You Better Know If You're a Workforce Developer or an Employee...

Join me as I talk about what I think the difference is between an employee and a workforce developer; what it means to do workforce in 2026; and what I hope for you!

Transcript

Courtney 0:01

Welcome back to Scratching the Surface of Workforce Development with Courtney Taylor, and I am Courtney Taylor. This is season three, and not a single season has gone the way I thought it would. So cheers to that. You know, when I look back at the last couple of years of life, I had, certain plans for what I wanted to do with this podcast, and I did it. And I honestly thought when I stopped last season that I had said what I had to say, and I was done. I mean, I'm doing this for me. I wanna say things, and so I gave myself a place to say things. So I encourage you in, whatever way you choose to do things, that you just do it. So over the last couple of months as I have, recovered from the last, beating, that life gave me, I s- I, you know, I finally was like,"Hey, I'm ready. I'm ready to come back to this thing." So here we are. We are back. It is May in Mississippi, and I suppose everywhere. And if you're in the workforce space, there's a lot going on, and I'm gonna just kind of hit on some things that, that I see around me. Uh, just a quick reminder, I have the fortunate world of getting to work nationally. I work for and with the state of Mississippi and her leaders and industry leaders, But then I get to work nationally, and I get to, to talk to people from other states and listen to what they're doing and study it. If someone is doing something that I want to do, I will just study it and figure out how to do it ourselves, or I will just sit with ideas until me or one of my talented teammates, makes it happen. You know, as, as I look at the world around me in workforce development I will go back to something I said in the very first episode of this crazy thing, which was the problem with workforce development is people are talking about it, but people aren't thinking about it. And I think there are many ways to get a leg up in this industry, and the first one really is to just be thoughtful. Step one. There's not necessarily any rewards for doing that except for just, in my world, just sheer joy of getting to do the work that you wanna do. And you know, we've talked in the past about, making sure that you get to a position and a place where you can do the version of this work that you want to do, and you have to be sold out, to your mission and what you want to accomplish. And I think one of the, one of the challenges we have is that there are plenty of people that wanna accomplish things, but maybe there's a break in the system or the responsibilities or whatever. And so I think you may have to make really hard calls in your life to figure out where you wanna be. And, sometimes that involves a move. You know, I moved from another state to Mississippi. And, really looking back on it, like, if I had had better sense, I wouldn't have, because it was not like I made some massive financial leap or... It just really wasn't, financially worth the risk. But man professionally, I would do it all over 10 times, because it has just put me in a position, and that's no shade to my previous work or my previous anything. It's just different, and it just aligned with kind of where I thought I wanted to go. I wanna do workforce development. I don't wanna manage growth. And I think you need to know the difference, When I look around the world and around this country and the state, like, we have a lot of people who can manage. They can manage programs. They can manage growth. They can do, they can manage development to an extent, and that's wonderful, but that ain't me. It's, it's not what, I think I am good at, and I think, the things that I am good at is, you know, leaning into just complete uncertainty and rapid acceptance of this is where we are. And, I choose every day, frankly, whether or not this is something I want to keep doing, and whether or not I think my talents are still aligning with where we're going. And,, just to talk personally for a second, before I get into some of this other stuff, when I took the job the, to lead the organization that I work for, which by the way, I have not previously really talked about except for when I interviewed our outgoing executive director, AKA Trader. He knows who he is. But when I interviewed him on here is really the first time we really directly addressed, my office. I really try to keep the two separate, and I think it's an important point because while, the world may see me, you know, I am the executive director of my organization and I'm doing this, that's not all I am. And I think too often in our working lives, we just get so identified by the thing that we are that we pigeonhole ourselves and we forget, in this space, that we are workforce developers first. And I will tell you right now, I am a workforce developer first. Now, I, consider myself to be an average workforce developer when it comes to practicality and putting the things on the road that need to be on the road, I'm a good developer. In general I'm... I love working with business and industry and, and listening to them and trying to figure out,'cause a puzzle piece, right? And I don't like actual puzzles'cause they involve a lot of sitting inside and they bore me. But in this space,, I love the puzzle that is this job. And so I am a workforce developer first. I'm a workforce developer, a human capital developer who is also an executive director. It's not the other way around. And I understand that might not be the norm in many states. I think a lot of times they create really cool things, and then they put people who are comfortable with government in charge of them. And there's a delicate balance here, but then you get what you get. And government understands more government. And so working for the business board that I work for, I, have to balance this world of what is necessary, what is government, and what is actually production. And frankly, and look, I'm not gonna tell you that I'm not guilty of this as well in my role is, frankly, a lot of what we do in government is just government. We just... Everything is designed to make government happy. I think government thinks it's designed to make the taxpayers happy, you know? And it's like i- it's probably not. But I, I think, just remember, and I encourage you, if you identify as a workforce developer, and look, there are plenty of people who take on roles that, that they're just in a job, right? It was a promotion. It was a, a lateral shift. It was just something that looked like fun. No shade. Cool. Enjoy it. I am a workforce developer, and I wanna talk to workforce developers. And I also wanna talk to economic developers, and I wanna talk to people who are interested in this space and in this thing because frankly, I spend a significant portion of my day either doing this or thinking about this. One of my mentors, Cindy, has