Work-Life GPS

The COVID-19 pandemic coupled with accelerating macro-trends of globalization and automation, has laid bare the vulnerable future of the American worker.  The world of work, which for generations enabled upward mobility and lifelong stability for laborers, is perpetually shifting.   Workers dislocated due to these crises and those struggling with generational poverty and systemic racism have suffered trauma, and technical skills acquisition alone will be insufficient for most to find and keep work with family sustaining wages.      

Workers who’ve suffered trauma need guidance to stabilize their lives, meet needs of their families, while gaining lifelong, portable skills for new careers.  Our “Work-Life GPS” program guides workers onto a pathway of greater resilience and career success through an integrated online essential skills training with Mobility Mentoring®.   As millions of Americans are facing an existential crisis, we must disrupt traditional skill-building approaches, in favor of more holistic, yet widely accessible and scalable models. 

More than 12M Americans are currently unemployed due to COVID-19, and a significant wave of new infections is prompting renewed business shutdowns across the country.  Lower-wage workers, most of whom live paycheck-to-paycheck, are among the hardest hit by this economic crisis. While government stimulus helped some businesses stay afloat, analysts estimate that 100,000 small businesses have already closed permanently.  Additionally, our current crisis exacerbates the acceleration of industry transformations due to globalization and automation, which for years have eliminated good-paying blue-collar jobs. While parts of the economy may quickly rebound, the job recovery will be slow, leaving millions of low wage earners, and those battling chronic poverty and systemic racism, stuck in a protracted crisis our social safety net is ill-equipped to address.    

Neuroscience research shows people experiencing the stresses of poverty and economic hardship are often overwhelmed with trauma.  Coping with complex, unrelenting stress and trauma taxes a person’s bandwidth thereby making it difficult to navigate various demands on their time and attention.  Organizing, prioritizing, concentrating, learning new information are all compromised with excessive, multifarious stressors and trauma of battling poverty.  This makes reskilling and reemployment daunting, and leaves individuals and families at risk of falling further behind.  

Our team has developed a holistic model to support individuals dealing with the trauma associated with economic hardship and poverty to work toward stabilizing their life circumstances, while developing essential skills that are the fundamental building blocks for sustainable employment in any industry. Work-Life GPS integrates Mobility Mentoring®, a coaching model founded on neuroscience, with our proprietary Growing Personal Skills (GPS) curriculum.  Together, these approaches place participants in the driver’s seat on the road they must travel toward success in life and work.  Coaches work in partnership with participants to assess their current circumstances and establish economic mobility goals, while also strengthening essential skills (also referred to as executive function) through facilitated learning and practice.   

 Participants utilize self-paced, online GPS training modules together with cohort-based, virtual group discussions with a Mobility Mentoring® coach to scaffold learning.  The key to our facilitated learning approach builds upon the strengths and skills participants already possess and apply them to various or novel situations or industries.  This approach supports self-efficacy and agency, thereby developing growth mindset and lifelong learning resiliency.  When ready to take steps toward employment, participants are referred to job placement specialist at their local American Jobs Center. 

Work-Life GPS is ideally suited for individuals who have been laid-off and need retraining to access new occupations, as well as youth or other persons with employment challenges (homelessness, justice impacted, insufficient education).  Participants are referred by partners at American Jobs Centers or other social service agencies.   Prior to COVID, our coaching and GPS training services were offered in an in-person format.  Post-COVID we adapted our model to be fully online.  This enables us to reach participants wherever they are, at their convenience.  During 2021 we will create a Spanish language version with bi-lingual mentors to support participants who are mono-lingual Spanish speakers. 

Topics discussed provide people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to engage in conversation with each other and learn from each other.  The impact is measured by each person: 

“This group is the only ME time I get; you guys are like family and I love getting to vent and share the way I feel about things without judgement” 

“...There’s really great information I can take away and use, as well as the comradery of being in a group of peers” 

“This class helps me work on my goals by talking about goals to begin with” 

Our Work-Life GPS solution was developed to meet the specific needs of workers and jobseekers based on decades of workforce development experience.  Our team in Washington state serves a broad customer base from marginalized populations including dislocated workers, first time jobseekers and individuals with high-barriers to employment, such as justice-involved or homeless. 

