans of color who have been left behind. Certifications can open the door to opportunity and provide a first step.

Until recently, Stronger Nation counted only degrees and certificates because reliable data on certifications were unavailable. Now, we have national data showing that 3.8 percent of Americans hold a certification as their highest credential.

The recognition of these valuable credentials is overdue, but before including certifications in the Stronger Nation count, we wanted to ensure they met Lumina’s quality definition–that is, that they led to further learning and better employment outcomes.

We know that people with industry certifications and no other credential beyond a high school diploma are more likely to be working than those without them. We also know people with certifications have higher salaries, are more likely to be promoted, and have greater job satisfaction than people without them. Also, certifications are more fairly distributed across racial and ethnic groups and provide pathways to more education and job and career advancement.

Including certifications in attainment measures offers a more accurate picture. With certifications, educational attainment in the United States for adults 25 to 64 years old is 51.3 percent, marking the first time we can say more than half of American adults have a credential of value beyond the high school diploma.

The country still has a long way to go beginning an economic recovery. But we have a clearer view of where we stand.

See the Stronger Nation Data Tool here.
 

The best business leaders know that a diverse workforce makes for a strong, sustainable company. If you’re an executive, you probably strive to make sure your workforce covers a broad range of experiences, across gender, race, ability and socioeconomic background. But is your company missing out on the benefits of an age-diverse workforce?
Age is an overlooked diversity category, but it’s a vital one, according to recent AARP research. Because people in the US are living and staying active longer, it means they’re part of the purchasing public for longer and that companies could be leaving millions on the table by not taking advantage of these workers’ experience.
AARP’s findings show that the US missed out on a potential $850 billion in GDP in 2018 because people over 50 who wanted to return to work — or who were working and wanted to change jobs or be promoted — were overlooked. Most of that impact fell on “large, higher-productivity sectors, including finance, trade, and professional services, which rely on the contributions of a highly-engaged labor force.” 
Though the study was completed before the current coronavirus crisis, Dr. Joo Yeoun Suh, Director of Longevity Economy at AARP, projected that even without the economic hardships caused by the pandemic, age discrimination alone was on track to lose the US economy $3.9 trillion by 2050, when Gen X and Millennials join the ranks of the 50+. 
As Lori A. Trawinski, a director in the AARP Public Policy Institute, put it: “By removing the lens of age as a way to view existing or potential employees, you can shift the focus to their abilities, skills, experience and knowledge, where it belongs. You will also expand the talent recruitment pool, which ultimately benefits the organization.”
But not every business is set to miss out on the benefits of age diversity. In the UK, many companies have embraced the idea of an age-diverse workforce. More than 20 years ago, home supply company B&Q — the UK analog of Home Depot — “blazed a trail with its active over-50s recruitment policy,” according to the Guardian. 
As B&Q people director Fraser Longden told the Guardian in 2013, the initiative immediately proved a wise one. “We trialed a store staffed entirely by [more experienced] colleagues in 1989,” Longden said. “This produced 18% higher profits with six times less staff turnover. “
“One of the benefits of age diversity is that policies and practices that resonate with [experienced] workers are also appreciated by new entries and workers of any age or life-stage — meaningful work, purpose, impact, flexibility, and lifelong learning,” says Ramsey Alwin, Director of Thought Leadership around financial resilience at AARP. 
B&Q saw this in action: Experienced workers often desire more flexible schedules and benefits that reflect experience and tenure, but B&Q found that applying these benefits across its entire workforce, for employees of all ages, helped them retain talent. Along with lower turnover, the company experienced 39% less absenteeism and 58% less shrinkage. 
When the company was shortlisted for a Personnel Today age diversity award, B&Q was touted as able to “[establish] the kind of success achieved in age diversity in other areas; specifically disability and race” and “[develop] a work/life balance strategy.”
Similarly, in a 2018 survey of 1000 employee respondents, AARP found that when companies diversified the age of their employees, all employees benefitted: “Seven in 10 workers say they like working with generations other than their own, and the majority agree that both younger and [experienced] workers bring a set of positive benefits that enhance the workplace environment,” AARP reported.
Seventy-nine percent of the respondents said they appreciated being able to pass on their experience and skills to workers younger than them; 77% of respondents said they valued their more experienced coworkers for the guidance they could give, while 69% said age diversity made the workplace more productive. The survey also found that “mentorship can enhance recipients’ “soft skills” and career-related knowledge in addition to the actual skills that get a job done.”
But there’s also a bottom line imperative: AARP’s recent research discovered that “the [experienced] cohort contributed 40% of U.S. GDP in 2018 — an outsized impact for a group that comprises just 35% of the population.” 
Fifty-plus Americans contribute billions of dollars in spending to the economy.  There’s an economic incentive for business leaders to consider them closely in the development of products, programs, and marketing plans.

