00:02.39

Zahra Massicotte 

Hi everyone, welcome to Tech in EdTech, the show where we explore how technology can empower teaching and learning at scale. I'm Zahra, and I'll be guiding the conversation today. If you work to support students' pathways beyond school, today's conversation is for you. We're tackling a critical shift in career readiness, and I'm excited to explore this topic with Allison Danielsen, CEO of Tallo. Allison has spent years at the intersection of education and workforce systems is doing such amazing work at Tallo, and she recently was honored with the 2025 Emerging Leader Award alongside her colleague, Hannah Bullard. Alison, welcome to the show.

00:39.51

Allison Danielsen

Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

00:41.50

Zahra Massicotte 

Great, looking forward to our conversation today. And Alison, I'd love to start with a bit about your background and your journey. You know, I love asking this question, but I'm particularly interested in yours because I think it really relates to our conversation today. You know, you attended community college, got degrees in art and psychology, spent a decade at Kaplan, then College Board, and now CEO of Tallo. How did that journey start for you? And at what point did you realize education and career readiness was where you were supposed to be?

01:12.73

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think like most people, the journey started in a very different place than where I am today. And I think that's, you know, something that young people should understand is that it basically never goes how you plan. I didn't even have education or business on my radar when I was in school. And in fact, in high school, I thought I was going to be a professional bowler and a painter full-time. And neither of those things are true, although I get to do both in my free time now, and I had things unexpectedly happen along the way, and got to explore different kinds of coursework and psychology, met amazing people at community college that inspired me to, you know, go on to continue my education. I got a job because I had to pay the bills, and then found a corporate ladder in front of me at work that then created opportunities as I went, so I spent 10 years working in education, but really running operations and business. At one point, I managed teams as large as 3,000 people, and I had to hire more than 1,000 people a year. So I understand the pain that businesses face doing that. And then I did some consulting and found myself in an opportunity at the College Board, where I was building a product to help young people think about what was next. And I knew, you know, the that the world is very different than we imagined it when we were young, and there's so much opportunity that so many people didn't see. But I didn't realize how complicated the process was and how, as the workforce changed, the information, and tools, and resources that people had to navigate it didn't keep up. And so I learned a whole lot at the College Board and spent some time launching products for career navigation, helping work on their career readiness solutions overall. But I increasingly felt like employers were left out of the equation. And I never would be here if I had not gotten that job that showed me there was an opportunity in front of me to move up and continue to manage large teams and do different work that was exciting. And people need to have that encounter with employers who create those pathways for them. And so coming to Tallow two years ago was, I thought, a chance to really bring the employers closer to the conversation. There's a lot of educators involved who work tirelessly every day to bridge that gap, but they're not making the hiring decision. And so I'm excited to be able to kind of marry my experience in business with the experience I had helping students figure out what was next, but then ultimately, you know, create a solution that I wish I would have had at different points in my life as I was trying to figure out what to do next.

03:44.86

Zahra Massicotte 

Thank you so much for that, really. Very relatable background story, of course. And I think a lot of us are in different careers than we thought we would be when we were in school. And yeah, amazing story with your experience at College Board and how you landed at Tallo. So thank you for sharing that. And I recently read one of your Fortune articles, and you had quoted stating like 38% of graduates are in their intended career pathways, and I've seen other statistics similar like one in four graduates work in a field closely related to their major, so I find that super interesting.

04:26.42

Allison Danielsen

Yeah. And I think we all either had this experience or know somebody who had this experience. And I don't, sometimes it gets painted as a bad thing that you are doing work that you didn't necessarily train for, but so much of the education is this foundational critical thinking, problem solving, and it's meant to get you in front of these different opportunities. But, you know, people do spend a lot of money going down a very particular path. And if they don't end up in something that is directly aligned to it, they probably wasted time and money going down that path. So there's a way to get people exposed to these broader opportunities, building these foundational, durable skills that ultimately sets them up for different kinds of success than they might have anticipated. But there's a lot of people who are feeling like they spent money on something that they didn't get the ROI for on the other side. And there's just a lot of confusion about what path to actually take to get to the goal.

05:20.73

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, we're going to dive into a lot of what you just said. So, really important things that you just touched on. I'd like to start with just defining career readiness a bit. When most people think of career readiness, they picture a senior polishing off a resume, maybe tapping into different school resources. Why is that already too late?