Our most recent efforts have emphasized transforming our Growing Personal Skills (GPS) essential skills training into an online platform with Mobility Mentoring® to develop skills that are crucial for workers in any occupation or industry. We believe that this integrated approach is powerful, affordable and ultimately scalable.

 Our Solution team is comprised of 2 full time and 5 part time team members, with combined 100 years of experience developing and delivering services that meet customers where they are. As we grow this model, we will position ourselves to build a multi-generational, culturally diverse team that represents the broad spectrum of our customer base, including gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and added emphasis on hiring new team members with life experiences similar to our customers. 

Our DEI approach recognizes the importance of raising awareness for employees in our organization about the nature of white "normative” culture and the insidious ways it manifests in our systems, policies, organizations, and even our personal world views.  As such, we created a Race Equity Diversity Inclusion (REDI) committee to assess our organization’s policies and practices, as well as review self-awareness assessments for our leadership team and staff.  The REDI committee makes recommendations to our executive leadership team on changes or updates that will improve our agency’s practices in hiring, promoting, and staff training.  Our CEO has also coordinated and facilitated a bi-monthly DEI Learning Zone for our employees to engage in discussions around topics such as implicit biases, anti-racism, micro-aggression's, intersectionality, privilege, etc.  Additionally, our organization is carrying out a DEI Design Challenge to refine existing program models to advance racial justice and ensure more equitable outcomes for customers.

Our solution is innovative, not because of new technology or even a new methodology for addressing challenges in overcoming poverty or unemployment, but rather due to the way our approaches integrate and leverage proven technologies to optimize participant experience and scalability.  With the right degree of personal interaction between coach and job seeker along with self-paced components, we believe our solution is both deeply impactful and ultimately scalable.  

We have created a service that helps participants work toward meaningful personal goals related to key factors for building stability in their personal lives, while also building aptitude for lifelong learning and the foundational soft skills for success that are most sought after by employers. In the final stages of our engagement with individuals as they prepare for employment, our partners at WholeStory help them build personalized profiles to better articulate their intangible capabilities based on life experience and the essential skills they have gained and can offer a prospective employer.  

We are confident the Work-Life GPS platform universally aligns to occupations in any industry, and we aim to prove it through this partnership with MIT Solve.  We also aspire to test the platform in tandem with industry specific technical skills training and job placement efforts early in 2021 as a part of the XPrize Rapid Reskilling competition. Once proven for one industry/occupation sub-set, we will scale to new regions, and adapt as needed for new industry/occupation groups. 

Over the last 8 months, our team has utilized a combination of basic online tools (Google Classroom and Zoom) to offer training and mentoring services to participants virtually.  Recently, we’ve begun the review process of transitioning our curriculum onto a more comprehensive Learning Management System to digitize training modules and interaction between coaches and participants.  

As we launch services outside of Washington state, the new LMS will allow job seekers to easily register, navigate course content, interact with coaches and manage progress.  Automated workflows will reduce friction for both coaches and participants, while providing participants ultimate flexibility to complete content at their convenience. This will allow coaches to dedicate most of their time to high-value interactions around content review and discussions, rather than primary instruction or organizational or administrative aspects of the program. 

Pre- and post-program assessments will be carried out through the LMS, allowing for evaluation of skill gain. Coaches will have real-time access to participant progress on goals and skill acquisition, allowing them to better support participant needs and scaffold learning.   While mentoring for higher-barrier participants may continue beyond the training program period, once a participant is ready to apply for jobs, they will be connected to our partner, WholeStory. WholeStory’s innovative platform and approach gives participant’s avenues to articulate and demonstrate their invisible talents and skills, beyond education and experience, to prospective employers.  

Prior to launching Growing Personal Skills (GPS) training online, one of our largest cohorts was 23 participants in March 2020.  By June, after launching GPS online, we were able to serve a cohort of 43 participants.  Since July, we have been able to maintain an average cohort of 50 participants through remote online engagement, with a peak cohort size of 61 in September.  This evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of an online model for delivering Work-Life GPS with increased engagement levels.