Anyone who has been in a brainstorm can tell you: The needs of the specific people in the room are naturally reflected in the development of the product or program. By that logic, if you exclude the 50+ from your staff, you run an increased risk of excluding them from your business considerations, and then from your buying market – because you haven’t created something that’s relevant to their needs.  It presents a blind spot the size of $850 billion in GDP.  
How can business leaders maximize age diversity in the workplace — and unlock their potential contributions of the 50-plus? As with all workplace diversity efforts, the first step is changing attitudes. AARP concluded that it will require “tackling workplace practices that push [experienced] workers out the door before they are ready to retire, shifting perceptions that prevent [those] workers from changing jobs or that pass them over for promotions, and overcoming biases in the hiring process that keep [experienced] workers from re-entering the workplace.”
It’s also important for companies to institute the kind of across-the-board culture that will help them retain more experienced workers. Providing flexible work options helps young parents, but it also makes work more accessible to 50+ employees. Offering on-the-job training to seasoned as well as newer employees will also help create an age diverse workplace. Actively recruiting for the 50+ for roles that align with their expertise in a way that recognizes the value of age within diversity initiatives. 
It’s clear that a diverse workforce – scaling generations, genders, races, and backgrounds, will be  essential to your company remaining competitive and innovative in the global economy.
This article was produced in partnership with AARP. You can learn more here about how AARP is shaping the Future of Work.

Distant ties often yield the most significant opportunities. Learn how to make the most of yours.
We’ve all heard this job advice before: When it comes to landing that career-changing position, it’s not what you do or how good you do it that matter — it’s whom you know.
But as the world around us gets smaller, our networks actually become much larger. And since our networks are more expansive than they’ve ever been, there’s never been a better moment for improving our professional — and even our personal — lives. Getting outside of your immediate circle and making connections is vital, not just for job leads, but also to build a vibrant,  successful and supported personal life.
“Close, deep relationships are important in life,” said Ramsey Alwin, Director of Financial Resilience Thought Leadership at AARP.  “But it also helps to have a vast network to tap to navigate the many life transitions we all will continue to experience as we age. Whether you’re moving to a new city, getting a divorce, or changing jobs – knowing a gal that knows a guy that knows a guy who can help you goes a long way in making the new life transition less overwhelming.”
In fact, according to AARP research, the people you barely know — or know only through a degree of separation — can be a game-changing investment.
And the power of weak ties goes beyond job hunts, it’s also valuable for life situations like a change in relationship status, new caregiving responsibilities for the old or young, or simple tasks like finding a good dentist or plumber.
This isn’t an entirely new concept. Way back in 1929, the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called “Chain-Links,” in which he speculated that anyone could be linked to anyone else by just a few personal connections — from the lowliest laborer to the most illustrious leader. 
This phenomenon, he concluded, was a modern one: “…Something is going on here, a process of contraction and expansion which is beyond rhythms and waves,” Karinthy wrote. “Something coalesces, shrinks in size, while something else flows outward and grows.”
The idea was given a practical test in 1967, with sociologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world” experiment. Milgram mailed packages to random people in Kansas or Nebraska, asking them to return it to a stranger — a student at Harvard University. The catch was that the package had to travel from hand to to hand. A farmer, for example, handed his package off to a local minister, who had a colleague in Boston, and so on. Most packages passed through between two and ten people before they made it to their targets. 
In both Karinthy’s thought experiment and Milgram’s practical experiment, the links between people depended not on close, personal friendships, but on looser acquaintanceships. This  idea was further established by Mark Granovetter at Johns Hopkins in 1973: weak ties are in some cases the strongest. In his paper “The Power of Weak Ties,” Granovetter argued that “micro-level” social links could be the most fruitful.
Since any two people with strong social ties — spouses, colleagues, close friends — tend to share the same social circles, he wrote, people would be wiser to look to more casual relationships to develop a stronger overall network, which can be relied upon in diverse life situations. This means introducing yourself to new people: the grocery clerk, the crossing guard, your cousin’s college roommate, or a new barber.  As AARP put it in a recent report: “Weak ties have access to information and contacts that you might not have.” 
Weak ties, according to Alwin’s research, are especially important for mid-life, mid-career workers — as well as minorities and immigrants, for whom weak ties can be a bridge to an otherwise hostile job market. But it can also help millennials, who may find themselves in need of networks of support when caring for two generations at once. 
Alwin said she’d noticed examples in her own life: When she recently conducted an inventory of her social connections, she found that she had strong ties among well-established colleagues her age and older, but she had few connections to younger peers. “I talk at the water cooler with the interns, but do I take them out for coffee?” she said. “I realized how quickly you can lose touch with emerging leaders if you’re not intentional about it.” As we age, our social networks spread out horizontally, but at a certain point they begin to contract; it’s important to maintain a broad network to beat loneliness and isolation and “shore up relevance and resilience,” Alwin said.
So how do you use those weak ties to broaden your professional and social network — and find support when you need it most? First, conduct an audit of who you know. Notice patterns: are all your friends of the same age as you, or the same religion? What kind of people are underrepresented among your weak ties — and how could you change that?
Social media can be a good place to start. Resources such as LinkedIn and Facebook can show you who you’re connected to, and who those people are connected to. It’s easy to message someone you know and ask for an introduction to someone you don’t know: “There’s a lot of transferable credibility through these tangential relationships,” Alwin said.
But it’s also important to increase your range of weak ties — across age, race, gender and class and geographic borders. It can be as simple as taking an evening class at the community center in a language you don’t speak, joining a community group, or learning a new sport. Alwin said she broadened her weak ties by becoming a Girl Scout troop leader and getting to know more parents in the neighborhood.
Then consider changing your routine. Remember that everyone you meet, even if you don’t become close, could be a potential bridge to an opportunity. And don’t be afraid to reach out, Alwin says. 
“People want to help and to be helpful,” she said. “And they want others to learn through their experiences.”
This article was produced in partnership with AARP. You can learn more here about how AARP is shaping the Future of Work.

