In 2015, when Mona Mourshed was analyzing career training and placement programs, she discovered that there were essentially two kinds: those that trained hundreds of thousands of learners per year, with job placement rates at 15% or below, and programs that retrained and placed one to three thousand learners per year into new careers, with job placement rates of 70% plus.
Mourshed wondered if there could be something in the middle–a training and placement option that could work with tens of thousands, and ultimately hundreds of thousands, with an 80% plus job placement rate. She knew it wasn't enough to place candidates; Mourshed wanted to ensure that employment continued and that learners thrived and achieved economic mobility over time. In other words, she wanted to ensure that positive change lasted.
With this in mind, Mourshed and her team designed the global nonprofit Generation, an education-to-employment system that prepares, places and supports learners into life-changing careers that wouldn't otherwise be accessible. Since then, Generation has provided free training and graduated almost 100,000 participants worldwide (50K in the last two years). Those placements have generated nearly $1B in wages.
In this interview, Mourshed talks about starting and scaling a global nonprofit that retrains and places learners with employers, giving them an opportunity to change not only their career trajectories, but their lives.
Sheila Callaham: How did you determine which countries you would launch your global nonprofit?
Mona Mourshed: We very deliberately started in five countries simultaneously. We wanted diversity–large and small countries with high unemployment, representing different continents and incomes. So we started in the U.S., Spain, India, Kenya and Mexico. In the initial years, we learned so much about what is universal across all countries versus what is a function of the environment in which we were implementing the program. In my previous work with McKinsey, I focused a lot on school systems and how to raise literacy and numeracy rates across countries. I found from that work that there is much more in common than different. It struck me that the same thing was probably true within the education-to-employment space. Ultimately, we wanted a program that could scale and serve different communities. Now, we are in 17 countries across the world.
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Callaham: Going back to those original five countries, did they scale as you expected? Have they kept pace?
Mourshed: Two of those countries are our largest countries by graduate volume–India and Kenya. In India, we've been on a tremendous journey from initially delivering our programs to embedding Generation methodology into the public system, which is important in creating systemic change. Plus, we've achieved this by working through local providers. We now offer programming in all of the counties, but there are certain areas where we've made a significant impact. For example, a particular slum in Kenya where eight to ten percent of the youth living there have been through our programming.
Callaham: Now that you've added an additional 12 countries, what are you seeing that might have surprised you?
Mourshed: When we first started in 2015, youth unemployment was the greatest challenge. This wasn't long after the Arab Spring and the Global Occupy Movement, which had a very strong youth focus. The challenge in Singapore was that about 70% of the long-term unemployed were aged 45-plus. So when we brought in Singapore around 2018, we asked ourselves why we were only focusing on youth when we should actually be focusing on learners of all ages.
Callaham: I read your article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, where you discuss the durability of change and the nonprofit duty to collect data after the initial intervention. You said it's not always easy, but you're leading by example. In what ways might this be a game changer for other nonprofits and what are the first steps for getting on board?
Mourshed: When you think about the impact of any social sector organization, breadth, depth and durability are umbrellas for metrics that can be applied to any nonprofit. For us, breadth is about the number of learners. It might be what's happening with the treatment rate for a healthcare organization. For us, depth is employment and income outcomes within three to six months. For a healthcare organization, it might be what's happening with the treatment rate. Durability for us is if learners continue to be employed, earning above living wages and saving for the future. And for a healthcare organization, durability could be the mortality rate. In discussions with nonprofit leaders, I have found that everyone wants to measure breadth. But unless we can understand if the change we sought to catalyze lasts over time, then we won't be in service of the mission that we started out to create.
From an employment perspective, we're trying to support someone in a new employment trajectory. To do that, we have to know what happens later and then use those insights to improve what we do. It’s hard because it is difficult to track people. If you look at our data completion rate, meaning the percentage of graduates we hear back from within a year, our data completion rate is about 90% plus. One to two years later, it slips to 60%. By the time you get to three to five years, we're at 30%, which is better than 0, but it is not good because you can still be prone to positive bias, right? It's those who are employed who are able to say they are the ones responding. So our goal is to get that 30% to 60%.