Trauma experienced by sudden job loss, living in poverty, or from broader societal/economic/global crises impedes our human potential.  People facing these challenges often lack the bandwidth to access essential, navigational skills required to overcome obstacles standing in their way.  Further, occupations are changing so rapidly in the wake of AI and machine learning advancements, that it is difficult to maintain the technical skills needed to remain relevant in the workforce.  We must update our approach to workforce development to help workers develop an aptitude for lifelong learning and build durable, portable navigational skills that can not only uplift them today, but also carry them into the future.  Work-Life GPS attacks these issues by creating opportunities for people moving through or living in crisis to step back and review their entire circumstance in context, set meaningful economic goals, develop the cognitive competencies and navigational skills necessary to launch onto different career pathways, and the ability to articulate in a way that adds value to an employer. 

Desired Impact:  Economic resiliency and mobility  

Inputs: Mobility Mentoring® coaches, GPS curriculum, assessment-survey, virtual meeting platform, LMS, referral network, Internet access and equipment for participants, WholeStory profile, employer relationships.   

Activities: Assessment/orientation, goal setting, GPS series, discussion forums, coaching sessions and progress check-ins, referrals, WholeStory profile creation.  

Outputs:   

• Number of people served 
• Number of people completing the program/process 
• Number of goals accomplished 
• Skill gains measured (pre/post testing) 
• Number of WholeStory interviews 

Short-term Outcomes:   Within 1-3 weeks, participants: 

• Are aware of what steps/actions they need to take to stabilize their circumstances. 
• Develop knowledge and capacity to set personal, economic goals.  
• Identify skills and strengths they already possess  

Mid-term Outcomes:  Within 4-8 weeks, participants: 

• Connect behaviors to various essential skills (problem solving, motivation, interpersonal communication, relationships, etc.) 
• Understand how and when to apply certain essential skills to different situations  
• Realize their own potential, take agency, and strengthen their self-efficacy  

Long-term Outcomes:  Within 9-12 weeks beyond, participants:  

• Know strengths and weaknesses 
• Can articulate their skills effectively for employment opportunities 
• Have an aptitude for lifelong learning for economic resiliency 

Within the coming year our team aspires to increase Work-Life GPS participants by at least 5X and as much as 10X of 2020 levels. We'll achieve this through pursuit of new partnerships with Workforce Development Areas (WDAs), social service organizations, technical training institutes, in Washington and beyond. Our participation with MIT Solve and the upcoming XPrize Rapid Reskilling competitions aim to open new marketing channels to reach participants in other states and the national market.  XPrize, (if selected) will also create opportunities for our team to focus on bundling Work-Life GPS with industry specific technical skills training to support rapid employment. 

As part of our organization’s strategic plan, within the next five years our top three key issues to address are: growth, future of work/skills gap, and diversifying funding models.  These issues guide our strategic focus toward scaling solutions to address the changing landscape of workforce development and aid workers in developing lifelong economic resiliency.  Work-Life GPS is our solution for the unemployed or disconnected individual seeking to develop an aptitude for lifelong learning in order to achieve economic resiliency.   Now that we are confident our adapted online model can scale and become financially sustainable; our marketing efforts have become more assertive.  We have recently participated in an RFI process to make the service available to all WIOA programs across Washington’s 12 WDAs, and we are proactively seeking other opportunities like MIT Solve to make the leap to other large metropolitan markets and will continue to do so going forward. 

Our leadership understands building and scaling new service models is hard work.  Having already gone through the challenging process of transitioning our mentoring, training and service provision virtually, we know there will be continued growing pains as we continue to iterate and adapt to optimize the participant experience and create efficiencies for our team as our customer base grows.  We anticipate the need to hire additional staff or to transfer existing staff to this project. Additionally, extra efforts are needed to adapt our curriculum for people who have varying abilities, such as low literacy, limited or no English, and physical disabilities.  

 We anticipate the most significant barrier to growth will be attracting the interest of WDAs and other partners to utilize our service for their jobseekers.  There are a multitude of soft skills training curricula and mentoring offerings on the market, and we must differentiate our integrated, more holistic approach, with evidence-based theory of change to capture the attention of prospective partners. 

Finally, we would be remiss to not mention that within our current customer base, there have been challenges in making our service universally accessible to all jobseekers, due to their own technology barriers. Many don’t have access to data connected devices, can’t afford data service, or lack the digital literacy skills necessary to participate.  As we move to new geographies, these steadfast challenges will need to be addressed, to ensure accessibility for those engaging from marginalized populations unique to the local community in which we bring this opportunity.  

