Hearts, Minds & Tech: How Career Team Leverages Software to Build Bridges to Better Lives for our Nation’s Underserved Population | Staffing Series

Intro: Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Michaela Pearson. She is the Chief Business Officer at Career Team, an organization founded in 1996 and headquartered in North Haven, Connecticut. Career Team provides workforce services and software for government and educational institutions, helping maximize investments through innovative models. Their Career Edge platform delivers career readiness courseware, case management, labor exchange and more.

Recognized by outlets like 60 Minutes, CNN and Fox, Career Team has received multiple awards for innovation and growth. Michaela has worked with academic leaders nationwide guiding them through shifts to online and hybrid learning. She strongly believes education is the key to empowerment and has dedicated her career to pairing workforce development with modern service delivery. She is also a certified trainer in the AHA process, bridges out of poverty program and completed the Accomplishment Coaching Leadership Coaching program in 2013. Her extensive background in business, finance and coaching allows her to help individuals and organizations thrive. Now before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the Chief Business Officer at Career Team, Micaela Pearson. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Micaela Pearson: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay, so tell us just in plain language for people who may be outside of the industry that you work in, what are the services that Career Team offers? Pay to picture for us in a way that we can all understand. Absolutely.

Micaela Pearson: So as you mentioned, Anthony, we were founded back in 1996. We were actually founded by a husband and wife team at the time, Chris and Sue Casilius, and they’re in Connecticut. And Sue Casilius was actually running the workforce development programs for a college that she was working for.

And what she found is that a lot of workforce programs were very mechanical. And so if you have a sense of what I mean by that, I’m not sure if you’ve been to the DMV in the last couple of years, but I had a recent name change when I got married about a year and a half ago. So I just went through this process and I wouldn’t say that it’s the most wildly engaging and exciting experience. And so that is putting it kindly.

Right. So what Sue found is that we were taking in many cases a very hard to serve population, meaning individuals that are coming to us with lots of barriers to employment success, whether it’s transportation barriers, housing issues, first generation career seekers and things of that nature. And then putting them through a very mechanical process, come in, stand in line, fill out an application, go to the next desk, and thinking that that was going to lead to sustainable employment and success. So as you can well imagine, that is not necessarily a recipe for individuals to secure and sustain employment. And so she and her husband, Chris, the founder and CEO of the company, they decided to build a workforce program that was going to be grounded in the principles of building the self confidence, the hearts and minds of career seekers before we send them out into the workforce. I’m really sorry.

I have a couple of guests in my office here. They decided to build a workforce program that was going to be focused on helping individuals build their hearts and minds first. And with that, these individuals would then go out and sustain employment and that worked really, really well. So that is the start of the company.

We started with a tiny contract with serving a handful of individuals in Connecticut. And now you can see that we’re operating workforce development programs across the country. So it’s been a tremendous experience. I came on board about 10 years ago after spending the first half of my career in higher education publishing. So I started my career working with at the time it was Thompson learning, they’re now Cengage learning.

So they’ve gone through a number of changes over the years. But I was working predominantly with institutions that were focused on helping individuals achieve specific career pathways, whether it was nursing or it or things of that nature. And in doing so, I sat on dozens of employer advisory boards across the country. And I would hear consistently from my employer partners that our schools were doing an incredible job teaching nurses how to take blood pressures and how to, you know, put an IV. But they didn’t necessarily have the sustainable skills that they needed to sustain employment.

Things like critical thinking, time management, leadership skills, conflict resolution. So when I was approached by career teams saying, hey, we are a workforce development firm, we’ve been working with hard to serve populations for at that time it was 16 years. We’re looking to expand our footprint within the education sector.

Would you be open to coming on board and helping us do that? I didn’t necessarily look at it as an opportunity. I truly felt like it was a responsibility.

It was something that my schools were really trying to figure out. And if there was a model and a curriculum or a philosophy that could actually help people break these cycles of poverty and enter the workforce and sustain that employment. That is something that very, very closely aligned not only with my professional goals, but with my personal mission statement.

So I took the plunge. I left my, at the time I was a national sales manager from a Gras Hill education, running a sales organization and solutions consultants from coast to coast and went from that to be going back to an individual contributor in an entrepreneurial environment where first one over the fence. I was the marketing department, the sales department, the invoicing the collections, the implementation manager, the product analyst. And so that was a really big change and one that I absolutely am so glad that I took the risk because when you can truly build something that is aligned with your personal mission, it’s extremely rewarding. And here we are 10 years later serving over a half a million career seekers a year in various different outlets. And that’s a little bit about how we got here.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s a phenomenal story. It really stuck with me that you said it wasn’t an opportunity. It was a responsibility. But clearly they had to feel like a bit of a career leap for you coming from a great position with an established publisher. You know, you were kind of at the top of your field there and here it was you were going to leave to go to a much smaller entity with much less support, much less infrastructure. Were you a little bit nervous in making that transition?

