There are 1 million people in Louisiana that have the skills and experience that qualify them for higher wage jobs, but they are being held back because they don't have a four-year college degree, according to Kenny Nguyen, a Baton Rouge entrepreneur. To put that in terms the football-crazed state can more easily understand, that's 10 Tiger Stadiums full of people.
"I'm not anti-college, I'm anti-singular path," said Nguyen, who dropped out of college to launch a successful business. "There's more than one path for you."
Nguyen is an example of the different paths to success. In 2011, he co-founded Big Fish Presentations, which specialized in creating professional presentation for clients such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana and Raising Cane's. Big Fish later merged with Hatchit, a customized website developer, and is now ThreeSixtyEight.
Nguyen founded the company while he was an LSU student, but running a startup and being a full-time student took a toll. He was flying out to New York City and Los Angeles for business meetings, then showing up for class the next day. As a result, his grades suffered and he decided to leave.
Going from running a cool startup to being a college dropout changed how people saw him, Nguyen said.
"This is a cause I'm really passionate about," he said.
To that end, Nguyen recently organized an event in Baton Rouge aimed at promoting skills-based hiring. It brought together leaders from state agencies, nonprofits and Baton Rouge Community College to talk about eliminating degree requirements.
It also featured a screening of "Untapped", a Netflix documentary produced by NBA star LeBron James featuring business leaders such as Mark Cuban, GM CEO Mary Barra and JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon. The documentary followed six young adults without college degrees who were participating in a program that gave them a chance at internships with Fortune 500 companies.
Louisiana Leading
It's not only Nguyen who is pushing to create alternate pathways to jobs. Louisiana is working to become a leader in the efforts to help eliminate unnecessary degree requirements. Earlier this year, the Legislature passed a bill prohibiting agencies from requiring a 4-year-degree or more than three years of experience for state jobs, unless determined otherwise by the Department of State Civil Service or the Louisiana State Police.
Gov. Jeff Landry signed the bill into a law that takes effect on January 1.
The state is also part of an inaugural program launched by Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit that has championed the cause of tearing down the paper ceiling.
Louisiana, along with Arizona, California, Colorado and Connecticut will look for ways to make it easier for make non-degree holders get civil service jobs, by providing insight on how to shift to skills-based hiring. The goal is to create pathways to hire people based on what they've learned and not just based on whether they have a college degree. Some of the agencies that are seen as being good spots for non-degree applicants are human resources, information technology and tax administration
"We're just trying to open up the applicant pool," said Byron P. Decoteau Jr., director of Louisiana Civil Service. One of the things Opportunity@Work and the participating states hope to do during the year long program is come up with a way to tack what success would look like in shifting toward skills-based hiring.
Decoteau and Nicole Tucker, chief operating officer for state civil service, said the goal is still the same in degree based and skills based hiring: recruiting and retaining qualified workers and picking the best people to fill jobs.
"It's really all about adapting to the challenges of the future workforce," he said.
Getting people without four-year degrees a chance to participate in the workforce is critical to help fill the state's employment needs, officials said. Post-COVID, less than 59 percent of Louisiana adults are working or actively looking for work.
"There are more than 40 percent of people sitting on the sidelines of the economy," said Susana Schowen, secretary of the Louisiana Workforce Commission. "In Louisiana, we have a whole lot of jobs that are significantly undersupplied that do not require a bachelor's degree or higher." Those are in high-demand fields such as health care, IT, coastal restoration, logistics and industrial construction.
"We know there are many untraditional routes to getting skills," said Willie E Smith, BRCC chancellor. "We need to start thinking constructively on how to mobilize Louisiana."
Teaching New Skills
More than 70 million people nationwide are considered to be "STARS," an acronym that stands for people skilled through alternative routes rather than a college degree. This includes people who were trained through the military, technical and community colleges or on-the-job experience.
Justin Hutchinson, who serves as director of business development for ThreeSixtyEight, is one of those STARS. Hutchinson was on track to go to Nicholls State University on a football scholarship, but those plans were dashed after his father's cancer came back from remission. He spent time traveling back and forth to California to take care of his father before he passed away. Hutchinson then ended up going to Baton Rouge Community College and managing three Smoothie King locations.
Nguyen was a regular at one of the Smoothie Kings and said he was impressed with how Hutchinson dealt with customers and remembered what items regulars ordered. Hutchinson was hired as an intern at ThreeSixtyEight.
"The skills I obtained working in the customer service industry, I feel like are particularly transferable to sales," he said. "It's all about providing good services to the people that you come in contact with."
Eight years later, Hutchinson is in charge of bringing in new clients to the agency. He said his success at ThreeSixtyEight shows the importance of bringing in the best people for a job, regardless of their educational background.
"As the nature of the workforce changes because of AI and just everything else in general, it's important to think about the human centered soft skills," he said. "You can teach anybody the hard skills for a job, for the most part."
(c)2024 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
