How a PBS station in Eastern Washington created one of the best workforce tools I've seen.
And what policymakers and employers can learn from it.
Around a decade ago, something kept coming up in Jason Miller’s conversations with the companies who underwrite KSPS, the PBS affiliate station in Spokane, Washington.
“Especially companies that were in manufacturing and other types of sectors that weren’t really trying to sell a widget to a local Spokanite, they were saying, ‘Gosh, I really don’t need marketing” through underwriting spots on the station, said Miller, KSPS’s director of corporate investments and partnerships.
“The salesman in me says, ‘What do you need?’ Consistently two, three, four times [the response] is, ‘What I need is people.”
Specifically, they wanted younger workers to fill jobs in skilled fields they might know about—or might never see. Eastern Washington is very rural, and it can be very hard for opportunities even in Spokane to reach young people. “We have a lot of smart kids who feel like they have to leave the region to get a real job,” Miller said.
The solution? Instead of the marketing his sponsors didn’t feel like they needed, Miller and KSPS used sponsored spots to run videos on careers in the region.
Over time, those spots grew into Career Explore Northwest, one part broadcast campaign and one part interactive online resource. I found it earlier this year while working on a project, and it quickly became one of my favorite workforce tools.
Why? It’s a tool built around giving workers what they need to be interested in a job and connections to the resources they need to try to enter the field.
There are many layers to how you get a worker—especially a young worker—in a job that needs filling. A worker may learn about a career, but they may not feel like they can do it or know how they could figure that out.
Career Explore Northwest touches quite a few layers of the problem in ways that are accessible and human. The sponsored spots stir interest and additional online tools allow young workers to dig deeper and see the pathway for them to enter the job—or another job in the next conceptual neighborhood over. It also has a delightfully maximalist (and sortable) resources page, offering connections to aid for the non-training challenges that keep workers from getting jobs, such as housing, food, and healthcare.
To be fair, KSPS is not the only public broadcaster to offer a resource like this—several others do. But I do think it’s a cut above for how intuitive and human-centric its tools are. After talking to Miller and Career Explore Northwest’s users and supporters, I think the resource’s thoughtfulness owes in part to KSPS not being the typical place you would expect something like Career Explore Northwest.
I can tell there was investigation and discovery that led to attacking the problem the best way with the resources available. That’s a fantastic approach for policymaking, which works best when it isn’t trying to bend a problem to a preferred solution.
“We’re public television,” Miller said. “We’re not necessarily workforce experts.”
The funnel.
Miller talks about Career Explore Northwest in terms of the funnel. As you might gather from the above, the sponsored spots are the top of the funnel, introducing young people to a job.
The middle part of the funnel is what’s called a “Virtual Field Trip.” KSPS produces 360-degree walkthroughs of employer sites to share with students what the workplace looks like and what actually happens there. It provides a more-detailed, interactive experience for young people interested in a job but whose schools may not be able to cover a field trip (or may not be able to know how to get a tour themselves).
Users can look around and see not just what’s put on screen by the producers, but also what’s going on in the workplace around each presentation. Just like if they would if they were on an in-person field trip.
“A lot of times kids just didn’t know these careers existed,” said Katie MacKay of MacKay Manufacturing, a contract manufacturer that was Career Explore Northwest’s first sponsor.
MacKay’s Virtual Field Trip, which shows the process of turning a plastic tube into a “lightsaber,”1 is particularly useful for educators, said Scott Kerwien, Spokane Public Schools’ chief of student success and a user of Career Explore in his work.
The process of getting a student to a career isn’t a straight line, he said. Students may think they’re interested in one thing, but then find another job that fits them better in the process of checking out the original job. The MacKay Manufacturing video helps with that process by showing multiple different jobs at one employer and how each contributes to the final product.
“A student might hear about a company and think of only one job, but to see a starting product to finish that puzzle starts to open up more ideas,” Kerwien said. “Because it shows the connectivity in an organization that a student can see themselves in multiple jobs when they might have only known about one of those six jobs before.”
The narrow part of the funnel is “Career Explore Live”: teleconferences between classes of students and workers at an employer, which Miller warns employers are unfiltered. “We do let the interviewee or the employee know that this is a live session,” Miller said. “We’re not monitoring questions.”
Young people might feel more comfortable with a job if they see someone who looks like them doing it or if they can verify with the worker that they really make the salary the employers says they do. They also want to know the catches or the parts of the job that suck because, frankly, some days just suck. Knowing that the bad days are something you can live with can be just as important to a worker’s calculus as how much they might make or whether it’s work they might enjoy.
That robustness of context about doing a job makes Career Explore Northwest a powerful tool for educators, some of whom can struggle to explain jobs that don’t fit their own life experiences, Kerwien said.
“[Educators] all come from four-year college educations. Usually we're experts about talking about what we went through,” Kerwien said. “We have no context of how to frame [jobs outside that sphere] for a kid. That instantly closes doors on options because kids don't have that information.”
Show, don’t tell, that the job is good.