Micaela Pearson: Of course. And I would say that if you’re not a little bit scared, then you’re not taking a big enough risk, right? And so, yes, I mean, especially at the time I was a new mom. I had a brand new baby and I was the primary breadwinner for my family. So leaving a very secure job to go and try my entrepreneurial spirit was not only a huge risk personally, but for my family as well. And I was very supported in that experience and very glad that I that I took that initiative. But no, I mean, and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

So, you know, those are some of the risks that you have to be willing to take or at least understand what your risk tolerance is when you’re making transitions like that.

Anthony Codispoti: So with the work that you do in the workforce development arena, are there federal dollars or is there government funding that comes into help with this? Is this all coming from some kind of the some part of the private sector? Sure.

Micaela Pearson: We have our tentacles in a few different markets. So I guess going back to your original question around the services that we offer, I talked a lot about our history and how we started as a direct services provider.

That was really, it’s been many iterations. There was we are now there’s we all, which is the Workforce Investment Opportunity Act. And they have programs and lots of dollars tied to what we call in school and out of school youth programs. There are adult and dislocated worker programs and all kinds of special grants that come down from the federal government.

They’re distributed to the states, then distributed into individual workforce boards who then hire out a lot of their service delivery. So yes, those are a lot of the programs that we run. We’re in, I think, 15 states right now running Riova programs. And then we also have a number of TANF programs that we offer throughout the country as well.

So those are temporary assistance for needy families. So you’ve got the Department of Human Services, we’ve got Workforce. And then we also have within our software division, this is really where we are taking those best practices that we have from working directly with career seekers for now two and a half decades. And we’ve built them into scalable platforms that we are now implementing within workforce programs, entire states for their workforce case management systems.

We also have departments of corrections, for example, in the state of Missouri. They utilize our career edge platform as their work readiness program for all their returning citizens, individuals that are getting ready to release back into civilian life after incarceration. And then we also work with a number of educational institutions, whether they’re community colleges, training institutions and so forth, that are preparing their students, not only for a particular career pathway, but also want to ensure that those students possess the sustainable skills that they need to, to do. To secure employment. So things like, you know, the soft scale development that our employers are always asking for with critical thinking and time management. That is what we reinforce through our curriculum offers. But then we also have a full career services management system and case management system that is utilized by at the enterprise level for institutions to operationalize and create staff capacity in those areas.

Anthony Codispoti: So what’s the extent of the training that you provide, you know, if I decide I want to start a career as a nurse, can I come in and get the full education and certification, or am I getting like my license to be a nurse somewhere else and I’m getting more of the soft skills from from you that are going to help me be successful in that career.

Micaela Pearson: That’s, that’s correct. So we are, we partner with a number of educational training providers that are offering core programming in areas like healthcare, business, it trades, etc. Pretty much the entire gamut of types of career pathways that you could consider. But the consistent thing that our employers are asking for is that whether you’re coming out as a registered nurse, or an automotive technician, or a have a business degree that you also should understand how to communicate with customers and overcome challenges and receive critical feedback and know how to interview and brand yourself. So we really look at ourselves as the platform that sits alongside all of that core programming and is ensuring that not only are students learning whatever core skillset that they are choosing to pursue, but they’re also leaving that educational experience with the soft skills that they need to secure and sustain employment.

Anthony Codispoti: Do the soft skill training differ for different career paths? I want to be a welder. So the soft skills that you’re teaching me are different than if I want to be a nurse or is it kind of the same because listen, you got to, you know, you have to know people and how to, you know, overcome difficulties and challenges regardless of what your career path is.

Micaela Pearson: There are absolutely some common denominators that we certainly are going to address. The use cases and the examples that we might give would be varied by, by industry. So, you know, communicating with a patient versus a customer, those types of scenarios, we might have some different examples, but the skill of empathy and human connection and, you know, how to communicate and deal with conflict or work with somebody when they’re having a bad day. Those are pretty universal truths that will apply across any industry that you may go into the workforce.

Anthony Codispoti: How does what you’re doing a career team differ from what maybe some similar organizations are doing?

Micaela Pearson: Sure. That’s a great question. And I think that because we did not start as a big box publisher that happened to have a solution in this area in the career development or student success arena, nor did we start as a big software company that suddenly decided it wanted to build a case management system or career services management system. We actually came as a services provider first and the tools that we built came, we built originally to support our own staff, right? We wanted to create scale and standardization and some automation and best practices across our organization. I think that’s what makes us very special is that we are truly practitioners and that the advice we’re giving through our online platforms on how to secure employment is coming from doing the work every single day. So as there’s changes that are happening within the world of interviewing, we are addressing that within our solutions at scale. Now, the other thing that is very unique about career team is that because we come from so heavily focused on the individual career seeker and building out the support that they need in order to sustain employment, and then we’re backing into a lot of the operational components of a case manager and workforce development.

So, you know, application and intake, determining eligibility, figuring out what kinds of documents that they need to have captured, that sort of thing. We’re able to combine the training and development of a career seeker with the operational components of a career services operation. So, I’m not sure if you totally make sense in this context, but the idea here is that an individual who is going through the training and development process also has some operational things that they need to do. You mentioned recruiting a lot, like you probably have applicant tracking systems and things like that where you’re scheduling interviews and so forth. That is the operational side of a career services operation or a workforce development operation that we’re pairing with the training and development.