a statement. She, she calls it work-life harmony, not balance, because in a balance, in a scale situation, as one side goes up, the other must go down. And so in a harmony environment, harmonic environment, I don't know, English is still not my thing. Ironic for a person who just really likes to write and use a lot of words. But anyway I could probably use less words if I was better at the English thing. But anyway i- she calls it work-life harmony, and I s- thought about that last night'cause she said it yesterday to me, and I'm like,"Man That's actually really, like, astute and really important, and I'm, I know I'm gonna be all over the place on this episode, but you wouldn't listen to this if you weren't ready for that,'cause you know how it is. But I actually second-guess regularly whether or not I should be posting things on social media, because inevitably someone will try to use it against me. And let me make sure everyone knows when you're listening to this, you can't use anything against me. Because it's fine. It's cool. You wanna use something against me and try to, try to get me out of my job? That's fine, I'll go do something else. You wanna use something against me to try to make me look bad? You can't. You can't, because I will tell you every insecurity, every weakness, every everything that I can identify that I think about. So yes, that's a trauma response. But you can't. And but I think about it because I don't want to paint the picture that, like, I'm just out there having all of this fun, because I work on Saturdays and I work on Sundays. Not every week. I have also simultaneously accepted that every email will not get answered, and that every single thing from the outside world that the world is asking me for, they will not get. But as long as I do the job that I have been asked to do by the people who have asked me to do it, the rest of it's whatever. I deal with people sometimes who will say that,"Oh, well, so-and-so is, is too good to call me back," or,"They're too busy for me," and da, da, da, da, da. And, and the answer is, yeah, probably. You're not a priority in their space, and you gotta figure out why that is. It does not mean it's intentional. But this is where the having the, you know, I tell people all the time,"Just pick up the phone and fricking text me or call me." And, and I say that after someone had literally called my phone every week for months it felt like, and I didn't... i, it was recognizing it as spam on my phone, and I just happened to look at my voicemails,'cause I don't really check voicemails. And I saw it was somebody. I was like,"Oh my gosh, I actually wanna talk to this person. I'm so sorry." So, so but I've just had to accept that, like, I will not be able, to, respond to every dog that barks at me, um, even if I want to. That is also where I think having a team that is just incredible matters, especially when you're somebody that likes to stir up a lot of stuff to do. And I would put the people who work in my office up against anyone's. Anyone's. For passion and productivity and willingness not to do the easy thing, which frankly is not rewarded in government normally, and, and I, I don't know that it's rewarded here, except that, the culture that we have is if you see something that you think is a challenge or is a great thing or something that needs to be corrected, then you should do something about it. Because the world isn't the world isn't measured, it isn't encouraged in government. It's just like what we do in government is what we've been metriced to do. Instead of questioning the metrics, we reward the system for being good boys and girls and checking boxes, and I just refuse. Now don't get me wrong, I like to check some boxes sometimes. Like it gives me, it gives me a little high to take a little to-do list and check it off. I'm just not, it's not my strong suit. And again, I'm not judging. I am though observing. And so anyway, so we live in this world of, of people who are just trying to check the boxes, and it is a very stressful world because you just, you check the boxes and then they move the targets, and then you just check the boxes, and then they move the targets, and then you check the boxes, and you haven't actually done anything But you've spent your time and your life doing it. And so I just encourage you, if you are in workforce development, to just figure out what your hard no's are and move in that way, shape, or form. And as a professional, as I've worked through all of this, reality, and, and I'm not gonna tell you I've worked through it well. I've just worked through it. You know, it's the first time I've ever lived this life, right? So I just go with it. As I have worked through it I have questioned whether or not I should post things about my trips and my travel and my barrel racing and, you know, all the things. But when parents post about all their kids' events and all the things they are doing, they don't get judged. So I, I thought to myself, and I am my biggest critic, and I am my biggest like,"Oh, you can't do that. You shouldn't do that," you know, whatever. But then one day I realized Like I have a life to live outside of work. And the life outside of work is actually what makes me good at the things that I think I am good at at work. I don't get overly involved in the social aspect of my job or the political aspect of my job'cause there's a lot of it. I just want to be a workforce nerd and left alone to do those things. And now that does require hard things, so like you can't have it, it's, it's not all gravy, baby. So there are things you have to do to be able to do the work of your, your life, you know? And I am living that dream, and I hope that for anybody listening to this that you get yourself in a role, in an organization in a role with a leadership that lights you on fire because it is a really fun way to live. It is not necessarily a work-life balance situation. But you strive to be harmonic, and so I say that to say, like I question whether or not I should post things on my social media. And I'm gonna tell you, like every time I question it, I post it because that is me, my little damn the man moment where you're not going to dictate what I do. So anyway, I'm saying this because when you get the urge of like, and I see the world around me where people don't post anything because the world judges them. And all I can tell you is if you're looking at my social media and you're judging me, you're the problem, not me. So for this world, I'm not supposed to be a human. I am supposed to be a robot I am supposed to be someone, you know, the way, the, the world wants it. I am supposed to be free of flaws, free of personal challenges, free of anything, and I am supposed to be at your beck and call. And I refute that at every level, because if... I have two goals when I am on social media, which is number one, to share my life with my friends. And if I have brought you into my world, we may not be friends, but you are someone that I have said,"I