Byron Auguste On Rewiring the U.S. Labor Market
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2022
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
When looking at the U.S. labor market, Byron Auguste sees too many job seekers screened out based on shallow signals like a bachelor’s degree, and too few ‘screened in’ by directly demonstrating the skills needed for the job at hand. To close those opportunity gaps in the American workforce, Byron co-founded and runs Opportunity@Work, which played a key role in Maryland’s decision in early 2022 to drop four-year degree requirements for thousands of state jobs in favor of recruiting from those identified as being Skilled Through Alternate Routes, or STARs.
He joined Tyler to discuss workforce training in the digital economy, re-evaluating college degree requirements in recruitment, why IQ is overrated and conscientiousness is underrated, the major opportunity gap in on-the-job training, what people miss about the German apprenticeship model, the best novel about finding a job, what’s gone wrong with American men, why we need signal pluralism for higher education admission, why he’s wary of AI for predicting labor outcomes, what happened when Maryland rolled back degree requirements for state jobs, the incentive problems in higher education, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded September 6th, 2022
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Transcript
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| 1:18.3 | Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations With Tyler. |
| 1:21.8 | Today I am here, yes, physically here, with Byron Ogeist, who is President and co-founder |
| 1:27.0 | of Opportunity at Work, a civic enterprise which aims to improve the U.S. labor market. |
| 1:32.9 | Byron served for two years in the White House as deputy assistant to the president for economic |
| 1:37.8 | policy and deputy director to the National Economic Council. |
| 1:41.4 | Until 2013 he was senior partner at McKinsey and worked there for many years. |
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