So very often it will take my partners three, four, five, six vendors to create a career edge. You have to have one thing for your externship tracking. You have another tool for your placement verification documents.

You’ve got something else for application and then take in determining eligibility. You have yet another system for case management. And most of the time in workforce, these systems are, they’ve been around for a long time, so they’re not necessarily born client facing. What we’ve done is said we want to take the modern consumer approach to all of these services and implement that in such a way that we are meeting consumer demand within the constructs of workforce development. So what I mean by that is historically speaking, if you were seeking workforce development services, you would have to get on the bus, go across town between the hours of nine to five, sit across a desk from a case manager, go through the application and intake process, and then maybe you’re going to receive services that day.

That doesn’t necessarily work, right? Today we’ve got a consumer model where if I need to schedule a pediatrician appointment for my child, I can just pull up my phone and do that from my phone. That’s the type of innovation that we’re bringing to workforce development by building tools that are born client facing and are including the expectations of the consumer that we have today.

Anthony Codispoti: And so you guys are saying, hey, you no longer need to drive across town, you can open up the app on your phone, you can schedule something, and can you do the meeting remotely as well then?

Micaela Pearson: Yes, we have integrations with all of the online platforms and all of the other stuff that they may need. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti: Mikaela, tell me about your work with working mothers and why this is so important to you. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: So I am a blended family of five children, so I’m a working mom and I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of support resources in that experience. I think that the same things that I’ve applied to the way that I am running my business, which is I often ask myself, just because you can doesn’t mean that you should, right? But other words, I have a lot of responsibilities in my household as well as in my business.

And very often I am running programs that I don’t necessarily have to do myself. So the ability to really learn how to create operational capacity in my business as well as in my home has been a skill set that I’ve cascaded across both parts of my life. So just as I guess one tiny example, when we’re growing and scaling a business and going from, like I mentioned earlier, going from a national sales manager back to an individual contributor and taking on all of the different operational responsibilities that that includes, I have also done the same thing at my house, right, where I was running the entire show. And then as the family grew and as my responsibilities at WorkGrove had to outsource and bring in other resources to help create the operational capacity that we need here.

Anthony Codispoti: So tell me what, in what ways your own personal mission statement intertwines with the company’s mission statement. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: So when I first came to Career Team, I read their mission statement and it was accelerating the human condition. My personal mission statement is to support people in creating fulfilled and abundant lives.

And so when I read those two things side by side, they’re really saying the same exact thing. And so I think that that’s been really exciting for me is that I have built a business around how can I serve, right? So the days that I start to get mixed up in the numbers and spending too much time in the P &L, I kind of have to take a step back and say, okay, you know, who would Makayla ambassador to humanity?

What approach would she take here? And where are there additional channels or places that I can go to support individuals? Because at the end of the day, and this is something I tell my staff all the time. Yes, there are KPIs.

Yes, there are performance metrics in every single job, whether you’re a case manager in workforce development or running TNF programs. And the difference between us and then maybe another industry is that by making that next phone call, you could be potentially saving some of these life, right? You know, we have one of our leaders in our Delaware office who has shared that there was one person who was planning to take their life that day.

And she took the extra time to really sit across the desk and unpack the situation and could just intuition to say something isn’t right here and really have an incredible conversation that led to that person making a different life choice. And those are the kinds of impacts that we can have every single day. So that’s why I try to tell my teams, yes, you know, there are performance metrics. Yes, we are looking to see how many people we’re serving, but the impact of that is is exponential. When you take an individual who has faced incarceration in their lifetime and maybe they reduce recidivism in a particular state. Not only are you moving the needle from a state’s resident status, but you’re also changing the trajectory of a family.

You know, an individual who’s able to secure employment, sustain employment, provide for their family. Those are the reasons that the bad things happen in this world, right? When you can’t take care of your family, when you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of your kids, you start to see the systemic issues of child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse, and everything else that goes along with it. So that’s the way that I look at this is those are my motivating factors is every single day that I that I am able to get up and pound the pavement or get on an airplane and go speak at an event. And I think that the potential impact of lives changed. Yes, the rest of itself itself, but that’s that’s the motivating factor at career team.

Anthony Codispoti: So what’s the ultimate KPI for you then.

Micaela Pearson: Oh, so my my big picture vision is that what I know very heavily observed within the government technology. I guess challenges is that there’s not really good ecosystems of communication. And so what tends to happen is that we have, you know, your Department of Labor and you’ve got your Department of Human Services and then you’ve got your community colleges and all these different entities or state run programs, but nothing’s really talking to each other.

So what ends up happening is that we’re we retraumatize an individual when they come into the community college and sit across the desk from their counselor and have to retell the story that they just told their case manager, their TANF program, who they just told to the housing support authorities and things like that. We aren’t able to really move the needle for that person because they’re free. They could potentially never want to come back through our doors. Right. The other thing that I would say is we don’t make it easy for these participants who are already coming to us with barriers to success.