will share my life with you." I have people that I would still today go to the ends of the world for if they needed me, but I will not have them on my social media, because they don't deserve to be in my life in that way. But I'm not a monster, so I would still help them. And so anyway, number one is I'm going to share my life and I'm going to share my world. And number two, I wanna humanize what it means to work in government. And I have wanted this for a long time, and so this is how I have lived. People have hopes and dreams, and regardless of what you think about, public sector workers, most of them are still doing their best, and they're not rewarded for it. You know, we've got jobs in government where they pay 23, 24,$25,000 a year, and they are humans and I don't know why they choose to do the work for that amount of money but it's not enough. So anyway, so if you look at my social media,, I try to humanize myself and my work and the people that we work with, because I work with humans. I don't work with physical capital. I don't know jack about physical capital other than I really just wanna drive a big, heav- I just wanna drive heavy equipment, and I'm gonna do that in my retirement. I'm just gonna, even if I just have to put it out on my 35 acres here and just, like, just go drive it around and just tear crap up, dig a ditch, dig a hole. I don't know. But I don't work with physical, I work with humans, and so the humanity is often what is lost. And I will tell you as someone who has to manage all of this it's honestly really impossible to do everything that needs to be done. And so you have to quiet the noise around you, and you have to have leadership above you that will protect it. I talk about this a lot because I will tell you that I owe my career, whether you think it's successful or not, it has been, it is beyond anything I ever could have imagined for myself. I owe that to people Either in leadership roles above me, or mentors, or just people in my network, in my circle or whatever, who, quote,"have my back." And that looks different in a lot of different ways. I remember when I first moved to Mississippi one of the people in the community that was a, an influential leader called one of the people from Alabama that I happened to have done some work with. And I don't even know if they know this happened, but they told me about it. And, the person who called did and they said,"Hey, you know, what's this, what's this Courtney woman?" You know? And, and that person gave me third-party credibility in a state that, yeah, I got my PhD from Mississippi. I had been around Mississippi, whatever, but it w- I hadn't, you know, necessarily worked here, and I hadn't been, you know, my work hadn't been very visible, I guess, in, in my previous state, and the person gave me third-party credibility. That is the kind of thing, and it is the kind of thing that I try to do today when I get the opportunity, is like,"Hey," and I don't do this for everybody, right? But like, it's like,"Hey, that, that person's the real deal. Hey," whatever. Because it helped give me a leg up in a role that, it was just crazy, so. But, I have leadership, and I have had leadership who will block and tackle for me. I go, go back to, when I was at Calhoun and Jim Klauber, the president there, and it was the first time I had worked so closely to a president. I had not been a direct report for a president. I felt wholly unprepared for what that meant, but I happened to work for a president with a business mind. And he blocked and tackled, and he said,"I want you doing this thing. You go do this thing." And when anybody, even inside the organization, got in the way of that, he blocked and tackled. And it was it was powerful to me because it showed me like, oh, okay, th- this is how it should be. But it's not how it is. And so I do not take it for granted, and I know I'm, I'm rambling a lot right now, but I do not take that for granted. And then, when I've gotten in these other roles, my business community has just always had my back, and so that's what I will tell you, too, is if you're in workforce development and you have the opportunity to tick someone off, and there's two people right there, and you gotta tick one of'em off, and one's in government and one's in business, tick off the government person every time. You'll survive it, I promise. So anyway, I have just been really fortunate to get myself and to get in positions with leadership That blocks and tackles. And it looks different in my current role. We have situations, in this job where my direct executive committee that I report to, they block and tackle a ton. They lead. They do just really incredible things, and it is the genius of the office, is that they put business people in charge of it who can take the hits and who can just say,"You keep going. We're gonna go do this." Like, you do your job, and they also will calm me down. Like, I talk about this. I am the type of person that you have to sometimes be like,"Yo, that's enough, Courtney." And they'll do that,? And, and sometimes, you know, it's, it's, you know, there's a, one angel and a devil on the shoulders here. But, but it's really incredible. But we... I also have situations where the governor and the lieutenant governor and our legislators, especially my, my chairman and women, like, they block and tackle. I have situations where the, uh... Just, just, you know, it's just everybody. You know, we have partners who block and tackle and who protect things that maybe they don't even understand. Like, I don't know why her crazy self did these things, but it's gotta be for a reason. So, like, we're just gonna figure it out. We're gonna fuss, we're gonna fight, we're gonna do whatever we have to do, but ultimately, we're gonna come alongside and we're gonna get it done, and I will put my state up against any state. Any state. I don't care how big you are, I don't care how small you are, I don't care how rich you are, I will put us up against you because we will do it together. And in my world, if you've heard me say this, I think if it's a real partnership, it's messy. If there's no mess in your partnership, it's probably not a partnership, okay? They may be a sponsor, they may be a investor, but they're not a partner. And I don't think there's a such thing as a, as a perfect partnership. I don't mind getting a little bit bloody when we have to get a little bit bloody. Now, I also grew up playing some sports not necessarily from a young age, but in my, my forming years in high school I played sports, and that's what I went to college for. And what you learn in the team sports is, you know, one of you may be up, the other one may not be. And it's a balance, and then it works, and so I really view, you know, you hear, like, economic development is a team sport and I believe that, and I think workforce development is a team sport. But I don't think it's ever been treated that way because of how, frankly, in my mind, how the money runs. It runs in, and