“The signs are not great for an inclusive recovery,” says Ann Kirschner CUNY professor and CEO of Comma Communications.

WorkingNation interviewed Kirschner for #WorkingNationOverheard as a media partner with ASU+GSV’s Virtual Summit 2020. You can watch all of the interviews on our YouTube channel.

She says the stats are showing that people losing their jobs during COVID-19 are mostly people without college degrees. That means employers need to change their criteria for hiring and colleges need to rethink how and what they teach if we want to change course in the coming years.

“We need to basically blow up career services as we know it,” Kirschner says. “And, of course, you know, it’s hyperbole. I don’t really mean to blow it up. But I do mean to essentially reform it because career services tend to sit on the Siberia of the college campus and totally divorced from academics, so they exist on two completely different planets. Those need to be brought together. And we need to get students thinking, from the day they walk into college, what the rest of their life is going to look like.”

In the meantime, Kirschner says the focus needs to be on reskilling and replenishing people’s skills mid-career.

Learn more about Kirschner’s initiatives by clicking here https://kirschner.org/
Learn more about the ASU+GSV Summit by clicking here https://www.asugsvsummit.com/
Follow the conversation on social media: #workingnationoverheard #asugsvsummit