Launching a Digital Career from Community College: Q&A with Eleanor Cooper, Cofounder and Chief Executive of Pathstream Inc.
Too often, college students enroll in a myriad of classes but don’t develop the practical skills that the job market demands; or students working part time in service jobs want better-paying, higher-skill positions but don’t know what those jobs are, how to train for them, or how to present their skills to prospective employers.
Recognizing that today’s job market favors those with strong digital skills, San Francisco-based startup Pathstream Inc. targets college students, primarily adult learners, with coursework designed to prepare them to become tomorrow’s digital marketers, data analysts, software developers, or database managers. Working with established technology companies, Pathstream creates curricula to train students to use Facebook Ad Manager, Microsoft Excel, Google Analytics, Unity, and Tableau, among other widely used business systems, and partners with community colleges that in turn offer the curricula to students. Students, many of whom are low-income individuals, are able to earn a credential such as a “Facebook Digital Marketing Certificate” or “Tableau Business & Data Analytics Certificate” that may aid them in the job market.
Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, which researches ways to improve the welfare of underprivileged populations, spoke with Pathstream Founder and Chief Executive Eleanor Cooper about the educational and employment issues facing low-income individuals and her company’s efforts to address them. Cooper received her MBA from Stanford GSB in 2017.
What is the basic problem that Pathstream is addressing?
Today’s high-quality entry-level jobs require digital skills and knowledge of software platforms like Salesforce, Facebook Ads, or Tableau. These modern vocations have a path to economic mobility if you can just get in the door.
But there’s no pathway from the community college or four-year college system into those careers. A lot of people don’t know about these jobs, and if they did, the education is available only through less-accessible formats, like expensive boot camps with strict admission criteria. Even if you have the skills, connecting to employers is challenging because, in the United States, hiring decisions are not always competency- or performance-based. Hiring is highly social network-based, and so, everywhere along the way, people get stuck.
What was your early research into the inaccessibility of job training and economic mobility?
I started asking, “What are the opportunities for economic mobility?” At the GSB, on one project we researched helping lower-income individuals find entry-level jobs, we picked medical assistant positions, a promising career path, and asked the question: What does it take to move someone from a frontline retail position at Walmart into that path? We worked with employers, like Stanford Hospital, to learn what employers look for on resumés. How do they screen candidates? And what does it really take to get in the door? What post-secondary education is available?
We put out a listing on Craigslist seeking individuals interested in entry-level medical assistant positions. We interviewed them about their skills and backgrounds and why they were interested in the field and asked them for their resumés. And then we worked with a few employers, including urgent care centers and Stanford Medical Center, and asked about their review process. We brought them a stack of resumés and went through them together.
What obstacles do entry-level job seekers face?
The widening gap in unemployment rates reflects educational background, showing that post-secondary education is necessary. See image below for unemployment rates and medium weekly wages by educational attainment. However, it’s not free like high school, and the quality of post-secondary education and the types of programs available aren’t adequate.
In our research on medical assistants, we found that candidates were often underrepresenting their candidacy. As one example, we had a candidate who was applying for the medical assistant position. Her resumé was almost blank — she listed no work experience. Upon interviewing her, I found out she had previously been the head manager of an understaffed smoothie store and had clearly developed transferable abilities in problem solving, owner’s mindset, personnel management, and customer service. Because the role was not in the medical field, she assumed it wouldn’t be relevant to include.
What’s the role of employers in increasing accessibility to job training?
Software proprietors — companies like Facebook — are well-suited to help solve this problem. They really want people to learn their platforms so they can grow their user bases and provide job-ready talent to their customers and the broader ecosystem.
The goal is to use the alignment between software companies wanting to serve more users and also wanting to train more people on their platforms to create a talent pipeline for their enterprise customers. Taking Tableau as an example, our program is closely aligned with Tableau’s mission to democratize access to data and data insights. More so, Tableau’s customers would buy more licenses if they had more access to talent trained in using Tableau. By branding the curriculum as a Tableau business and data analytics program, we then can serve the students to companies with that branding and create a new category of credentials other than a bachelor’s degree.
How did community colleges initially respond to Pathstream’s ideas?