you get credit for your thing, and you get credit for your thing, and you get credit for your thing, and everybody's looking for credit on the number of people trained and for the most part, nobody cares about what's actually happening at the system level. But when you get down into the individual people working with the humans, they do care. But we haven't figured out how to share credit as a nation. And I think the credit that we are reporting right now doesn't matter. I don't care how many people you served in your units. I don't care how many people you trained. What freaking happened to them? Let's really start looking at that. So anyway, I can say those things because people have my back, and they will call me down, and they will help me when, like, I don't understand something because, Any- anyway you have to be human. You have to be whoever you are, and very frankly that is something that when I was offered the job that I have now, it was like,"You've gotta bring all of you." And I'm like,"Well, dang, I'm gonna run through a wall for these people. I will do whatever I can." Because it's really hard to accept all of a human because we are messy, we are hard, we are, offensive, we are weak sometimes. You know, we are just humans, and we are so just so perfectly imperfect that it's like, okay, so, like, even the bad parts of me that I have been told, pretty much my whole career that I should be less, and, and Mississippi's like,"Eh, we'll take all of that." And it's like, okay. So you can't touch that, and I'm really, really, really, really lucky, and I know I am really lucky to have that. But that also means I want that for you if that's what you want. And so I will tell you that you'll have to fight for it. As a professional, you will have to make really hard choices that could end your career if you're doing it right. If you're not making choices that could end your career in workforce development, you ain't working in workforce development. You're just, you're just managing, you know? I mean, you may be working, but you're, you're not leading, you're not living, frankly. I try to encourage my team every day to argue with me if they believe in something that I don't see or I don't hear., I move really fast, and I move really abruptly through the world. And I'm, and I, I'm a large person too. I'm six feet tall and so I just, I just am moving, and I don't slow down enough sometimes, and so I'm like,"You guys have to argue with me if you disagree with me." And now, it doesn't mean I'm going to agree with you, but it will probably sit with me for a while. And same with our partners. There are choices and decisions that I have to make to support the mission and support what I see coming Are not always popular. In fact, I, I would say most decisions that we have gotten the best results from were the least popular things we've ever done. So okay, cool. Let's do it. You have to figure out what you're built for and what you wanna be built for as a professional in this space, and I need more of them. I care about this profession because it has this profession has given me everything, and I mean everything, so I care about it. I think that no matter what as you're looking at, the world around you right now, which I'm gonna get into a little bit, but you have to respect as a professional that you're gonna spend a large part of your time doing your job, so you may as well love it. I say all of that, so it's like 27 minutes of junk. I say all of that to say You have to decide if you're a workforce developer or if you're an employee of the organization you work for. You can be both. You can be either/or. So you can be a workforce developer and not really have a home yet, right? Like, you can just wanna do this work, and maybe some of you are in that world. You can be a workforce developer that works for an entity. Or you can just be someone who works for an entity and has a position and a title. And look, no shade. Do whatever. The people that I wanna work with are people who wanna be workforce developers,'cause this is the profession that I have committed my professional life to and in ways that you guys don't even know yet, right? So even in my personal life, I have committed myself to doing some things for this profession that isn't actually... There's not an O*Net code for a workforce developer. You know, it's like, what do you check on the little box when it's like,"What do you do?" It's like,"I'm an executive." And it's like, gosh, how did I get so far in life that i'm just an executive, you know? It's like, geez. I'm a workforce developer. Like, we, we don't have that as an O*Net code really, and, and we don't really have a way to quantify effectively what it is, and I think that's because it's largely led by government, even though industry spends more money on workforce than government ever could think of. But I don't think industry in many cases, does a good job of hiring workforce developers. They hire people to manage people And that's something that you need. But somewhere along the way, you need a leader that's not held down by all that stuff. I'm not burdened by managing, it- outside of ARPA, but I'm not burdened by managing millions and millions of federal dollars with all the federal strings, and I get the strings. I run an organization. I get it. I'm not burdened by that. And I think there are people who are good at that and that want to do that, and I respect the crap out of those people. I'm just not one of them. And so anyway, so I think rapid acceptance of who you are is really, really important, and you will have to make changes in your life to put yourself in a position that you think you can be the most effective at. I would say this to my own team I know eventually they're going to leave me. I'm a government entity. I cannot compete. I cannot even compete with other government entities on what I pay in other states and in this state. So I will lose people, so all I can do is be with them and be for them while they are with me, and when they leave, My only rule is that they go get paid. So don't think you're gonna come recruit one of my people for a little bit,'cause you're gonna have to pay them. Because that's the amount of respect I put on this profession and the people who do this work. So anyway I think, a- as we, as we talk about, what you have to do in workforce and what you wanna do in workforce, I think you have to develop yourself professionally. I obviously am a massive fan of the, the PhD program at Southern Miss,'cause I'm a product of that. And I'm just really glad that it worked out for me to go into that program, as applied as it was, and it worked and, and it's just a PhD. It's just a piece of paper at the end of the day. But it was the learning. It was the learnin' the learnin'. It was the books. It was the, the humans that we learned from. It was a hybrid program, so we spent some time online, but we spent days and days every semester together. Instead of doing, the weekly deal, we would go a couple