Internal growth management – Leadership will track participation rates of jobseekers, hours of engagement in self-paced content vs group and individual interaction by team members and will make incremental adjustments to optimize growth.   Our organization is large enough to allocate additional staffing to Work-Life GPS in the short-term while we work toward financial sustainability.   

Regional expansion / new partnerships – Our leadership team is intensely focused on this challenge, and in the final quarter of 2020 alone are submitting several proposals for partnership/funding opportunities, including MIT Solve.  We are hopeful these opportunities will not only help to establish partnerships in new areas of the country, but also generate some media attention, and seed funding to support further refinement of our model as we grow.   

Jobseeker tech barriers - We have addressed issues in a couple ways.  1.  lending out devices and hotspots to participants during their engagement with us, 2. through partners such as Department of Social and Health Services in Washington to donate devices and/or free data services to participants.  We have addressed tech skill deficits through the provision of basic tutorials and staff tech support.  As we branch out into new regions, and in particular rural ones, this will be a larger issue  we must confront.  In such cases, we will follow the lead of our regional partners to build our service into models that are working for customers in their region, seek partnership with tech companies, while also offering guidance based on our experiences in Washington. 

To date we have not been able to track longer-term outcomes for participants attending our Growing Personal Skills courses.  An established retention period of 18 months will allow us to track how participants are utilizing executive function and essential skills, and to understand how their employment status and life circumstances have changed since our initial engagement.  If skills have atrophied, we will be able to use evidence-based feedback to help inform needed adjustments to our training framework, to include how we might increase skill durability longer term, albeit more frequent mentor engagement might be an additional solution to consider. 

Our team has decades of collective experience working at the intersection of the workforce system between jobseekers, employers and training providers.  Because of our continuous engagement with workers across diverse communities and with the companies that seek new talent, we have deep insights into the challenges faced on both sides.   For 50 years, Career Path Services has helped communities' weather both significant economic boom periods and downturns which each pose their unique challenges to the workforce system. The organization carries with it both intellectual capital and personnel, as well as tried and true, field-tested and refined service models, and infrastructure to achieve our vision by empowering people, enhancing workforce and enriching communities. 

The team members leading this initiative are the creators and implementers of this model, they are uniquely qualified to deeply integrate our GPS training and mentoring models and to scale them to serve customers nationally.  They have  tested, refined and used customer feedback to continually improve the quality and customer experience.  We are confident that our big audacious goal is possible, and that this is the team to do it.  

Additionally, we are confident that the partnerships we’ve built over many years with organizations like Empath, The Prosperity Agenda, Bankwork$ and WholeStory, who will also engage with us going forward, will help to maintain a tight connection to the latest science, social trends and technologies to ensure our methodologies will stay relevant with emerging industries and human needs.   

Technical Program Partners - Career Path Services is a member of Economic Mobility Pathways’(EMPath) Global Exchange Network, which provides both Mobility Mentoring® training and on-going technical assistance and support.  We are also long-standing partners with the Les Biller Family Foundation in delivering the BankWork$ program in the Southern Puget Sound.  This work has informed thinking about how Work-Life GPS can be adapted to meet specific industry needs. We are also partnering with WholeStory a research-backed tech-based hiring platform aiming to humanize the interviewing process by providing insights into life experience and to help jobseekers with nontraditional backgrounds stand out from the crowd. Finally, we have also partnered with The Prosperity Agenda in the past and hope to utilize the relationship and their expertise to help us validate our curriculum and delivery method as we scale up. 

Client Referral Partners – Our most noteworthy partners in the provision of relevant training and mentoring services in Washington are Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) and PacMtn WDA.  We launched GPS in 2018 in partnership with six DSHS offices in King County (Seattle). In 2019, the number of partner branches increased to eight, and in 2020 to 18 branches of DSHS in five counties.  In 2020, we also brokered a partnership with one of twelve WDA’s to provide GPS training virtually to jobseekers in 5 additional counties in Western Washington.   Through these expanded partnerships, we have been able to scale this program by nearly 100% year of year since 2018. 

Over our first three years, GPS has utilized a performance-based business model with payments aligned to the number of hours and modules participants complete and when participants successfully secure employment. Our mentoring program has been financially supported by our agency’s provision of social and employment services for TANF recipients across Washington state. We have attracted program participants by partnering with social service and workforce development agencies, through contracted services, for referrals to the program. Both have been financially sustainable models to date.

