GUEST: KATIE NIELSON, PHD, CEO, VOXY ENGEN. By 2024, as baby boomers reach retirement age, 97% of net workforce growth will come from immigrants and their children. Join Amy and her guest Katie Nielson, PhD, Founder and Chief Education Officer of Voxy EnGen, as they talk about enabling these new Americans in the workforce. With access to meaningful and effective language training, immigrants and refugees can get better jobs and more educational opportunities. At the same time, companies that want to build their talent pipeline can make language learning part of a bigger body of skills-based training, drawing upon their existing pool of workers to fill open positions. By upskilling incumbent employees, companies can save on recruiting costs and provide their employees with opportunities for economic mobility.
GUEST: KATIE NIELSON, PHD, CEO, VOXY ENGEN. By 2024, as baby boomers reach retirement age, 97% of net workforce growth will come from immigrants and their children. Join Amy and her guest Katie Nielson, PhD, Founder and Chief Education Officer of Voxy EnGen, as they talk about enabling these new Americans in the workforce. With access to meaningful and effective language training, immigrants and refugees can get better jobs and more educational opportunities. At the same time, companies that want to build their talent pipeline can make language learning part of a bigger body of skills-based training, drawing upon their existing pool of workers to fill open positions. By upskilling incumbent employees, companies can save on recruiting costs and provide their employees with opportunities for economic mobility.
Amy Baron 0:06
Hey, everybody, I'm Amy Baron. And this is Upskilled: solutions in the learning universe, where I talk with professionals in education and workforce development, about practices and perspectives that catalyze positive change.
Amy Baron 0:25
And we're here today with Katie Nielson. Katie is the founder and chief Education Officer of Voxy EnGen, a public benefit corporation that helps new Americans get access to meaningful and effective language training, so they can get better jobs and educational opportunities. As the chief Education Officer at VOXI, Inc, Katie designed and patented and award winning language learning platform that's been used by over 4 million people around the world. She has a PhD in second language acquisition. And currently she lectures and writes about all things related to language learning and education technology. And we are so happy to have you here today. Katie Nielson
Katie Nielson
Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here today.
Amy Baron
Great. So I thought we should start off with you telling us a little bit about your latest initiative, your latest endeavor, which is engine. And if you can talk to us a little about about your mission with engine, maybe some of the history with how the company came about and and your own personal involvement, that would be wonderful.
Katie Nielson
Sure. So let me go way back, I started teaching Mexican migrant workers on an apple orchard when I was 20 years old. And that's when I realized I really didn't know what I was doing. And I definitely shouldn't have been the person assigned to teach them and that as a country, we have a problem with how we help immigrants and refugees get access to language instruction. So fast forward many years. And about two years ago, I got a strategic investment from a family office that really wanted to help new Americans get access to meaningful English training. So I was very lucky to be able to found an incubator Voxy EnGen inside of Voxy. And at the time, it was called our New Americans Initiative. And our goal was to remove English as a barrier for the 96% of English language learners here in the US who just don't have access to instruction. So we have many, many immigrants and refugees here, who are working many times two jobs, three jobs, and just don't have access to the English classes that would let them get the skills they need to improve their careers to be able to talk to their children's teachers, to be able to understand what happens when they go to the doctor's office, and they get directions for prescription. So I founded boxy engine to help create pathways for new Americans to access the types of training programs that will help them improve their economic outcomes and those of their children.
Amy Baron 3:08
And we're talking about people who
Unknown Speaker 3:12
have always in my experience in the language learning market, they've always been very difficult to reach and very difficult to sort of get your arms around because of what you just said the fact that they are mostly, you know, adult learners, they're in job full time jobs, sometimes several.
Katie Nielson
Yeah, they, they often have barriers to attending classes. You know, they have childcare issues, they have jobs that they have to work at all times on weird schedules, they have transportation issues, and various times in my career, I've been able to work directly with them. I taught ESL at a community college for several years, I volunteered teaching English and I would always be amazed at my students who would come to class after working 14 hours doing manual labor, and then sit there because they wanted to get English skills so they could talk to their bosses so they can help their kids with their homework. It's difficult to get your arms around this population, but not because they don't want to take English classes, it's because they just can't access them. It's funny, even in a place like New York City, Queens Public Library, when they open up their ESL classes, every three or four months, they have a waitlist five people deep for the spaces that exist in those classes. So not only is there a problem of getting learners to be able to attend class, there aren't enough seats in the classes that do exist. It's a it's a huge problem. And there's been a national focus on rescaling and upskilling the future of work apprenticeship programs, getting people into the jobs of the future. But we almost always leave immigrants and refugees out of those conversations. We don't think about people who just don't have the English skills they need to succeed in career training programs, or we generally don't there are a few very forward thinking programs that are starting to do that. Yeah.