If they have to get on a bus and come across town and schedule childcare to receive childcare services. There’s actually a barrier to the barrier we’re trying to remove. So those are some of the things that keep me up at night is I really want to take all of that these different entities that our career seekers are commonly engaging with and build a single source of truth. So, you know, 30 years from now, if I can look back and say career edge became a tool that was engaged with our student populations from maybe the K-12 system all the way through the community colleges, track them through workforce development through the Department of Human Services and we had kind of an integrated, you know, like an electronic health record right now. I’ve been visiting a couple of different healthcare organizations and I am able to share my records across these organizations without having to download, upload, fax files, all that kind of thing. So the ability to create something where we’re operationalizing with a career seeker, the actual end user in mind. I think that that’s where we’re going to see some pretty substantial changes and some some some operational capacity building for these different organizations that are trying to work together today in a much more manual format.

Anthony Codispoti: McKayla, did I understand you correctly that you are either building or you have or you want to build something that will track kids as they’re kind of moving through the education system and opportunities may exist for them as they get closer to employment age. Exactly.

Micaela Pearson: Right now we work with a lot of out of in school and out of school youth. We also run a number of summer youth programs. So these are programs that are around the country. We actually do run them as a direct services provider in a lot of our workforce programs. But then for other entities that are running workforce programs, we are the software engine. So in many cases, when a summer youth program is occurring, these participants historically speaking have had to fill out physical applications.

There’s not an easy way to pair them with an employer and they’re tracking paper time sheets and things of that nature. So we are the software engine for places like the city of Detroit that uses our system as their is our tool. We also work with the Washington DC, Mary and Barry summer youth program.

So lots of these big summer youth programs utilize our software platforms and I’d like to take that at scale and figure out a way that we could back it into the entire student life cycle.

Anthony Codispoti: Is career team a for profit, not for profit.

Micaela Pearson: We are for profit. And we were owned by an individual owner until 2021. So just over three years ago, we recapitalized and we’ve been able to expand our footprint quite a bit since then.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah. Would I be correct in thinking that there are other maybe career development companies, workforce development companies that in a way you might compete with that are using your software as well.

Micaela Pearson: That’s a great observation. Yes, you know, there are direct services providers in the workforce development arena that are similar to career team. You know, there are lots of those types of organizations that are very much dedicated to the services side. They’re not necessarily software companies. So that is something that makes us a little bit unique in that a lot of our direct services, quote unquote competitors would potentially be using courage inside of their operations.

Anthony Codispoti: Micaela, you’re a certified trainer in the Bridges out of poverty program. What is that program and how does that training influence the way that you maybe work with government and educational institutions. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: I, well, I have to tell the story of how I got into that work to, I guess, bring it to light. When I was in my early career as in the publishing industry, I was my territory was Northern California and there was a school in the San Joaquin Valley that I became tremendous friends with a lot of the academic leaders there. And they invited me to come to a faculty training that they were having for their staff. And it was a bridges out of poverty training.

I was not familiar with this work at the time it’s the opera process it’s Dr Ruby pain’s work. And the first thing that they had me do was complete three assessments and the first one was, could you survive in poverty. The second one was, can you survive in the middle class and the third one was, can you survive in wealth. And I went through the middle class one.

That’s how I grew up. Check, check, check, check, check, went through the wealth one I would say maybe half of the things on there I was familiar with. But when I got to the assessment about living in poverty. I could not check a single box.

Anthony Codispoti: And boxes are asking, have you ever experienced this kind of a thing is that

Micaela Pearson: would you know what to do if. Okay, so, you know, have you ever navigated the public bus systems would you know where to go if you needed to receive food stamps.

You know, does your family. And then finally, like, there’s just all kinds of great questions that really threw me for a loop. And what I figured out in reading through this assessment is that poverty has nothing to do with intelligence. It took more intelligence to navigate the things that were on the list that that I couldn’t even answer a single question for. And that that struck me. And so I think that, you know, my personal mission statement was in place at that time, but I really chose. At that moment to focus my career on serving individuals who are coming into into the workforce and into the educational environment with some of these inequities that I was unfamiliar with. And so I took it upon myself to become trained in the platform itself.

And I’ve brought a lot of those philosophies into our product design. One of the 10 to mount ideas that we have every time we’re launching a new feature in career edge is that we assume no prerequisite knowledge, and we always deliver without judgment. And that is important as we are looking to serve individuals who maybe didn’t come from a family where they’ve ever written a resume or, or gone to a an office job on a daily basis or own their own vehicles or things like that. So those are those are some of the things that really stuck out to me and drive the heart and the heartbeat of our mission at career team.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, as the chief business officer, I imagine that you have to mix sort of big picture vision with practical execution. How, I don’t know, what’s maybe like a realization that you’ve had about balancing those bottom line objectives with your passion for empowering individuals to improve their life through education and better work for better work opportunities.