It seemed like the world changed overnight. One moment, people were going about their business; the next, they were going into quarantine, and trying to figure out how to keep working without leaving their homes. Many found themselves entirely rethinking the way we work — and getting creative in the face of change.

There are now virtual versions of previously very in-person professions: In Brooklyn, hairstylist JaBarie Anderson is pivoting from giving people haircuts to coaching people as they give themselves haircuts. Through Zoom, he’s worked with clients all over the world, he told NPR; many other barbers have followed suit.

Other unlikely professions are also making forays into virtuality: Florida plumber Patrick Garner spoke with Slate about his days talking clients through fixing their own toilets. His company prepares sterilized boxes of parts and tools for homeowners to use, then explains how to use them over video chat. For office workers, the shift to working from home has been more seamless — but the changes have prompted many to take stock of their professional goals. In Seattle, Kristin Anthony was able to continue herwork developing academic testing material from home. But being home all day made her start to think about whether she actually liked her job.

“The deeper questions the pandemic awakened in her subconscious made her re-think her career path,” reporter Vanessa Misciagna explained. Anthony realized she wanted to explore software development instead.

Whether the pivot is small or large, quarantine has prompted many Americans to rethink their professional plans, passions and goals. And as many industries feel less stable in reaction to the crisis, more people than ever are looking to re-career.

Even before COVID-19 hit, changing careers was becoming increasingly commonplace, according to AARP. In a national survey conducted before the outbreak, AARP researchers found that 78% of workers were likely to change careers at least once during their lifetime. According to AARP’s Ramsey Alwin and Lona Choi-Allum “Gone are the days of our parents and grandparents, when everyone expected to live a three-stage life: Invest in education, work hard, and then retire. Instead, people of all ages are navigating a nonlinear, multistage life experience.”

Re-careering can mean more than just changing jobs. According to Alwin and Choi-Allum, careers are “lifelong occupations” that “allow an individual to grow professionally and advance within the hierarchy of a company or industry.”