Wanting to meet the significant growth needed for this type of support, we set out to develop an integrated Work-Life GPS model. By leveraging technology and economies of scale, it will be affordable for new referral partners and individuals who wish to sign up independently. We also see a trend of employer's willingness to invest in incumbent worker type training for workers to acquire new hard skills and accompanying essential skills, reducing recruitment costs by investing in their own, maintaining market competitiveness through tech training, and improving employee loyalty through professional development.  

We have initiated efforts to expand our base of referring partners to new geographies in Washington state and beyond, and are developing our website to enable individual sign up as well.  Most partners will rely on federal, state or philanthropic resources to cover the cost.  For individuals who are unable to pay the published rate, our organization will consider self-attestation of inability to pay and offer deep discounts and scholarships, accordingly.

Our activities, in their current form and scale, are financially sustainable.  Our motivation to grow comes from our experience and evidence that Work-Life GPS can provide significant value to individuals struggling through personal and economic hardships.  Our application to MIT Solve is an effort to attract initial seed-funding and new partnerships to jump-start our scale up efforts.  We’re seeking investments for technology upgrades to expand access and automate certain workflows to optimize coach capacity for serve larger cohorts. Investments in staff time for continued refinement of our content, model, and delivery methods prior to serving new customers in more distant regions is also needed. Another key area for investment is the evaluation of long-term skill retention and how it impacts a person’s economic resiliency. Such research would further strengthen our theory of change and garner additional investments for development.

 Our path to financial sustainability at scale, is through multiple routes, but primarily the acquisition of new partners such as WDAs, social service agencies, industry and technical training institutes. Our growth thus far has been organic, through word-of-mouth connections within our networks. We are evaluating  other forms of strategic marketing to expand our network and customer base.  

We also anticipate the direct-to-consumer as a fee-for-service offering will create incremental growth potential but will also require partnership with MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platforms such as EdX, Udemy and Coursera in order to attract independent customers.

Our Growing Personal Skills (GPS) mentoring activities are already generating contracts and revenue with workforce and social service agencies as described above and based on our current scale our operations are already financially sustainable.  

For confidentiality reasons we cannot publicly disclose additional information regarding current funding and revenue at this time.  If selected to participate in subsequent rounds of the competition, we will share more detailed financial information with MIT Solve and its partners.

We envision multiple pathways to scaling our Work-Life GPS program.  First, continued incremental growth would be possible without much change, and without much more than the core resources of our non-profit organization.

Given the level of need and impact on jobs due to COVID-19, we prefer to jumpstart Work-Life GPS through philanthropic investment and new national partnerships.  Partnering with MIT Solve and its network of forward-thinking WDAs represents our ideal scenario to capture investment funds and partnerships simultaneously.  Absent such an opportunity, Career Path Services will continue efforts to raise new philanthropic funding and referral partners through our network with a goal of raising $250k in investments and at least five partnership contracts in the coming year to achieve our scale up plan to increase the number of participants we serve by 5-10X current participant numbers in the coming year.

For confidentiality reasons we cannot publicly disclose additional information regarding current funding and revenue at this time.  If selected to participate in subsequent rounds of the competition, we will share more detailed financial information with MIT Solve and its partners.

Our motivation for applying to the Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge is threefold:

First, we are eager for the opportunity to partner with MIT Solve and the network of partners assembled to bring this ambitious challenge to life.  Of particular interest is the opportunity to run validation pilots together with one or more of the nation’s most forward-looking workforce boards. This presents the opportunity for our team to make our first jump to a new geography beyond the borders of Washington state. It would also be deeply meaningful to have the opportunity to sit at the table with representatives from MIT Solve, New Profit, JFF and other key partners to influence the future of workforce development in our nation. Decisions we make today will impact generations of Americans to come!

Second, in order to achieve our ambitious scale-up plan for Work-Life GPS over the coming year(s), we are seeking grant funding to make strategic investments in technology and further product refinement. Additionally, resources will be utilized for marketing / outreach efforts to build new partnerships with WDAs, social service provision agencies, industries and technical training institutes to grow our base of participants. This design challenge represents one significant opportunity to secure seed funds to advance these elements of our strategy and plan. 

Finally, we also see significant value in partnering with IBM’s consulting team as we develop out our technology to be able to scale nationally, and if practical to also leverage IBM’s technology platforms as well.