Skills-First Hiring and Apprenticeships are Key to Advancing Black Talent Without Four-Year Degrees According to New Case Study

 

OneTen, a coalition of leading executives and companies committed to hiring, promoting, and advancing one million Black individuals without four-year degrees into family-sustaining careers, today published Catalyzing Careers through Skills-first Hiring:

Insights from Cleveland Clinic, a case study developed in partnership with Cleveland Clinic and Grads of Life that offers a new and exemplary model for employer DEI practices and skills-based talent management.

Key findings from the study revealed that adopting a skills-based approach and re-credentialing roles were proven actions that catalyzed careers for Black talent without four-year degrees, with apprenticeship and executive sponsorship programs generating success in helping advance Black talent into more senior roles.

“We know that skills-based hiring is a catalyst for change, especially for Black talent. It’s thrilling to see OneTen coalition members like Cleveland Clinic put their commitment into action to exemplify how transformative this work can be,” said Maurice Jones, CEO of OneTen.

“Our hope is that even more employers will be emboldened by this sense of possibility to adopt these key learnings and hire, promote, and advance more Black talent into family-sustaining careers.”

As a founding member of the coalition, Cleveland Clinic began working with OneTen and its strategic partner, Grads of Life-an organization that helps companies create and implement diversity, equity and inclusion strategies-to accelerate its goals to advance racial equity.

December 2020, Cleveland Clinic is committed to building, expanding and sustaining a competency-based culture and ensuring equitable career paths for its talent. The Cleveland Clinic prioritized outreach to build trust, diversified employment opportunities, and created training programs to build long-term careers.

In addition, the Cleveland Clinic has moved from a degree-based attitude to a competence-based approach, developing competence-based career paths that allow nurses to advance based on their skills rather than their academic credentials.

Two years after further developing this study, the Cleveland Clinic found that:

• Apprenticeships are a strategic talent pipeline for full-time recruits. For those without a four-year college degree, apprenticeships offer an opportunity to simultaneously continue their education, maintain a professional network, and gain better access to work with family-related wages. This is especially important for black adults, 76% of whom do not have a bachelor’s degree. OneTen helped the Cleveland Clinic identify and strengthen relationships with local developer talent and create its first pharmacy and information technology apprenticeship program. The success of these programs, combined with the Cleveland Clinic executive’s sponsorship model, has revealed opportunities. By creating a more work-based experience, the health care system can help Black caregivers rise to higher positions.
• A proven means to advance your career. Using his OneTen guidelines for determining desirable roles, the Cleveland Clinic recertified or rewrote her more than 260 job descriptions to remove unnecessary his four-year degree requirements and ensure that the roles required We have re-listed the best skills and desirable skills. The Cleveland Clinic has since recertified over 2,000 positions as SkillFirst and has hired and/or promoted over 1,600 of her OneTen talent since joining the Coalition.
• Well-defined and clearly communicated career paths promote greater job satisfaction and belonging, especially for black talent. For his highly in-demand role as a medical assistant, the health system found that most of the essential skills listed did not require a medical assistant degree. We created a career path that provides participants with the training necessary to become a medical outpatient clinical nursing assistant. To date, the Cleveland Clinic has eliminated him 80% of the clinical nursing assistant degree requirements and used a path model to increase opportunities for similar roles.

“Increasing the recruitment and development of diverse talent has always been important to the Cleveland Clinic and aligns directly with OneTen’s mission. said Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and president of the Cleveland Clinic and Morton L. Mandel’s CEO.

Catalyzing Careers with Skills-Preferred Recruitment: Insights from the Cleveland Clinic are the first of three case studies OneTen will publish this year, highlighting key insights, best practices, and opportunities for job reskilling and upskilling. We share our evidence of success — the first approach to hiring OneTen employer members, talent developers, community organizations and across our national network of Black Talent. The next survey in the series focuses on black talent and his path in his OneTen career.

Originally published at https://businessdor.com on January 25, 2023.