Micaela Pearson: Yeah, it’s a great question because I always say to my teams, leaders are paid to think and that we work full time for today and part time on our future. So if you in an executive role are spending all of your work hours tactically executing against what’s happening right in front of you, you’re missing the mark. We have to give ourselves enough time and elevation and space to think broader and to say, okay, I have this solution in front of me.

What if I just turned it on its side? Could I reimagine this and could it serve a different purpose? So that’s a great example of the work that we’re doing now with the departments of corrections. We have five years ago, we’re doing no work in the DOC’s because the technology infrastructure to work with technology prior to release was not there.

Anthony Codispoti: DOC is? Department of Corrections. So working with some of the resident populations in the prison systems today. Historically speaking, it’s been, you know, no technology, no internet, no anything. Well, guess what? The DOC’s are starting to become a little bit more sophisticated. And if you have the right security infrastructure on your systems, they make great candidates for work readiness programs because once you bypass all of the basic human needs, the number one tool that a returning citizen needs in order to stay out of the prison facilities is a job. So having done that work ahead of time, having learned how to interview and done their resumes and understand their unique value propositions and learn how to overcome the conversation around incarceration before they exit is something that is really beneficial to their objectives of reducing recidivism. So where I’m going with that is, and we are thinking big picture. They, this wasn’t on our radar a few years ago because of the technology infrastructure.

But if you give yourself enough elevation as a leader to really say, what are some of the changing and emerging trends across all the different channels that we serve that align with our mission, you’re always going to be able to find new use cases and ways that you can innovate your platforms and services to reach broader and more populations. Speaking of Department of Corrections, I had a conversation with someone else recently that kind of opened my eyes to people who are coming out of the prison system and the extreme difficulties that they face in trying to re assimilate like, hey, I want to, I want to get on track. I want to provide, I want to get a job, I want to be part of the community again. And there are so few opportunities that exist for somebody with a criminal record. And there’s sort of this perception that people who have been formerly incarcerated, they’re not going to be good employees. They’re not someone that you can trust. Help me, help me paint a different picture for people listening about the sort of the negative stereotypes that surround all of that.

Micaela Pearson: And that is certainly a movement that we’re seeing far and wide and more and more states getting on board with. There are also a lot of employers that are very second chance friendly, and have found that those employees end up being the most reliable, the most eager to work, and have very, very little issues. From an insurance policy perspective, or I guess a way to kind of help soften the blow of employers that are willing to work with this pool.

There are lots of federal bonding programs and things of that nature. So if an employer is nervous about this possibility, and they would like to, but they’re, they’re trying to figure out the best way to do these sorts of things. Partnering up with our local workforce agencies with the nonprofits that are specifically focused on employment for folks that have a felony record can help them better understand what resources are out there for them. Yeah, there’s, there’s lots of transitional programs, there’s lots of opportunities for individuals to come in, and a work experience and then if that is a good solution for them, then they can come on and stay full time.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, and one of the points that you just made there, Michaela was something else that came up in this other conversation where it was like, it was a little counterintuitive. You know, these are folks that have had so many struggles and they’ve had so many doors closed in their face that when there is an employer who will open the door for them and give them an opportunity that they are so incredibly grateful that they end up being, you know, some of the best workers, the most reliable, the most loyal. That’s been your experience as well.

Micaela Pearson: Yeah, and listen, there’s not a universal truth to this. There’s certainly going to be exceptions to the rule. But I would say that you won’t know until you try and that there is a lot of promise that we’re seeing out there. As of late, I’ve been working with organizations that are teaching cybersecurity and coding boot camps into broadcasting into the prison facilities in a secure manner and we’re just seeing all kinds of new types of career pathways that are being delivered prior to release and it’s really, really exciting to see some of the work that’s being done.

Anthony Codispoti: Are there any other common misconceptions about workforce development or career readiness that you’re always trying to dispel?

Micaela Pearson: I don’t know if I would say it’s a misconception, but I do think that there is a tremendous opportunity for better collaboration between our educational leaders and our workforce leaders and the employer community.

There’s three legs to this stool. And when we are solving problems in a vacuum, we’re missing the mark. So by really better leveraging the employer communities into the conversation, having true training programs that lead to the skill sets that our employers are looking for, I think solves all problems. And to the degree that our education leaders are willing to sit at the table and think differently about their current processes, the length of their programs, the traditional university four-year degree, master’s degree pathway isn’t necessary for so many of the in-demand jobs that are happening in this country today.

So the idea of erasing the stigma around some of our trades programs and some of the incredible, sustainable opportunities that we have within this country is definitely the path that I see that we’re on. I was recently at a workforce and education conference and there was a representative from one of the major construction companies there. And he was speaking to, I think it was a $4 billion backlog of construction projects that they’re just sitting on.

And the reason they’re sitting on them is because they don’t have enough employees to get these jobs done. So what if the conversation were to change within households around this country to teach our upcoming workforce that there is a lot of employment opportunity here. Let’s stop freaking out about AI and replacing all of our computer jobs and actually look at where there’s a need for a labor, a qualified workforce in this country. And it’s all over the place, you know, healthcare, the trades. And then I asked the question during that session of the $4 billion in backlog, are we talking about casinos and hotels or are we talking about hospitals and roadways, you know, because this is going to affect everybody. And it turns out 50% of the workload that he was describing is very much related to things that would impact our day-to-day, whether it’s building new hospitals, schools, infrastructure, bridges, things like that. Wow.