times a semester. And so you got to learn some things deeply, and then step away from it and apply it and it applied in real life, and then come back to it. And so I think my hope for you as you're working through this is that you, you do that. So I did not mean to get off on that tangent this morning. But anyway, to sum up all of this when I'm talking about social media posting, I literally have had people after I post, some stuff on social media, they'll come back and it's like,"Oh, you're not working." And it's like, you know what? You can go straight to hell. Because I work really hard, and I have a lot of harmony in my life. I barrel race. I am a barrel racer, so I ride my horse, you know, four or five times a week. I barrel race. I go places to do that. I use my vacations to do that. I work while I am on vacation. Now, I, I don't... It's not an unhealthy balance. I block my schedule, but there are still some things as an executive director that have to be done, and so I manage them. But also... That is, that's the world I'm in. My world starts at 6:30 in the morning and ends at 9:00 some nights, when it comes to work. So in between that, the harmony of the situation is I'm gonna go ride my horse in the time that I need to ride my horse, because if I had a kid living in my home that had an event, had a sporting event, I would be at their sporting event. So why on earth can't I say at 6:00 today I'm gonna go ride my horse? If we were doing travel ball, we would be traveling all over, the s- the southeast for my kids, and I would be leaving on Friday afternoon, and I would do all this. Um, yeah, if I'm gonna go to a barrel race and spend a few days, I'm gonna go to a barrel race. If I wanna go to a concert in another state, I'm gonna go to a concert in another state. Like, live your life. The world's gonna judge you, so whatever. So anyway, that's the, the professional reality is figure out what you wanna do, live your life, be human, show the world that you're human as much as you want to do and then move on But then as we move into, where we are, and one of the things I have fought against, uh, really, really hard is that the enti- in my opinion, the entire workforce system nationally is led by what I consider to be the minimums that the federal government put in place. Like, here's the minimums, and somehow over the course of 10 years of WIOA specifically, like, the minimums became the maximum. And the minimums in some cases are just absolutely ludicrous, so they should be the maximum. I mean, you're gonna guarantee success for 87% of the people who come through your program? Not if you're actually helping the people that need to be helped. I think it's incredible work but it's... No, stop. That's one thing I appreciate about Workforce Pell is it's like, hey, 70% have to complete the program and go to work. It's all right. I can handle that. Because if 70% aren't going to work, then you do have a, uh, there's something missing there, right? Either your industry isn't hiring, so you don't need to have the program or the program, they're not hiring because maybe the program isn't what it needs to be. Okay, cool. Whatever. Or you've, you're producing too many, or maybe you're not producing enough, so they don't see you as a valid pipeline. I don't know. I like the 70%, and it's something that my team has incorporated, um, in a lot of the stuff that we're doing. And so it's, something I can live with as we move forward. But anyway, as we're managing all of this federal stuff, I mean, it is, it... What a time to be alive if you're in workforce. There's plenty of opportunity to be creative. There's also plenty of opportunity to lose your shirt right now because it just looks different. And just so we're clear, we can disagree with this, but I am supportive of it looking different even if I don't support every way that it looks different. And that's the hard thing about my personality is I don't think there is really a such a thing as perfection, and I think we expect perfection. And we oftentimes in government just sit back and either complain about it or boast about it instead of just being a part of it. And so, like, I do not miss opportunities to go to DC and to talk to my congressional delegation about what's going on. I do not miss opportunities to go meet with agencies when I can, even if it's not the proper way. Maybe I should start regionally or start here. I don't care. If I have an opportunity to go speak to the people who work for me as a taxpayer, I'm gonna take it, and you should too, and you shouldn't be scared about that. Because at the end of the day They're just humans, and they're just trying to accomplish things for their own futures and the things that they think are important. And, you know, it's like, y- you know, one of the things I deal with is, oh, you know, politics are awful, and I'm not gonna tell you I wasn't in this camp. I didn't understand how it worked until I had to face it in this role, in this organization. And, you know, I'm a, I'm a people watcher. I'm, I'm more introverted than what most people believe. I get my, my my energy does not come from engaging with people most of the time. It comes from thinking and, being by myself and being with my horses and my dogs and I don't get energy from humans. And, so I sit around and watch the world around me, and it's it's crazy. And it is really good watching right now. And so anyway, as we've, as, as I've navigated this and I've watched the last year, um, you know, and I am, unfortunately for the world I operate in, I believe that many times you have to break something to figure out what actually makes it good. You have to define what working means. Is the system working? If you look at all the metrics, the system's doing great, but I happen to represent the workforce in one of the poorest states, rapidly rising, by the way, I'm just gonna tell you that, but one of the poorest states in the country previously, but all of our money is going down. The juice isn't worth the squeeze almost anymore, and I'm really grateful for the federal funds that we do get for WIOA, and so we're looking at Workforce Pell, and we're being serious about it. But it's friggin' hard. But I don't know how else to do when the feds have set up this system that they're not even supporting anymore. Our WIOA training dollars have gone down about 10% a year, and at a time when we're also saying we need to be putting people to work. What? What's the purpose of this program? And so that's the question that I'm asking, and I get... I'm fortunate to be able to ask that question, and I don't ask it disrespectfully. I mean no disrespect. And I'm not saying the program isn't working. I'm not, I'm... I...'Cause,'cause by the definition, it is. By the way it is metricked, it is. Just like education systems in every state are still working by the measurements that their legislatures have put in place. So if the industry says it's not working and the government says it is, which one do you believe? Which