Last fall, I spent every morning — starting at 6:00 a.m. PT — cold-calling colleges to tell them about the programs we were building. While their interest was clear based on their willingness to connect immediately, it was interesting how common it was to hear the same two initial “objections.” Their first objection was, “You’re trying to sell Facebook into colleges, pushing product.” And secondly, many colleges have initiated industry partnerships that turned out to be empty promises, so they’ve been burned.
They were also very concerned that these curricula were too vocational, too much button clicking and not actual education. I convinced them that it’s Pathstream, not a tech company, that’s building these programs and that they’re academically rigorous and holistic, not specific to a product. Our learning design is highly project-based — students learn the foundational concepts (e.g., marketing strategy and customer segmentation) and then use the actual software platforms used on the job to practice and apply what they have learned in real work simulations. In other words, the software platforms actually enhance, rather than distract from, the pedagogy and learning efficacy. We signed up 20 community colleges in two and a half months.
What do the courses cover?
They’re contextualized for someone who doesn’t already work in the industry, who has never used customer relationship management software or worked with leads and the sales process. You go through the process of understanding what the business case is for the system and understanding the conceptual foundations that you need to use it well. And then the courses use project-based learning to teach enough for students to function on the job. And then you’re linked up to more resources that teach other things you can do with the system.
We are mostly focused on technical matters. However, we can incorporate teaching soft skills, such as how to respond to an email from your boss, how to attach the right things, and talk about what the next steps are. You need to understand tone, what your manager is really looking for, what problem they’re trying to solve. After you submit your project, you have to grade yourself. If you were your boss, put yourself in their shoes. How is your boss evaluating what you just submitted?
How does existing education shortchange students?
Society often assumes frontline workers don’t care about education, but current education programs are just not designed to fit into the lifestyle of someone who is stretched really thin or living in poverty. Existing programs ask students to watch videos, read texts, take multiple-choice questions. That is effective for someone who has time to sit down at a desk and study things and take notes. You have to have a certain quality of laptop and high-speed internet connection.
That learning experience isn’t great for someone already in the workplace, for an individual who has 15 minutes between the ten other things they’re trying to do, and is trying to do it on the bus. A better learning design is to learn something small and apply it and repeat on a platform that requires only McDonald’s-level Wi-Fi and affordable hardware. We need different learning experiences for different audiences.
You can earn while you learn. For example, if you’re going to be stocking shelves, you can learn about store placement, why things are priced different ways, and do simple activities during the day that you can also get educational credit for, because otherwise, the time you’re working and earning is always in conflict with the time you spend learning. So, those need to overlap so that people can earn while they’re learning and get credit for their learning.
The average turnover in frontline retail is five months. If earning a credential means you stay for ten months, then there’s a clear return there for the employer, too.
How else might Pathstream distribute its curricula, and how can students locate jobs once they’ve completed their coursework?
When education went online, it should have meant more accessibility and affordability, but online courses usually cost the same as in-person courses, which is crazy, because a lot of dollars go to marketing. Our programs are available at community colleges. We can also find distribution channel partners, with companies such as the Walmarts of the world, to distribute our programs, eliminating the need for marketing but also reaching the population we want to serve.
We’re in the middle of launching several pilots with other organizations in the talent ecosystem around various job connection strategies. As a company, we are very partner-friendly. We recognize large societal issues cannot be solved by any individual company alone, which is why we look for opportunities to work together with mission-aligned organizations.
How should we best give people recognition and credit for their learning?
We need to make sure they’re seen by employers. So much of hiring is now through LinkedIn, which is not inclusive of lower-income or less-traditionally educated individuals. A lot of people don’t know about LinkedIn or are intimidated by it because it highlights professional success and credentials. So, lower-income individuals need a way to show off what they know versus institutions that they’ve been a part of and translate that into what employers seek.
It’s hard to solve that problem without solving the credentialing piece first and knowing what employers will accept, whether it’s a portfolio or a new kind of credential or something else. If we don’t know what employers are willing to receive, it’s hard to figure out how to translate and convey an individual’s skills. So, I think we have to solve it backwards.
— —
Learn more about the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Follow us @GSBsiLab.
Learn more about Eleanor Cooper and Pathstream.
With writing help from Louise Lee.
With interviewing help from Susan Athey.