Anthony Codispoti: So you mentioned healthcare, you mentioned trades. Anything else that you’re seeing come up on a recurring basis where there’s opportunities?

Micaela Pearson: Sure. I mean, IT is definitely a strong area. Cybersecurity, gosh, every single day it seems like things are popping up with additional need for support in those areas. And I think that’s what I’m talking about is, you know, those are, I would say the majors that I am consistently running into is, but trades means a lot of things, right? You’ve got welding trades, you’ve got plumbing trades, electrical, all pipe fitters, all kinds of things that fit into that. And what’s kind of exciting about those particular industries is that you can earn as you go, right? Maybe you start with a level one welder certificate and get an entry level position, and then your employer is now paying for your next certificate and the one after that. And you’re seeing your earning go up as you go as opposed to going and taking a four-year degree out of the gate and going $150,000 into debt and starting in an entry level position where your student loan is your entire paycheck.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah. And Mikaela, you’ve completed the Accomplished Coaching Program. You hold some certifications and executive coaching. I’m curious to hear in what ways that coaching has shaped your leadership style.

Micaela Pearson: Sure. And I would say bridges out of poverty and the Accomplishment Coaching Program had a very similar impact. And I think at the end of the day, I’m so much of how we were raised impacts the way that we see the world. The way we see our careers, the way we interact with others. So with both of those programs, I’ve really tried to take an individualized approach to really understand the motivating factors of my own team and the participants that we’re serving. And, you know, the challenges with those types of programs, not everybody can afford to go to an individual therapist or a life coach or go to a very expensive four-year degree program. So how can we take these concepts of really understanding who you are overcoming some of those emotional barriers to success?

Because that’s what I would say. Going back to the roots of career team and when Sue Casillio said, gosh, the thing that’s getting in the way of these individuals’ success is so much in their heart and so much in their minds. So can we at scale create tools that, you know, are going to allow an individual to unpack some of those barriers and go into these academic and employment opportunities with a level of confidence that they didn’t have before?

So those are the, I guess, the guiding principles that I’ve taken from both of those additional training programs and said, you know, how can we reach backwards for context, not to make excuses about why an individual, you know, can’t break a cycle or move on, but at least it helps us better understand who they are and put the equitable structures in place to help them take the next step in the ladder.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, there’s a question that I like to ask most of my guests, McKellen. I wonder if you might have a rather special perspective on this because of what you do. You know, a lot of folks I talk to, a lot of employers I still talk to that say it’s still a pretty tight workforce, like it’s tight labor force. Hard to find good folks, hard to hold on to good folks. Now, obviously you’re mostly involved in getting people trained and ready for those careers, but I’m curious as you sort of talk to your different clients and interact with them, what are some things that you’ve seen have been really successful and first of all, recruiting good folks into an organization. And once you identified that, hey, the art, but we want to hold on to them to then retain them, like what are sort of the strategies involved in attracting the right folks and hold on to them. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: I mean, I don’t think that I’m going to say anything that is that unique, other than one of the biggest things that I always try to really hone in on during the hiring process. I’ll take the extra time to make sure that there is mission alignment.

Right. And we all have a different reason why we’re choosing to do what we do, but I think if you were to speak with any employee at career team, there is something about being part of an organization that is specifically focused on helping individuals with barriers to success, helping somebody go from A to B or A to Z that keeps them here. We could all go to work in any industry. If that idea of helping individuals is not in your bucket, then we’re probably not the fit for you, right?

But maybe saving the oceans is. So if there is an opportunity to really check mission alignment through the interview process and then come back to it because, you know, I’m sure you experienced this running your company as well. At the end of the day, not 100% of my time is spent having these conversations. I am, you know, in the weeds of looking at project plans and troubleshooting technology issues and working with our fiscal teams. But I have the privilege of going out and seeing our customers often and hearing from the students, hearing from the participants in our programs about the impact that our services or our software or the, our partner organizations have helped them achieve their goals. So we try really hard to make sure that we are bringing that back to our staff on a consistent basis. So as an example, every Friday I meet with our teams, we go through a comprehensive review of every project that’s in flight. And I’ll always come back and say, well, hey, this week I was at this event and here’s what we heard from the students.

And I think that everybody needs that shot in the arm and that reminder of the why behind what we’re doing. And then, you know, spending the time I still maintain one on ones with my teams and probably 50% of the conversation has nothing to do with KPIs and metrics. It’s how we do it. How are you feeling about this and what else can we tweak and, you know, I always tell my teams I work for you as much as you work for me. So my job is to remove your barriers and get things out of your way. And if I can do that, then, then, you know, people feel seen and supported and just like every other relationship on the planet, where you start to see things break down as when people do not feel seen and they do not feel hurt and they don’t feel supported. So as a leader, if we can make sure that we’re starting off the game and the right set of rules, we know that we are aligned from a mission perspective and then we’re checking in on that and checking in on people as human beings. That’s what I’ve seen be the recipe to sustainable success and our executive team at Career Team. Many of us have been here for a very, very long time. We are, we are as much as we work hard and we are competitive and we want to do the right things and see our performance thrive. We’re also very much a family and that resonates across the board.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, in your role, we’ve talked a lot about this already. Being very KPI driven. Obviously the ultimate KPI, at least from a business perspective is the P &L, right?