And longer lifespans give workers more time to pursue those higher life goals of growth and advancement. “Greater longevity is changing the way we learn, earn, connect, and live,” Alwin and Choi-Allum wrote. “With longer, healthier lives, many want and need to work longer, and given the changing nature of work, career trajectories are changing as well.”

People change careers for many reasons, AARP found:

• • Ambition: people changed careers to maximize their earnings and status, and to find greater flexibility in their lifestyle.
  • Misfortune: Divorce, illness, layoffs, and workplace conflict often precipitated recareering.
  • Passion: as people age and grow as individuals, they often discover new interests they want to pursue — and those interests become more urgent as people age and “someday” becomes “now or never.”

The second two factors may often build off each other, and covid could intensify this effect: “When something catastrophic like [COVID-19] happens, it’s human nature to take stock of the how fleeting and precious life can be, particularly when you have reached a certain age,” wrote Kerry Hannon, author of What’s Next? Updated: Finding Your Passion and Your Dream Job in Your Forties, Fifties and Beyond.

As the pandemic wears on, those who have already had the experience of breaking into a new industry at midlife or later might now have an advantage in adaptability in a post-covid world: the exigencies of the crisis may reward those who are nimble and quick learners.

“Making a career change in the midst of a global pandemic might seem wild at first,” wrote Fast Company’s Susan Peppercorn. “But many people right now are considering taking a job in a different industry, whether it’s because they’ve been laid off from a job in a struggling industry or because the crisis caused them to reevaluate some major life choices.”

Even those who have re-careered before will face challenges, of course. As unemployment soars, many people will look for new jobs for months despite high qualifications. Others will change careers in ways they’re unhappy about, because they have no other options in their field. For example, a digital recruiter might find themselves taking a job at an Amazon warehouse out of desperation, despite the lower pay, harsh working conditions, and possibly deadly health repercussions.

And it’s also possible that covid might make changing careers easier: because so many businesses are retraining employees en masse, hiring a worker with less experience becomes less costly. And it further normalizes midlife career changes. As many are standing at the precipice of reinvention to adapt to a post-COVID economy, creativity in re-careering will also help us collectively recover.

For pre-pandemic re-careerers, “there was a common spine to the success stories,” Hannon wrote. “No one made a rash move. They made sure they had their financial lives in order. They did their homework and research. They asked why me, why now, why this product or service or job? What can I bring to it that will make a difference and bring meaning to my life? But the seed for the change began in a crisis.”

If workers maintain a growth mindset in the midst of this crisis, they may be able to remain relevant and resilient through changes both wanted and unwanted.

Editor’s Note: The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that our society’s most essential workers are also our most vulnerable. That includes our interns.
In honor of National Internship Day, NationSwell Council member and “Pay Our Interns”‘ Co-Founder and Executive Director Carlos Mark Vera reminds us that if we want to #BuildItBackBetter, the American workplace can no longer compensate interns with experience — we have to compensate them with pay.
Experience doesn’t pay the bills, and many young people, including people of color and low income people, need to contribute to their household income. As millions of people have lost their jobs, young people have been deeply impacted. From cancelled internships and reduced wages to the evaporation of service industry jobs that many rely on to make ends meet, young people need our help.   
And while workers under 25 only comprise one-fifth of hourly paid workers in the country, they made up almost 50% of those paid the federal minimum wage or less. Currently over 7 million people under 30 are unemployed as a result of the pandemic. Fifteen percent of those between 18 and 24 were already living in poverty as of 2019—and that rate is higher for people of color. 
Many young people don’t qualify for unemployment and weren’t eligible for CARES Act funding, effectively being shut out of Congress’ efforts to support workers and their families. 
We need to take action. That’s why Pay Our Interns launched #SaveInternships, an intern relief fund that has provided over $30k in direct assistance to over 40 individuals, and why we are calling on Congress to include funding in the next stimulus package that will create jobs and provide assistance to young people. 
And, in the long term, leaders in the public, private, and nonprofit sector need to come together to develop to create jobs for young people so that we do not leave a generation behind.
Thursday is National Intern Day, and to celebrate this day we ask you to join us in taking action:  

1. Sign the letter to Congress asking them to invest in job creation for young people. 
2. Donate to the Intern Relief Fund so you can support young people directly. 
3. You can share your support by posting on National Intern Day. Here is a social media toolkit with some sample tweets and graphics you can post to Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook! 