one do you think I believe? I'm gonna believe the industry. And that's why I'm a problem. But, industry's not perfect. I kick industry in the teeth all the time. You can't even tell me the basic competencies of what you need. You wanna fix the system, we gotta start there. So we have a whole new institute with our business alliance in Mississippi, that that is what they are working on, is how do we get information from industry in a way that matters without just beating them to death with committees and all this crap that doesn't actually move a needle? What moves the needle in workforce from a business and industry's perspective where their involvement is concerned? And that is the question we're gonna answer for our state. But I think but I think, it is an exciting time to be alive. But if you only look at the hardships, if you only look at the,"Oh, we're, we're losing money here," because I could get on one about that. If we only look at that, then it is a really demoralizing profession, occupation, you know, whatever. And the reality is, and the thing that I had to learn, as I advanced through organizations and got closer to, Which was not a goal, by the way. I, I did not prepare myself. I was not prepared in- directly to just, all of a sudden start working with legislators and governors directly, I had no raisin as we would say, in that world. And so I just had to learn how to move through it. And I'm grateful for that, actually, because it means I don't do it the way the way maybe the people who are good at it do it. And maybe, maybe I just do it the way I feel comfortable doing it, and it works for me, and they actually support it. But you can't just look at the bad because the thing that I have learned is the moment you tax somebody and take the money from them, the moment, that moment, it becomes political. So you can be holier-than-thou, you can whine about it, you can cry about it, you can call your legislators and abuse them, or your governor and abuse them, whatever, but the moment you tax somebody, that money becomes political. Like it or not, that's where we are. And so that's the rapid acceptance I talk about. Like, okay, this is the political nature of it. This is where we're going. Let me see how I can get there. And if I can't get there, I'm gonna be honest about it. I'm just out on that completely. We're doing things today that a couple of years ago I was completely against. Maybe not completely against, but I just didn't like it. And so we're trying to do more of the things, that we have, have seen that have worked. And that's the other thing. You've gotta give people who move in these ways time that they don't necessarily have to figure through what works and what doesn't. And again, I, I just have to say I'm very grateful that I am in a situation where I can say,"That ain't working. We're not doing it anymore," and I am supported, supported by people who- Who trust that I'm just trying to do what I think is right and and I do things that, that I don't like, but that doesn't mean they're not right. We have to do things like that sometimes. But at the federal level, when you watch all this stuff coming down, I mean, it was like we've had record record states combining their WIOA plans. And we are one, by the way, and I'm, I'm really grateful for that. And that took, leaders at levels that have no reason to trust me when I'm like,"I ju- we just need to do this together." And don't get me wrong, they were planning together, had been for some time, but we weren't actually doing together. And now, in fairness, we still aren't. We still have some gaps we have to close between our community college and our K-12 system and, um, but we're going to. It's cool. It's okay. We're gonna do it. We're gonna figure it out. So you have those kinds of wins happening. If, if we're gonna have less money in the system, okay, but if all of your money is going to urban and highly affluential or opportune areas, is it really a special populations program like WIOA professes to be? I don't know. It's just... I'm just frustrated about it. I'm frustrated watching us get things moving and then just know that, like, the money is evaporating at a rapid pace, and for my state, it's 11% a year. Our population supposedly isn't going up, which we have some arguments about. Our unemployment rate is going down. What I actually need to do, in my state is encourage a bunch more people into this system, which would artificially, momentarily inflate the unemployment rate which ironically would also influence the labor force participation rate, which is why we have to look at whole numbers of people working, not just the rates. The rates are helpful. They are not the thing. So anyway. So what I've, what I've had to do in my position is say,"You know what? We'll do it ourselves." And that's what we've done in Mississippi. And that is no shade because I work with some incredible people at the federal level, and I think, I honestly, I love the work that they're doing, the things they're trying to do. It is perfectly imperfect right now. So cool, but I have a lot of respect for the work that they've done and have done. I mean, this is a system that has been doing this for years, and there are people who were part of the system 10 years ago directly who are trying to make some changes now because what we knew then is different than what we know now. So can we just admit that like, hey, maybe some things aren't working? That's what we try to do. So what we're doing in our state is taking our own resources and putting them on the table. That's what we're investing in ourselves. We are not a wealthy state. Like maybe there are others who have more funding, which means we have to be more creative. We have to leverage it better, which puts a strain on the people doing the work because they have to figure out how to get to the money. But I will say that, that one of the things that I just appreciate the most about this state is, you hear about people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, and that is what this state does over and over and over again, and I am just so proud to be part of them. And I will call myself a Mississippian even though I haven't lived here long enough. I think you have to live here for like 80 years to be called a Mississippian, but I'm a Mississippian, and I'll argue with you about that. And I'm very proud to be a Mississippian and I get to live the life I wanna live here. And so what I've found and what I respect so much about the humans who are from here and who choose to stay here is just the,"We'll just get it done." It's like, we're, we, we know that no one's coming to save us and we have evidence of that, so we'll, we'll just save ourselves. And as, as the funding from the feds go down, that also means that the, the, the numbers should go down. And so I'm encouraging that right now. I call this, the milk theory or the milk proxy. I haven't really, hadn't really figured that out. But, one thing I see in MySpace is, mySpace, wasn't