You probably read a lot of stories with headlines like this, or hear the in-person equivalent of it from employers or political leaders:
I do think these sentiments generally come from a place of sincerity, and there are real reasons to be worried about the incoming “silver tsunami” of retirements in hands-on fields where education and other systems haven’t aimed enough young talent in recent decades.
But I also think that, among employers and especially political leaders, there’s a key issue that doesn’t get treated with the respect and attention it needs to address this generation’s workforce challenges:
Workers, and how they need to be convinced that they can do jobs employers say are open and need filling as soon as possible.
Employment’s not just a legal and a financial relationship; it’s a human one. I have met employers who have an expectation that an 18 year old should be ready to commit the next several decades of their life to them because the employer says it will pay well and the job is cool. But just as you probably aren’t going to marry someone because they say they have money and they’re cool, it’s kind of asking a lot for talent just to take employers’ word for it.
And as much as some employers don’t like to acknowledge this, you have to deal with the personal stuff of a worker to actually snag and keep them in a job. It’s hard to see yourself doing a job if no one else in your life has done it, too. Those reference points are awfully hard to manage when you’re living in a rural place or if you don’t have much money.
It’s something I can speak to personally after having grown up in rural Alabama in less-than-economically-secure circumstances. I had no point of reference for what we now call “knowledge work” when I was 14 years old. My mom was then an occasionally employed former seamstress after garment factories largely left North Alabama after NAFTA. My late dad was a power plant laborer. Then, an experiential training program surprised me and placed me at a newspaper. It was the first time that my reading and writing and analyzing all the time manifested as actual job skills. It led to me going to college and, eventually, you putting up with me in this space twice a week.
Career Explore Northwest probably can’t fully duplicate my experience, but it uses the digital tools we have today to take a good shot at it for as many young people as possible. Because people relate better to people like them, it’s also deliberately built to give students in Eastern Washington reference points to jobs they might not know are in their community.
“It doesn’t feel relatable when you’re watching something happening in Tennessee when you live in the Pacific Northwest,” Miller said.
The inefficient business of getting people to a job.
An employer complaint that has bubbled up often in recent workforce policymaking discussions is that employers don’t know if investing in a worker or workforce development will see a decent return.
I don’t want to dismiss that concern. The point of a business is to get the job done and make money. You have to justify expenses, especially with cut-hungry investors in publicly traded companies. But expecting maximum efficiency from workforce development spending is inherently out of tune with how people end up in jobs. After high school or college, many people end up on Plan B. Or E.
Employers can’t reasonably bank on everybody working out, but they can broaden expectations—and build infrastructure—to better catch people interested in working in after leaving other jobs. That’s why it’s so important to have more resources like Career Explore Northwest, which accessibly shows the full range of jobs at some enterprises, creating natural pivot points if someone figures out one job just isn’t for them.
MacKay, the manufacturer, said some of her best employees came from other jobs, like gas station operators or dental assistants. In the Virtual Field Trip, one of MacKay’s machinists talks about how he went to college in another field, which I think is an awesome detail given how absolute everything can feel to young people finishing school.
She said her investment in Career Explore Northwest is hard for her to tag with performance indicators, but she sees it as part of “the betterment of the whole mission.” MacKay said she also has invested in hiring an on-site teacher to train up recruits in an effort to be more proactive about finding the staff she needs to keep her business going.
“I can’t keep complaining about things” in finding talent, MacKay said. “It’s a massive investment, but 90 percent of my students have stayed. So that’s well worth the investment for me.”
Card subject to change.
I enjoyed chatting with Andrea Hsu at NPR for her story about Trump II’s apprenticeship plans and its pay-to-train incentives. It’s a good story, and you can check it out here.
Speaking of which, I’ll be back here later this week with a post on the Trump Administration’s push to one million apprentices. New data indicate that apprentice enrollment dropped last year for the first time since the pandemic. Also, on Monday, Trump II issued guidance that could dramatically reshape how Registered Apprenticeship works and who registers programs and how. Neat.
We also got proposed Workforce Pell regulations last week. I’ll have analysis of those, plus last week’s dismal job numbers, plus whatever’s sure to come up in the Labor Secretary scandal in THE MONEY on Thursday.
Next Tuesday: Workforce has a hard time getting taken seriously. How do we break out of being “niche”?
If you want a little proof of concept for both the site and some of the points I make in the main text: I showed the MacKay Manufacturing Virtual Field Trip to the Star Wars-loving six year old in my life, who recently wrote and illustrated a book largely about how Sabine Wren is awesome. She watched the Virtual Field Trip three times in a row, even though there was no apparent installation of a kyber crystal shown onscreen, something I’m sure she’ll note to me soon enough.
I explained what the point of the video was, and it led to one of the more serious conversations she has had with me about what she wants to do as an adult. “These jobs are cool,” she said, “but I don’t think I want to work one of these jobs when I grow up.”
What she did want to do changed a few times within 15 minutes—she’s six—but it included being an artist “like Frida Kahlo,” then being an author and all the things she thought she could do because she was an author. (She told me her next book is about “why people should like Star Wars.”)