Steven Hussain is Vice President of Workforce Programs and Community Relations at Prologis and has spent most of his career working on behalf of equitable workforce development. He is also a member of LISC's Emerging Leaders Council. He shared with LISC his insights about how the COVID-19 pandemic is transforming the labor landscape, what's missing from our nation's approach to workforce development, and why he's optimistic about the post-pandemic future for workers.
As of mid-November, more than 22 million Americans were receiving some form of jobless benefits from the government. With COVID rates rising across the country and the prospect of further business closures on the horizon, COVID continues to devastate certain segments of the workforce – particularly those working in sectors like travel and hospitality.
Steven Hussain is the Vice President of Workforce Programs and Community Relations at Prologis, a real estate investment fund specializing in logistics facilities. He is also a member of LISC’s Emerging Leaders Council and has been involved with workforce development in the private, non-profit and government sectors. He spoke with Anna Alekseyeva, VP of Strategy at LISC, about the workforce development ecosystem today and how it is responding to the economic changes precipitated by COVID.
Can you start by describing your role at Prologis and what your experience in the workforce development space has been?
I'm the Vice President of Workforce Programs and Community Relations at Prologis. In my role, I focus on building talent solutions for logistics employers. Prologis is the world's largest logistics real estate developer. We have over 5,000 customers, including brands like Walmart, Amazon, UPS and FedEx. My job is to think about what the talent pipeline for those companies will look like and how that talent development pipeline is being built.
I started my career in the collective impact and workforce development space and then moved over to work for the Mayor of San Antonio doing economic and workforce development. Then, before I joined Prologis, I was the Chief Mission Officer of Goodwill San Antonio, where we ran large-scale training programs, which served about 15,000 clients a year.
What drove you into this area of work?
Like far too many Americans, I grew up under tough circumstances. Resources were limited, and my mom and dad worked odd jobs to scrape together enough money for us to survive. However, despite their hard work it was just never enough to stabilize us financially. Nevertheless, they were my champions and pushed me to be the first in my family to go and graduate from college. And that always made me think about why it is that some people have pathways to opportunities and others don't. So, I was always piqued by that.
When I had the opportunity to work in the collective impact space and work with a lot of different partners in communities in San Antonio, I was fascinated by the system because it was so complex. Workforce development isn't actually about education and training, it's about how a city and a society actually works. Do we have just access to resources for people to really move up the ladder? Does the American dream exist?
Let’s focus in on the workforce training ecosystem specifically. Can you describe what kinds of players are involved?
First, we think about employers and sector-based partnerships as part of the ecosystem. Then, in terms of hard assets, those include workforce investment boards, which are the local organizations that are our funding streams for workforce development. We also think about school districts and other education institutions. And, in particular, we think about community colleges as a big piece of the broader ecosystem. Depending on where you're working, non-profits play a big role as well.
You also need things like affordable housing, proper public transportation, and access to quality childcare and healthcare. In order for students to be successful and to be trained, placed and ultimately retain employment, they have to have a broader system of supports. If those are not in place, you won't get the results that you think you're going to get.
We know that COVID has disproportionately impacted communities of color, both on the health side and in terms of job losses. Can you speak to the workforce implications of this over the longer term?
If you think about what types of jobs are impacted by closure, they are largely service sector jobs, which were disproportionately held by people of color. Even before the pandemic, we had great inequity within the system, and COVID is just further exasperating this. The economic impacts of COVID look very different from the impacts we saw from the 2008 financial crisis. At the height of the last wave of COVID, Black men saw unemployment rates of 25%, and Black men without a high school diploma saw unemployment rates of 40% compared to White peers, which were half that.
What historically happens during an economic downturn is that employers adjust how they operate because there is slack in the labor market. So employers tend to make the job application process more selective, or they invest in things like automation or business transformation, and roles don't come back at all.
Do you think COVID will accelerate the trend of automation? And how big of an impact will automation have on the American workforce in the future?
I don't buy into this belief that there will be massive job loss due to automation in the near term. Over the next 10 to 15 year time horizon, I think the technology just isn't quite there. And the financials for companies don't make sense. But I think there's no doubt that COVID will accelerate adoption and implementation of automation tools. Think about a grocery store, for example. Will we see more expansion of self-checkout lanes? Will we see more self-checkout lanes for restaurants? Most likely. Those are roles that I think are at high risk of automation because the technology already exists and is quite easy to deploy.
So will there be permanent job loss? I think absolutely, but more so there will be a lot of job changes. The skills needed to thrive in a more technology driven economy are different. This requires massive re-skilling efforts. For communities that often have low levels of digital literacy and a discomfort with technology, that poses a great deal of risk.
Can you talk more about what re-skilling entails?
You start by looking at the labor market data itself to say, "Okay, where were we seeing job losses? Where do we expect to see job gains in the future, in the near term? What parts of the sector of the economy are doing well?" So, for instance, logistics is doing very well, supply chain is doing very well. There are opportunities there, whereas the service sector is struggling. Then the question becomes how to reposition workers into sectors that are growing.