that a great website? We really did Tom dirty. Millennials, we suck. But, if you don't know what I'm talking about, just disregard. But it- one of the things I see in my world, both professionally and personally is, as I look around, and again, remember, I spend a lot of time thinking about this and looking at it, is we have we have told Congress, we have told our state legislators, this is across the country, so this ain't about Mississippi, I promise you,'cause I've seen it everywhere. We have told them that the cost of this is X, and you get Y. And so when you correlate that to milk, if you have been told the last time you remember talking about the price of milk, it was$2 a gallon,$1.98, whatever, and you go to the grocery store today and it's five bucks a gallon, you're gonna be like,"Holy crap." That's expensive. What did you do to make it so expensive? You need to cut your costs. And it's like, oh, well, that would be super great, but, I can't because all of the inputs that it takes,'cause the cows now don't cost$500, they cost$3,000, and their feedstuffs cost X amount, and travel and fuel and all of these other things go into it. But if all you know is that milk costs$2 a gallon and it's suddenly$5, feels like somebody's lying. Feels like somebody's being dumb, and I'm not saying there's not dumb stuff happening in milk production, i.e., so let's pull that out of, of the milk proxy and put it into the real world, and this is something we're battling. If you've been told as a federal government that we can, quote,"serve", 50,000 people, whatever the number is, on$10 million, and then all of a sudden the budget drops to, to$5 million, but you're still serving 50,000. It's like, oh, you were lying. You were pocketing that money. And it's like, eh, you were lying, but it wasn't about the money. You were inflating your numbers because that's what it took to get the money, okay? So if you want a more honest system, you have to accept it. And i- this ain't easy because everyone's encouraged to inflate their numbers, and that's what we gotta stop. I hope one day in my career that I have done enough to have a reputation for tanking numbers because I don't want people working their bones to just produce some bullshit number. I want them working their bones to produce the human, okay? So we need to think in terms of dozens, not thousands in workforce. And I know at the state level, I have to think in terms of thousands, right? But I have to break it down and say,"You know what? If you can just give me a dozen more, and 10 of y'all can give me a dozen more then we can go." And that very much is a, I think, a business perspective that they, have beat into me over the years, and especially over the last few years of just make it simple. You know, keep it simple, keep it simple. So, okay, if I need to increase from 500 to 1,000 of anything, how do I get that done if I have 15 places that do this? Okay, you need to go up by 200 you know, because you, you already have 100. I need you to go, you know, whatever. But I also think in the middle of that, we have to stop, stop, please, please, please, please, please stop Lying with numbers. Whether you're doing it intentionally or not, I want you to go back and look and say,"What is the purpose of this?" Now, I will also tell you, in my state, that means you're probably not gonna get federal grants, except for some of the things I've seen lately. It just says,, if you wanna get$5 million, you gotta serve 500 people. Like, that has been wholly helpful. So thank you DOL and the people who are doing that. And I think we need more of that, because the feds are absolutely allowed to say,"This is what we need to get out of this money." But when, when you don't know what they're looking for, that's what encourages people to inflate the numbers. And so when we can be really honest with what we are doing, at the state level, then the feds can be really honest with the impact of their work. And the same goes for me when I look down into the system, is, trying to make sure we're not incentivizing them to inflate numbers. It is the knee-jerk reaction for people who have been doing this for any time period,'cause that's just how it's been. I mean, I remember writing for grants for any federal entity where it's like, you know,"Oh, you know, the impact of this isn't big enough." It's a whole freaking county. It may not be big enough for you, but I have to set up the same infrastructure in rural Mississippi that you have to have in Huntsville, Alabama, or Birmingham, Alabama, or freaking Atlanta. I have to have the same equipment to run a manufacturing program. Now, I may not have to have as many iterations of it, in fairness, but I still have to start with that same equipment if I'm starting a program. But the reality is if I'm rural southwest Mis- southwest Mississippi, I am going to serve dozens, not hundreds, with that piece of equipment. Okay? So the ROI is very different for a funder in that case. I don't care. That is why you have to figure out what you are funding. And so this is some of the things we talk about. Are we funding the person, the program, or the entity? I generally think that in, in education, the state is responsible as its basic core duty to fund the entity, okay? If I'm gonna set up programs, if I'm gonna ask my education entities to set up programs then we can fund the program, the startup of it, right? And then the state needs to fund the continuation of it, and there needs to be a lot of communication in there to make this happen, and that has to be done at the state level. That's not the federal responsibility, and I will be forever grateful to live, in a time where, frankly... And it's hard, and look it's certainly hurting us. It's challenging I want the feds out of my business. I, as a state, believe that we can do it better. And so, hey, cool, let's cut the funding. You're gonna cut WIOA, cut WIOA, but cut my taxes in the process, and let me keep more of it at home, and let me do this. I will take responsibility for it, if that's what I'm paid to do, and that's what I'm driven to do. And so here we are, it's not a popular opinion. I don't strive to be popular, never have. So here we are. But anyway as we've navigated all of this and the federal stuff, and I have a lot of pride for watching how the feds have moved. It's not gonna last forever. We're gonna get another wild swing in here, next year probably, and who knows where it's gonna go. But for now, I'm gonna have rapid acceptance, and we're gonna do this thing. In the meantime, we are communicating differently. In my office, we have moved away from communicating how much money we're spending. Now, we're still telling the world how much we're spending. We have our reports. We put it in our articles, whatever. But nobody actually cares about how much we're spending. The taxpayers, all they look at that and say is,"Holy crap," because that's the milk proxy, right? Even our elected leaders,"Holy crap, you spent that much? On