You’re not running a charity that the numbers have to look good and have to make sense. And as I think about a business leaders role in trying to improve the P &L, there’s sort of these two categories of levers, right? It’s like one of them is how do we increase sales? The other one is how do we reduce expenses? In the past, as you sort of thought about each of those levers, has there been a creative idea that has worked to move either one of those? Sure.

Micaela Pearson: I think that whenever you come up with a model that works well in a channel, there’s probably industry adjacent areas that if you take your solution and it’s square box and say, well, I could just tilt it on its side or relabel something this or what would we need to do to make this work elsewhere? You find, especially where we are, and when I started with the company, I really only thought of students as our customers and job seekers as our customers.

Well, guess what? There’s a whole employment community out there that has existing employees that need to upskill in some of these areas or whatever the case may be. So instead of, I would say, getting a broader definition of customer has definitely helped us to say once we’ve really saturated in a particular channel, is there a way that we’re not going to start a whole new business unit or have to restart the product strategy? Could we take what we have, turn it on its side and solve a problem for another industry?

So perfect example of that. We launched our statewide case management solutions in the past couple of years. And in doing so, we figured out that there’s a lot, a ton of other types of organizations, mostly social driven organizations that need case management solutions, maybe not at a state scale. But what if we were able to bring this big enterprise solution down to something that could work within the nonprofit space or work within cities or counties and other places? And so what we found is this is also a solution for veterans organizations.

It’s a solution for not only the departments of corrections, but the nonprofits that are case managing those recently released returning citizens as they’re making their way back into the workforce. So while our workforce programs may call it application and intake, somebody else might call it program or intake process or whatever the case is. So to the degree that we can flex and be a chameleon based on the audiences that we’re serving, we’re finding out that the customers are customers, a customer. Some of us call them career seekers. Some of us call them students.

Some of us call them returning citizens and we need to be able to pivot and move with those changes so that we can serve broader audiences. On the expense side, I think we just, every year we try to say, okay, here’s what things look like this year. Where did we invest our resources? Did that make sense?

Was there a return on this? Do we need to change our strategy? Should we be moving in a different direction? And then also, are there things that we’re purchasing today that we can combine into other resources? So I’m always looking at that is to say, you know, do we have three or four software systems that if we purchase one, we could move all of that into one experience. And that is actually very often what our customers are doing when they’re adopting career edge, right? They’re saying, hold on a second, we’re buying courseware over here.

We are purchasing a labor exchange or job board from another company. We have an alumni community. We’re also, you know, using another background check service. But if we go with career edge, maybe that single line item in our P &L is bigger, but we’re able to encapsulate four or five services and create some economies of scale and some operational efficiency in the process. So I’m doing that every day or every year at Career Team and looking across our organization to see if there’s ways that we can optimize our investments. And that’s exactly what our customers are doing as well.

Anthony Codispoti: I have to imagine that from when you first joined Career Team to where you are now, your role has very clearly evolved, right? Very small organization. You’re wearing all kinds of hats. You’ve got a few hundred employees, you know, you’re spread around. What was kind of the biggest challenge for you in kind of making those progressions along the way into, I don’t know, sort of the role that you filled and the way that you had to carry yourself through the company?

Micaela Pearson: For sure. When I first joined the organization, I was our education division president. So what that meant was one vertical, very focused. I ran across the entire organization, like think of kind of a GM type of thing where you’re doing the business development, the marketing, the customer success, the product analyst, the implementation, and then even on like the contracting and fiscal side.

So the entirety of the operation. As we’ve scaled, we now have more specialization, right? So we have a general counsel. We’ve got CFO, we’ve got product teams and fiscal agents and people that are handling all of these things.

So for me, it’s like I’m going back to where I was in my previous role at McGraw Hill. So not quite, you know, it’s not as big of an organization as that. So I’m not quite as specialized.

But like I said, on the earlier part of this call, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So I find myself going into a task and then go, wait, wait a second, I need to actually let go of this and have somebody else take care of it. So I’m trying really hard and that has been the biggest transition is to let go of certain tasks so that the organization can scale and that we’re all working within our superpowers. And, you know, I am by no means the best person that some of the fiscal and operational components of the business, but I wore that hat because out of necessity. Now that we’re in a different place, I need to let every single team member play in their role and let the orchestra shine brighter than the individual. I like that.