That is a state- and locally-driven process, because economies are largely regional. You have to look at what employers are in the region and ask what skills they need. Then you have to build out programs based on that. There's no doubt that our current workforce ecosystem is not designed to do this kind of rapid re-skilling. It's not structured for this kind of adaptation, and there's not enough capacity to do it.
What are the main levers in the workforce development ecosystem that would need to change to enable re-skilling at scale?
At the federal level, changes to Pell Policy would be important. So, how can you actually fund workforce training programs in a different way than you fund traditional college programs? We need different funding streams, and more funding in general. If you speak to leaders in the sector, they will tell you that the education system – including colleges and community college systems – is very bureaucratic and slow to adjust. That’s really problematic in a time like this.
The second big thing is that we are in a place where everyone is having to adjust to online learning. Again, this is very different from the 2008 crisis. Now, training programs are faced with the question of how you actually do all of your training online, which they did not have the infrastructure to do before. On top of that, their students may not have access to technology or high-speed internet. So there's a host of other issues that have to be addressed from the real infrastructure standpoint, broadband access, and how you get content online quickly in a way that works for students. That's a secondary challenge, but I also think it’s a great opportunity because, once those investments are made, that opens up a whole new world for what training can be and how you can deliver content to communities that otherwise have not had access to it.
In an economic downturn, people turn to "survival jobs" with lower pay. What do you think that workforce agencies should do to help people move from the survival jobs into sustaining careers?
First is working with the employers themselves to think about career pathways and credentialing makes sense within those organizations across all sectors. Every sector has that opportunity, but it's not well defined. The second piece is how to build out training and development solutions that work for somebody who is working. So if somebody needs to be working and they also need to be training and upskilling for a longer-term career opportunity, they need supports. Do they have access to childcare? Do they have access to transportation? Do they even have time in their work schedule for training? Those are things that the public and the private sector can absolutely work together on.
Apprenticeships lend themselves very well to accomplishing what we’re talking about. The US just hasn't adopted this model at the same speed or scale as other places, like Europe. I think continued investment into the apprenticeship infrastructure is necessary across multiple sectors, not just the skilled trades, but in sectors like IT, finance and banking.
You’ve mentioned the role that employers can play in creating career pathways. What else should the private sector be doing to respond to today’s workforce challenges?
We have seen a lot of action with the private sector already. First and foremost, employers have to be thinking about safety for their employees.
Second, I think employers have to be cognizant of making sure they don't slip into bad habits of making certain types of jobs harder to get. As I mentioned before, during economic downturns, employers often become more stringent with job requirements. When they do that, marginalized communities become further disconnected from the economy. It's a vicious cycle. Employers feel that, because there's slack in the labor market, they can be more selective. And they absolutely can be, but it’s not clear that this actually drives positive business outcomes. So let's not go back to the old ways of doing things, creating these structural disadvantages – let's have an inclusive job application process.
Third, companies know what needs to be done from a training and development standpoint. They should invest there. They know what roles are coming and what roles are there today. And they have unique capabilities to invest from a technology standpoint, from a learning and development standpoint, to work with community-based organizations in the workforce ecosystem to create programs for the future. I think employers in the private sector can really help drive progress by coming to the table and working with the public sector to find and deploy training solutions.
What about community based organizations (CBOs)? What role do they have to play here?
I think CBOs are uniquely positioned to help with case management, and also in job placement on the back end with employer relations. Case management is a fundamental aspect of any good workforce development program. People need guidance and support, because going to school is not easy. It's complicated both from the technical standpoint of enrolling in the right program, but also – life happens. If you're in a two-year training program, a lot can happen in your life in two years. Just look at the last year of our own lives. CBOs are uniquely positioned to address this need, which community colleges and other workforce entities just aren't good at, and are also not funded to do well.
Let’s talk about the future. What do you think the post-COVID world will look like in terms of employment, particularly for people who have been historically marginalized in the job market?
I'm optimistic because I hear leaders across the country and employers saying that they’re going to use an equity lens now to think about outcomes. Again, I think this is different from what we saw in 2008. However, there were structural inequities before the crisis that have now just been exacerbated, and I'm not sure that we have the policy solutions in place yet, nor are we in a financial position from a state and local budget standpoint to be able to make necessary investments. So I am somewhat concerned there. I am particularly concerned about businesses owned by people of color.
The last thing I would say, which is core to the LISC mission, is that I'm deeply concerned about the housing situation. Knowing where you're going to live is foundational to everything else. If that's not in place, then we can't discuss workforce development programs or economic mobility. You must be stable and have that foundation before anything else.
Do you foresee the workforce ecosystem itself looking different in a post COVID world?
I'm actually really excited about what's happening from the workforce ecosystem standpoint. I think this crisis is requiring it to innovate in a way that it never had to before. Investments into learning technologies, online learning platforms, new modes of training and development with VR and AR, I think these will be accelerated greatly because of this crisis. I also think this crisis will help accelerate us to think about what the future of automation means. Because many of the roles that were impacted by the pandemic crisis were roles that were going to be impacted by automation. So this is, I think, a great awakening for us as a country to think about the investments that will be required to address the disappearance of these roles.
Leaders and entrepreneurs from a diverse range of sectors working to bring fresh perspectives, networks and attention to LISC’s work.