Episode 40: Opportunity @ Work: Are Tens of Millions of Workers Ready to Level Up?

Guests Scott Parish, LinkedIn’s Director of Product Marketing for High Growth Markets & Segments, & Karan Chopra, Co-Founder of Opportunity@Work join us to explore how we might connect people to critical jobs during COVID and energize and foster upward mobility for tens of millions of workers who don’t have college degrees and are in low paying jobs or are unemployed today but have learned plenty of valuable skills through alternate routes.

1 The Emergency Social Response Playbook – When an emergency strikes how might a company surge their innovation efforts, connect to people who can help inside and outside of their organization, and make a difference fast? In this segment Scott Parish will share the story of how Linkedin jumped into the COVID response to support surge networking of five million healthcare job candidates with critical needs at hospitals, national health systems, and organizations like the Red Cross. They developed a go-to-market plan in 10 days and are on track to deliver over a million volunteers and tens of thousands of newly hired healthcare workers to fight the virus. He’ll share what he learned from the experience and how it’s leading to a playbook for emergency social response.

2 Opportunity@Work – What if we valued skills not schools? How might we build entry level gateways to high paying jobs for tens of millions of workers who have learned Skills Through Alternative Routes (STARS). Karan Chopra will take us on a deep dive into how we might design job pathways to move a $15/hour worker into a $45/hour career and discuss what he found when his organization explored data on more than 70 million Americans who could be STARS if we could build better pathways to get from where they are today, to a better tomorrow.