Anthony Codispoti: Micaela, I’m going to shift gears on you here for a moment and I would like to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve worked through either personal or professional or a combination of the two. What it was like getting through that and some lessons learned as you got to the other side. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: I mean, I can speak to so many. I think that, you know, going from an individual individually owned company to having investment resources and that transition that I’ve just mentioned of being a division leader and then now scaling into a chief business officer role where you have your hand and a little bit of everything, but you’re very focused on one particular area of the business that has been extremely rewarding but also challenging to say, as I will admit, you know, I like to have control for situations. But I also recognize that the company and can’t grow the way that we needed to if I’m having individual ownership all over all these different components.

But I would say bigger than that. And what I have often said is that when I went from McGraw Hill to a career team, I had to learn that there’s different definitions of success for a business based on their goals, right. An individual owner of a business is going to think about success very, very, very differently than something that’s private equity backed or has VC funding or is looking to exit or go public.

And so aligning your day to day and your objectives as an executive to the definition of success that you’re tied to can be very challenging and especially when it changes virtually overnight. So that has been something that’s been so exciting to say some of the things that I didn’t feel were possible when we were, we didn’t have some of these other resources now they are and I’ve been given that freedom to fly which has been so exciting scary, right. But when you’ve got great leadership backing you and incredible CEO, wonderful board of directors that says, awesome, go go try these ideas out and whatever investments that we need to make to make that happen. That’s, it’s really, really exciting and that’s, I think the way that I’ve overcome that challenge of going from one definition of success to another is to kind of reframe my brain to say, this is a different job that you have today. And you need to think make sure that the lights are still on and that you’re making sure your customers are taken care of and that the mission and the reason that people have chosen career team for all these years is still there. But that you’re also taking advantage of the opportunity that you have to date to grow into new areas which in our case means helping more people.

Anthony Codispoti: I imagine that has to be a lot of fun knowing that you have that flexibility and the resources behind you to experiment a little bit.

Micaela Pearson: It is and I also think that we need to shake it up right we’re never if we stay stagnant for 10 years and one role and we think of our definition of success the same way year after year after year that we’re actually becoming a hindrance to our business and not necessarily the wind at our own back so I’m always doing that I’m constantly asking am I thinking broadly enough have I have I gotten out from under the weeds enough to really think about our next strategies and and and challenge myself to think bigger and more expansively about where we may go next.

Anthony Codispoti: Michaela any books mentors experiences that have been particularly helpful for you in your path. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: Lots of all of the above I think my favorite book though today is still the same one from forever ago which is the Go giver. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book but it’s a very very simple concept around and I think it’s that it’s actually how I’ve run my business and my network for the since the beginning of my career. It’s just the idea of looking past the situation right in front of you and whatever is really kind of self serving to your individual contribution I go getter and and looking at how you can solution for whichever problem that you’re solving so in other words I’ve had many. A CEO or chief academic officer that has called me over the years to ask me about things that have nothing to do with my products. And I think that that’s the biggest feather in my cap is when you can be looked at as an industry ambassador or somebody who is bringing ideas to the table. So that happens to be the chief business officer of career team and and offering the courage solution. It always pays off in the end and I can’t tell you how many times my relationship with one of our current partners started totally not related maybe they needed a referral for a new person for their team or an introduction to a vendor that has nothing to do with us and then downstream when the timing was right when the need was there. Where their first phone call and that’s something that I’m very committed to and and I think the go give her and their principles really aligned with that mission that message.

Anthony Codispoti: That’s great. It’s surprising to me I haven’t heard of that book before but I’ve just put it on my list of pick up so thanks for that recommendation. But I just got one more question for you. McKayla but before I ask I wanted you to things first of all everyone listening today I know that you love today’s content please hit the like share subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. McKayla I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you what would that be.

Micaela Pearson: I’m linked in is probably the easiest way to find me. My email address and contact information is there just McKayla Pearson so pretty easy to find and then through our website my bio and all that is as pretty easy to find there as well. Terrific.

Anthony Codispoti: Last question for you. I’m curious what you see the big changes are that are coming either for your industry in general or career team more specifically in the next couple of years any particular projects innovations new directions that you’re excited about. Sure.

Micaela Pearson: Well, I mean just in the last couple of weeks we’ve had our first joint calls between departments of corrections and departments of workforce development so that idea of building a ecosystem that makes it easy for a citizen or a participant to migrate from one state department to the next and have a experience that is consistent. I see that the beginnings of that so I’m really excited about some of those possibilities and we’ll be really curious to see what that looks like as we go forward.

But you know there’s there’s a lot of change coming there’s you know a new administration coming in and I’m sure that’s going to affect a lot of the performance benchmarks for any of the state agencies so we’ll be very much paying attention to those changes and seeing if and how our technology services can better align to meet the objectives and ensure that these dollars are going towards a good investment that’s that’s helping individuals either reduce their government dependency or achieve better wage employment and sustainable careers.

Anthony Codispoti: Very admirable. It’s going to be fun to kind of watch is the progress unfolds. Micaela I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today I really appreciate it.

Micaela Pearson: Absolutely really appreciate you having me today and thank you so much for bringing these stories out there and for the great work that you do.

Anthony Codispoti: Thank you for those kind words folks that’s a wrap on another episode of the inspired stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today. .