what?" Well, let's tell them what we spent it on first, workforce. D- Tell them what you're doing before you tell them how much it costs, okay? Communicate like you're talking to your, your husband and you've just been shopping, you know? It's not how much I spent, it's how much I saved. Look at all this stuff I got, uh, and it was only, you know,$300, whatever. But one example, one college, they just started two new programs. And we had some back and forth on those programs. They started two new programs, and so we get 30 seats roughly a year. And now in fairness, I don't think that's enough. I think the seat minimums need to be 22, 23, but okay, cool. We'll go with that, 30 seats a year. So for 30 seats a year, we spend X number of dollars, and that's what we're gonna do. Now, the world needs to judge the success of that program on whether or not we get 30 butts in 30 seats. You don't need to care how much money... I mean, you need to care how much money was spent if you're a conservative. But the money actually is just the medium. It's not the thing that's happening. I'm doing a hard-- this goes back to, my English challenges. But, I just care more about what we're supposed to be producing than how much we spend to do it, because government's going to spend some amount of money on this regardless. Let's just make sure we're doing what we need to do. So you know what we need? We need more programs. We need to expand our capacity to be able to do these things, and we need not to BS about it. We need to do it for real. We need to change, um, and continue to invest in the quality of the learning. That means investing in instructors for real investing in instructors, especially in the CTE and workforce space who don't get this, exposure. They didn't come maybe from an, an academic background. We need to teach them the things they need to know. We need to expand our programs, we need to support our instructors, and we need to look at new ways of doing things that may be not even new ways of doing things. Students need to be using their hands while they are in career technical programs that matter. Okay? They need to be working. Companies, you gotta spend money on internships. The state shouldn't have to fund all of this for you. You should hold the state accountable and the locals accountable for having a person that can do the job on day one that you need them to do, and if the system isn't working, you need to beat it upside the head, and that's what we're doing right now. We're looking at bringing in, new initiatives into the state, with some partners, who... Willing partners, that's who we work with. I have to tell legislators all the time when they question why I'm not doing something, it's,"Well, that's not a willing partner." So, you get them willing, and I'll work with them. I'm not gonna beat my head up against the wall. I have to do that too many different ways. I'm not gonna do it to try to also get the work done. I will just go around them. So when we have willing partners, we lean into it. It's like,"What do you guys need to do this?" And, and then you develop a sense of trust there of like,"Okay, tell me what you need. Don't screw me over. Please use my trust in the way it is intended and I also will have to trust that you're telling me the honest reality of what you need." And so, we're gonna bring in some new... And it's all designed around the quality, because I think we know how to start programs, we know how to hire people, we know how to get students into programs, da, da, da, da. What we sometimes as a nation frankly miss out on is this connection of are we producing what we need? We may be producing what the program was designed to produce, but if the world around us has changed and we haven't changed this approach, then maybe it's behind and we just need to be honest about that. But it is hard and painful and all the things. And it takes a level of introspection that is hard, and there is no reward, and that's the hardest part. You can do all the hard things. You can work your fingers to the bone. Your reward is that you have the job, and I'm okay with that. I'm good with that. But people, you know, it's like,"Oh, this is just making my life hard and there's no reward." Well, you know, the world, reward is you get to keep your job if a system is truly thinking forward. So, anyway I think it is an interesting time to be alive. It, there's a lot going on. Um, some of it good, some of it not good, you know, whatever. It's a mixed bag in my opinion. It always will be. We have a rapid swing and we go to the other, uh, you know, the other party and they come in and they change everything all over again. Whatever. Some days you're gonna be winning, some days you're not. That, it is, it just is. It's politics. It's part of it, and if you don't like it, vote different is all I can say. We just have to collectively figure that out. I also, don't take for granted that, or try not to anyway, that the work of the people at the local level, which is the hardest work you will ever do at the local level. Like, people talk about,"Oh, Courtney, you have a hard job." I do not. Don't get me wrong, it is, it is hard. It has its challenges. I, I've shed some tears. I have some hardships, you know, whatever, but it is different at the local level, and I know that, and I respect that. But I don't always understand that, and,, so I do appreciate when, you know, I have some people who will call me and say,"Now, Courtney, you know, here's what you think this is doing. Here's what it's actually doing." And then what I have to do in that moment is sit and decide, am I okay with what it's actually doing? And that weighs on me a lot, and I try really hard. I have this persona as being kind of a I don't give a shit kinda person. But i give a lot of craps actually. I work really hard to to protect, kind of my peace in, in this world, and so I do care. And the people I work with and for care, and I think everybody cares, and so we just have to be really, really, really specific on what that looks like. So I've talked a lot today and I really, I, I don't know that I intended to, but this little podcast has just been, s- one of the most fun things I get to do. I love writing, and I've got a couple of writing projects in the works, and I had kind of taken a s- little step back to really think through those but I missed this. And, and so I was like,"You know what? Let's go do season three." So season three is here. We're back. I am looking forward to it. I've got some things that we're doing that I want to share with the world the world of, you know, dozens of listeners. But, anyway thank you for being here and listening to this. And again, please text the line and let me know if there's a topic you want me to dig in on, because I'll say anything if I believe in it. I hope you're having a great year, and I look forward to catching up with you through this season's episodes. So this is Courtney Taylor. I was Scratching the Surface, and we will see you next time.