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Carlos Mark Vera is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Pay Our Interns. He is also a NationSwell Council Member. To find out more about the NationSwell Council, visit our hub.

During last Friday’s NationSwell Conversation, acclaimed documentarian Ken Burns put this current moment in historical context. He suggested that 2020 — and the confluence of COVID-19, global recession, racial injustice and political turmoil — constitutes one of the four greatest periods of crisis in American history, alongside the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II.

The toll of each past crisis strikes a raw, familiar chord: loss of human life, anxiety and misery at scale, and immense economic displacement and insecurity. But there is another side to them: each period also gave birth to paradigmatic social and economic transformation and progress, from Emancipation to the New Deal to the domestic and international programs and policies that ushered in the most sustained period of economic growth in global history.

They serve as testimony — rich in precedent, insight and inspiration — that out of rupture and suffering, we can emerge better than we were before.

Before COVID-19, all of the ills and inequities were there in plain sight: our nation’s painfully unfinished work to redress systemic racism and injustice; intense polarization and division; gaping inequality in access to education, health, housing and economic opportunity; a fraying of our most important democratic institutions and norms; and behind all of it, a sense that the forces of selfishness and tribalism were faring too well against the countervailing ethos of  interdependence and a shared commitment to the common good.

And now a pandemic has struck — shaking us from drift  and shining a floodlight on the injustices, the corrosion and on the fragility of what’s holding us together.

That’s our opening.

And that is why we are kicking off #BuilditBackBetter: an initiative that will invite the NationSwell community to come together to surface the solutions and ideas that can help us to emerge from this period of crisis with a more equitable, inclusive, resilient society and planet.

#BuilditBackBetter will kick-off with important, wide-reaching conversations, like our July 22 event on anti-racism with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Carmen Rojas, PhD. Those conversations will launch a series of tracks focused on vital issues, including: Economic Opportunity, Sustainability, Data for Good, Education, The Future of Work, Building a Culture of Connection and Belonging — and several more to be announced in the weeks ahead. Within each track, working groups of diverse leaders will reflect, explore, ideate, pressure test and surface powerful (often, cross-sector) solutions. We’ll place gender and racial equity and justice at the very core of this undertaking.

As we go, we’ll publish solutions and ideas for this community and a broader national audience of tens of millions online to bring them into the journey —  and invite them to take action alongside us. We’ll capture some of the most powerful solutions and insights generated by each track and share those findings with all of you, to inform and inspire your leadership, work and citizenship. And, of course, we’ll find areas of collaboration, where together, we can take action and drive change and energy behind the solutions that surface.

Now is our time — as a community of pragmatic problem-solvers, innovators, builders and clear-eyed idealists — to work for the paradigmatic change and progress that the current moment offers and that future generations call on us to deliver.

We are so grateful to our extraordinary partners: AARP, AARP Foundation, Camelback Ventures, Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, Lumina Foundation, The Patrick J McGovern Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Schultz Family Foundation, Starbucks, Workday — and several to be named later — whose support and expertise is so essential to this initiative.

We are thankful to you all for your leadership and for the opportunity to serve and support you. NationSwell exists for you, and we hope that #BuilditBackBetter will provide you a vehicle to seize this moment of crisis as an opportunity to build the nation we’ve never been, the society we seek and the world that must be.

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Greg Behrman is CEO and Founder of NationSwell.