Amy Baron 5:00
And when you and I talked before this, you gave me an amazing statistic about baby boomers leaving the workforce, and who's replacing them. So, so talk to us a little about the this market in general ESL instruction in the US and some of the barriers, the funding models and things like that.
Katie Nielson
So so that's true by 2024 97% of net workforce growth is going to be immigrants and their children. So baby boomers are retiring, they're all going to be out of the workforce or working their way out of the workforce. And we have to help people get the English skills they need to take over these jobs. When I think about employers and English instruction, this is almost what we're doing is solving two problems at once. So employers will talk about talent pipeline shortages, or the inability to recruit people to fill jobs they have. And at the same time, they often have a big pool of incumbent workers who are in low wage jobs with little room for economic mobility just because they don't have English skills. So to make that clear, you'll have somebody where the custodial staff has been there for 10 years, 15 years, and they never get promoted, because they don't have the English skills to get promoted. That same company will also be looking for people to take jobs as forklift operators or people who will work in sort of supervisory roles. And they're looking outside to hire for those roles because they can't promote their staff. By helping employers with a tool that lets them help their frontline workers and their low wage workers get access to English instruction, were helping with two problems, they can promote employees that they want to keep employed. And they can help them at the same time with the English they need for integration.
Amy Baron
So in the spirit of the the title of my podcasts being upskilled, we're talking about an upskilling in language skills, but we're also talking about providing a great advantage to employers because they it's going to enable employers to upskill their workforce.
Katie Nielson
Exactly. And you know this as well as I do as an expert in language learning. Learning a language is learning a skill. And we don't learn it the same way we learn other content areas, you learn language, because you want to use it to do something else. And as a country, we could do a whole separate podcast on all the problems with language education in the United States. But but to summarize it, what we know we need to do is integrate it with other things. We need to integrate education and training and integrate language learning with skills based training. So we can help people get the English they need for XYZ career, the English you need to work in allied healthcare or the English you need to be a forklift operator. It doesn't work when you put them all into a one size fits all. Yes, well class and teach them the words for apple and banana and book an airplane. Right? Right. Absolutely. So how is EnGen’s approach different? What does EnGen or Voxy EnGen that other programs out there aren't doing?
Katie Nielson
So when I built the platform that we use at Voxy EnGen, my idea was to take everything we know about how language learning works, and use technology to do it at scale. So we know it's learning a skill, we know that people learn better when they like the content they're learning from and when they see right away that it's helping them. And when it's tailored to their proficiency level in their interests. So the platform that we use does all that we automatically assess learners proficiency levels, we give them content that's relevant to their needs. That's interesting to them, that gives them the vocabulary and the structures they need to use right away. And we track everything they do, so that we can reach out when they need help, we can automatically adapt the difficulty of the activities, we can help push them so that they're getting the right language at the right time for their right proficiency level. And this approach is completely different than one that starts with this is a linguistic syllabus that we're going to follow. And we're going to teach everybody how to use the present tense because that's what we do in the first month of this class. We throw all that out. And we start with what do you need to do your job in English? Let's teach you that English. Right?
Amy Baron
Right, which is so important because we know relevance and the ability to apply what you're learning to your actual life is is what really increases efficacy.
Katie Nielson
Katie Nielson
Exactly. And learning language is really hard. It's one of the hardest things that we asked adult humans to do. It's very easy for children to learn their first languages, and it's much much, much more difficult to learn another one. So we're asking people who don't have a lot of free time, who have many demands on the time that they do have to do something that's really hard. We owe it to them to make it as efficient and effective as possible. And to let it be accessible so that they can take it with them and do it on their mobile device and go into a class that's offered 24 seven, we have live classes that meet around the clock, so
Katie Nielson 10:00
learners can go into a small group class with other learners at their proficiency level and practice using the language right then.
Amy Baron
Yeah, right, point of use. So you talked about mobile, how is EnGen’s technology? How is that been enabling your success? What what are the technology pieces?