Callaham: If you can't do it cost-effectively, then no one will want to replicate that.
Mourshed: Measuring the durability outcomes two to five years out costs us one percent of the total cost per learner. That's replicable. But the trick for us now is how to go from 30% to 60% data completion while keeping the cost at one percent.
Callaham: So, when it comes to keeping costs low, are you talking about being able to rely on a survey or an email versus having someone make a phone call?
Mourshed: You have to be omni-channel on this. So yes, there is the email, but sometimes emails change or are used less frequently. Then you've got to have the cell phone number, and maybe you're texting or doing a WhatsApp circle. Or perhaps the most responsive is having their mentor reach out or the instructor with whom they worked during the program. We have to try it all, and there is no single answer. Every community is different, and we must experiment a lot to succeed.
Callaham: I want to switch gears and discuss the mid-career report that Generation published in partnership with the OECD. One of the biggest takeaways is that employers equally value five years of work experience as they do 25 years of work experience. So, who gets hired?
Mourshed: In terms of who employers prefer to hire, it's those in their 30s–that's what we saw in the report. From a technology fluency perspective, there is a belief that younger people are more adept at the learning curve than those who are mid-career and older. And that also plays into the hiring decision.
Callaham: Since Singapore, you've been more focused on mid-career and older people, and you understand how terribly ageist the workplace is worldwide. When you're looking for companies to place your learners, how do you talk to them about this topic of ageism and help get them over that hurdle?
Mourshed: So, a couple of things. Being able to convince an employer or anyone really to do something different means you need to understand why they do what they do. That always has to be the starting point. The second piece is that you have to think about what data will influence them to do something different than what they believe to be true. For example, when companies have hired mid-career and older workers (and most have), how are they doing on the job? It's not enough to say, hey, here's this company that you know, and they've hired mid-career and older workers and are doing just fine. The third piece is the external environment, which determines whether they need to change their hiring. There is no silver bullet that works with every employer. It really is a one-by-one approach to understand what it takes to shift their view. In another example around hiring for entry-level tech roles, we probably talked to 100-plus companies about why they continue to have traditional hiring methods as opposed to skills-based hiring methods. And we've probably heard eight or nine different reasons. So, you have to understand each of those different reasons and then figure out how to counter them in each discussion.
Callaham: Even though there is age bias across the age spectrum, it seems to be hurting older worker more right now. Moreover, how you define older might be 45 in one industry or 55 in another. What are you seeing?
Mourshed: Even within the same country, we found that some sectors are more open to mid- and older workers than others. For example, we found that with green jobs, not only have we had a significant share of mid-career and older applicants in these programs, but employment has been about 90% plus. Health care is another one. Tech, however, is different. We have focused on tech programming with our mid-career and older candidates and graduates. It took them longer to get hired than those who were younger, but then, on the job, they performed just as well. And, they have had longer retention with their employers because younger graduate peers have been doing a bit more job hopping. So there are bright spots to be had for mid-career and older workers.
Callaham: What are the criteria for people who might be interested in your program?
Mourshed: Our website is Generation.org. From there, pick the country you're in. If you're in one of our 17 countries, see which professions we offer. We welcome applications all the time and have cohorts starting in succession. One thing I'll say–and this also came out in the report we did with the OECD–mid-career and older workers can, at times, under-invest in building a new skill set and believe that their work experience will be viewed as more important in the eyes of the employer. That's not always true. So it's really important, particularly now, given all the changes in the workplace, to take the time and invest in doing that. All of our programs are free to our learners. In no way do we want financials to be an impediment to joining. Ninety percent of those who apply to our program are unemployed. Mid-career and older workers are typically making a career transition, so they may have lost their job or they may have been caregivers and looking to get back into the job market. Learners have to be able to commit to the full time of the program, which can be anywhere from six to 16 weeks. When we are recruiting, we're not looking at your academic degree, but we are looking for what we call a fire in the belly.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