Curbside Chronicle is an Oklahoma magazine sold entirely by people experiencing or at risk of experiencing homelessness. By the organization’s estimates, they’ve been able to help half of their vendors attain housing. And though helping people experiencing homelessness get money is a huge part of why they operate, they also pride themselves on building their vendors’s confidence through creating a reason for face-to-face interaction with customers.
All that changed in the COVID-19 era, and now they’re taking action to serve their community in different ways. As part of NationSwell Live, we’re amplifying their efforts — and showing you how you can get involved.
Here’s what they had to say about how we can all take action to help people experiencing homelessness through this crisis.
NationSwell: Can you please introduce yourself?
Curbside Chronicle’s Whitley O’Connor: My name is Whitley O’Connor, I am the Social Enterprise Strategist for the Homeless Alliance. The Homeless Alliance is the parent organization of the Curbside Chronicle, which is the street paper that my wife and I founded seven years ago. A street paper is a publication that is partially created and completely sold by individuals who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness. There are about 115 around the world, about 35 in the U.S. It’s something that kind of started in New York and spread all over the world, all independently run. So it’s not like one big group, but we all have an association. We work through, um, in addition to curbside, we have started pursuing, um, other additional ventures to provide employment. Whether it’s on the preventative side for folks who haven’t experienced homelessness yet or for transitioning our vendors who sell the magazine into next steps.
We focus primarily on individuals who are experiencing or at risk of homelessness. 70% of our clients at the Homeless Alliance are what we call “street homeless” — they’re currently in a space that’s not habitable for human beings. The other 30% or so are folks that we have gotten into housing and they’re not quite to the point that we’d call self sufficiency. For the paper itself, a large group of our workforce are folks that are interested in employment and they want to make money, but they feel as though they’ve been excluded from the workforce due to various barriers — whether it’s mental illness, incarceration records, lack of transportation or education, various barriers that we’ve worked through.
Now, I want to say maybe about 50% of those individuals are in housing through our program. And so have this like sort of revolving door where we have folks that, because of their barriers, they’ll always be selling the magazine. And we have others that were able to transition to other employment. But we do have a pretty good success rate of getting people into housing if they’re willing to stick with the program and work with us. But we don’t have a cap or requirement to entering our program. Anyone who needs our program is welcome to utilize it. So just because you’re getting the housing doesn’t mean you can’t sell anymore.
NS: How has COVID-19 impacted that community?
CC: I describe our vendors as modern day newsies. And so just like you would have seen boys and girls, men, women on street corners yelling, “Extra, extra!” — That’s kind of where vendors do. That’s kind of the model that street papers utilize. Door-to-door sales aren’t really legal or profitable U.S. anymore, and so our folks are in business districts, are on the side of the road on busy intersections selling the magazine.
So obviously the money component is a big part of it, but another big part of our mission is breaking down barriers between individuals, between our vendor and our customer. I’m giving people a reason to interact with someone that they normally wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s not really a typical reason to interact with the person staying on the street corner holding a sign. This gives you a reason to interact with them, to roll down your window, to engage.
Breaking down that stigma is a really big deal. It also boosts our vendors’ confidence. They start to build these salesmanship skills. So when COVID-19 hit, it shut us down. You go from like this face to face interactions that’s key to what we do — but we don’t publish online — that face to face interaction is a giant part of the mission. Right? And so you go nearly overnight to not wanting to interact with people anymore. So we were one of the first street papers to shut down because we wanted to take an overabundance of precaution. People experiencing homelessness tend to have higher health barriers and preexisting conditions than the general public. And so we wanted to protect them.
So we started selling the magazine online for the first time in an effort to raise money for vendor fund. That vendor fund works in many ways like the restaurant funds and health care fund and whatnot that you’ve seen pop up. It’s an emergency fund that our vendors could apply to for things like rent assistance, food assistance, to pay their phone bills — all those things that they were using the money from the magazines they sold for. The idea was that they could apply for these funds to tap into.
NS: How can our audience take action to help? 
CC: If we do this really well, if we respond to this pandemic and its economic crisis really well, we’ll all come out a little bit poorer. It sounds weird, but it’s kind of what needs to happen. Obviously economically, most people have been hit by this. Not everyone, but most people. But in general, this is a time where everyone’s really going to have to — if we want to not see even further increased economic disparity — we’re going to have to see some pretty drastic redistribution of wealth here. It’s going to have to be on an individual and voluntary manner, but hopefully that’s what we’ll see.
But also, we’d love people to go online and read the magazine. Obviously, we’re pretty proud of the product we put out. One thing from a social enterprise stand point that we really hold dear is that we want our product to be of value. We don’t want folks to buy it because of the social mission, right? Obviously, that is why most people start engaging, but we want them to pick up our magazine and say, “Oh, man, that’s a really valuable product!” We’ve won Best Magazine in Oklahoma for the past two years. We just won a number of regional journalism awards, and so we’re really proud of what we’re putting out.
NationSwell Live is a one-hour event on June 26, 2020 that will convene organizations like Curbside Chronicle that have been at the frontlines of COVID-19 response for communities with some of the most urgent need. Together, we’ll take meaningful steps towards offering help at a time when so many need it. Find out more here.