Katie Nielson
So as far as technology goes, it's completely cloud based, which means learners can do their work anywhere from a laptop, or a desktop, or someone else's laptop or a public computer in a library when we aren't having a global pandemic. And people can go to libraries. There are native apps for iOS and Android. So they can download an app. They can also download lessons into the app and do them offline when they don't have access to Wi Fi, which is often a barrier for immigrants and refugees. And the fact that the technology is mobile, and that it's available offline really drives engagement. We also track everything learners do, I'm working on a big project right now where we are enrolling lots and lots of learners who want to change their careers and get careers in allied health care. And so they're enrolling in the platform, but many of them have questions about they've been out of some of them have very low levels of formal education, some have been out of school and out of training contexts for a long time. So we are tracking everything they do and sending text messages to them to figure out what kind of help they need, automating how we send them to that help offering webinars so that we can go through and answer their questions in real time. And the combination of technology that adapts in real time, and also lets us monitor where learners need help is really driving engagement.
Amy Baron
And what are some of the fields you're looking at, you know, really trying to penetrate with this with this program?
Katie Nielson
So allied healthcare is a big one, it was big, even before the global pandemic, but it's clear that we're running out of health care workers across the country. And it's also clear that communities of care should reflect the people who live in them. And that we do a better job offering health care when our health care providers can speak to the patients they're treating. So helping more and more new Americans get access to healthcare jobs is going to increase the number of bilingual health care workers we have, which is just going to make care better. So that's a big focus for us. Another I would say is thinking about manufacturing, and advanced manufacturing, helping people get into jobs in a manufacturing context that have room for upward mobility, customer service, whether it's phone, customer service, customer service, in a retail environment, all of those are places where immigrants and refugees will get relegated to the back of the house because they don't have the language skills to communicate with customers. And we know we can really quickly get them those skills and open up opportunities for them.
Amy Baron
Is it realistic to think that a new arrival, let's say with very little English can become a customer service representative on the phone?
Katie Nielson
Yes, it is. And it can happen in six months, nine months is it one of the things that's wonderful about language learning is that if you do it the right way, it doesn't take that long. As a country, we sort of think learning a language is so hard because most Americans will tell you they took five years of Spanish and they can't say anything. And that's because we taught them the wrong things. We taught them to conjugate boot verbs, and we taught them to read dialogues about like, where Pablo was going to the dance, but we didn't tell them how to do anything. And we know if you teach people language the right way, they learn very quickly. new immigrants are in an English rich environment, if we can give them a tool that helps them get a little bit of English, they'll start using it as they conduct their daily lives. And they'll learn more and more. So it is totally reasonable to think of people getting into customer facing positions in six months, nine months of using a platform like Voxy EnGen.
Amy Baron 13:52
Right? I was going to mention, you know, immersion, like one of the reasons that you know, our US foreign language system is so deficient is that there is no opportunity, very little opportunity for immersion in the language. And the motivation is really not there. Because we're so far away from any countries that speak. I mean, we're not in all (), but many parts. But it's true. These people who would be taking advantage of this program are actually living in a country where the target language is being spoken. So it should be a little bit easier. And of course, the motivation is there.
Katie Nielson
It is and what's so nice is that I just got a customer survey back and these are rough numbers. I haven't finished crunching all the data but several 100 learners responded that was sent it up to several 1,075% of them said the platform has helped them get a job. It's helped them either get a promotion, or get a better job. And it's true, because we do have jobs here for people to get an English is sometimes the only barrier between a new American getting one of those
Katie Nielson 15:00
jobs. And so when we can remove that as a barrier, we can really help people change not only their own economic outcomes, but those of their children.
Amy Baron
That's great. And that leads really into this, this question of what is this platform going to do for people and what what are your hopes for how this platform will impact lives and the workforce landscape.
Katie Nielson
So because as a country, we meet the needs of only 4% of the adult English learners, we need to radically rethink how we reach them. So my hope is that we can enable employers to help upskill their own workers, improving their lives, and also improving internally their talent pipelines, but that we can also help people help their children. One of the biggest barriers to new Americans being able to support their own children and getting a better life is their inability to understand what comes home in their backpacks. If they can't read what the teachers want them to do, they can't do the things that every parent wants, which is to make sure that what your kids are telling you they're supposed to do is actually what they're supposed to do and help them when they struggle and encourage them. And so we have so many English as a second language children who have parents who want to help them, but they can't, because they just don't understand. And we put their children in a position of having to translate for their parents. And I would like to help get rid of that. I have a tool that can be delivered at scale that I know works. And that is designed to solve that problem. So I will be very happy when we have fewer parents who need to use their children as translators and can instead do what they want to do as parents, which is tell their children to do their homework.
Amy Baron
That sounds like that sounds like a great goal, especially now what you know, one less thing for parents to worry about one less thing for kids to worry about. See Exactly. Well, great. Well, that has been a very interesting conversation. I hope others found it as interesting as I did. So I would like to thank my guest, Katie Nielson of Voxy EnGen. Thank you, Katie. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai