Rebecca Agostino: The Skill Schools Forgot to Teach

At Multiverse, you moved from school leadership into apprenticeships and workforce learnings.

What did that experience teach you about how people actually build careers?

I, as both a principal and apprenticeship leader, saw the tremendous value of work-based learning, of young people getting to experiment with different careers and learn through actual work.

And I saw how that experience can be absolutely life-changing for a young person and their career.

And I also saw the tremendous barriers to scaling the models the way that we do now.

So in our country right now, we create work-based learning by an individual school or intermediary or nonprofit, recruiting employers and saying, you should work with our students.

They're really great.

It will be good for your business in the long run.

And then finding and training students and then pairing them up individually.

And if you think about the millions of young people who need early work experience, that model is never going to reach all of them.

So that reality was sort of simmering in the background for me that this type of experience is so powerful, but there just aren't enough to go around.

And then I started doing more research with college and career counselors and just asking people in my own life, how did you get your first work experience? How did you get your foot in the door? And not a single person said to me, there was an internship board or I sent my resume in cold on this job board.

There was this marketplace and I applied for it sort of randomly.

No, everyone told me I knew someone or I went door to door to small businesses in my community or I started something entrepreneurial myself.

Everything was through people's own initiation and school counselors would tell me.

The kids who are most successful are those who will put themselves out there and hustle and go find people that can build the right connections for them and then advocate for themselves.

Say, I am 16.

Here's some things that I could do to help you out.

Would you be willing to let me volunteer

for you or let me work for you over the summer?

And what those counselors would always tell me is that's the ideal.

And that works for lots of students, but not all students know how to do that.

And we can't teach all students how to do that motion.

And I started to think, okay, but what if we could teach all students that sort of motion of self-advocacy? and connection.

Could we create more opportunities than we have today because are there business owners out there who aren't necessarily proactively thinking, I should have an intern this summer, but if approached by a really smart, curious, passionate young person would say, sure, I'll take a chance on you.