05:41.14

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think we're finding that the majority of young people are deciding even who they want to work for in high school. And we're making critical decisions about what we do immediately after high school. Where we’re spending our money in education? What are the opportunities we're going to pursue much before we graduate? And so as people are developing, we want them to have a space to see the possibilities, explore those possibilities more deeply, and then make informed decisions, not just about what do they do immediately after high school, but what are the steps they take to get them ready for the future if they've got different kinds of ambitions. And then also, are they doing the things in high school that allow them to actually be ready for that next step? Just as an example, you need to be on track with foundational math in high school in order to start pursuing a four-year degree, or you're already behind in college. And that is not fair to young people if they didn't know that that was the path that they actually wanted to take.

06:34.84

Zahra Massicotte 

Absolutely. Touching on a topic really dear to my heart is that math readiness. And my husband struggled with developmental math in his college, like having no idea that you can't even start your first college-level, credit-bearing course until you pass a certain point in math. So, a really important point to bring up.

06:52.89

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, and a lot of people don't even realize how their education even connects to these opportunities and what they need to do to be ready. So if we're starting the conversation senior year, we're too late. And we're going to end up with more scenarios, just like we talked about, where people feel like they've invested time and money and didn't get the outcome they expected.

07:12.47

Zahra Massicotte 

So let's dive into a bit more about that early readiness. When a student starts thinking about careers in middle school instead of senior year, what actually changes? Is there a shift, you think, in motivation, confidence, the classes they pick, for example?

07:29.37

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think we can see all of those things ultimately shift. And I think we really want people to understand the relevance of the education they're pursuing and ultimately be able to complete the things that they pursue so they can be ready for that next step. So if they understand that their work counts towards something, that this math is something I'm actually going to need on the job, or that I'm learning this skill because it's something that will help me make money in the future, if that's my interest, or you know become a nurse or work in different settings solving problems, I'm much more likely to be engaged in that education while I'm pursuing it. I'm much more likely to understand the ‘so what’ and then I am going to get through those classes, see more opportunities open for me, and that builds confidence as you go, right? As you start completing things you have, the opportunity to see that success that grows the confidence and the confidence alongside the competence is ultimately what's going to get people ready to navigate the workforce, especially as the skills that are needed are changing so quickly. We need people to be able to be engaged in the problem-solving process, see how their work connects to that bigger picture, and see success along the way, rather than feeling deflated because they didn't get to the place they wanted to be.

08:45.98

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, that makes so much sense. From an institutional standpoint, what shifts can a school make to prepare students for the workforce today?

08:55.96

Allison Danielsen

I think it's back to what we just talked about, where it cannot be a senior year checklist. And in fact, I actually think in general, a lot of what we're trying to do to get people ready for the workforce comes from, you know, accountability requirements that are increasing every single day that make sure we are checking boxes on career readiness. Are students doing an activity? Are they, you know, do they have the evidence of this thing? But that doesn't actually mean they've engaged in the process deeply enough. And it often means that we are treating this process that, in fact, we go through throughout our entire lives over and over and over again, as a one-and-done thing. You don't one-time take a career assessment, decide what you are going to do, get a plan, take the steps, get a job, and finish. In fact, I think many people listening to this conversation today might be wondering what is it that they should do when they grow up. Because we constantly ask ourselves, how do we want to what are our goals? How do we want to reach those goals? We then go through the process of pursuing additional education. We will find different jobs across our lives, whether that we are pursuing something else or, you know, the timing isn't right for us to be down this pathway. And we need to be ready. We need to have the muscle to understand that career journey is cyclical. We're going to enter and exit at different points across our lives, and that we cannot check a box and ultimately know that we are ready for that next step or what the future is going to hold for us.

10:20.92

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, it's such an important thing to think about that it's not such a linear path, and it ebbs and flows. And yeah, we go through so many phases through our career and our journey, you know, just thinking about if I had only just had some of this knowledge, you know, back when I was in school, go to high school, you go to college for a certain career, and you get a job in that career. Like, that's just what I thought, like, because I wasn't told otherwise, you know?

10:44.70

Allison Danielsen

Of course.

10:46.14

Zahra Massicotte 

So along the same lines, if a district leader only has budget or bandwidth to move, for one move before 10th grade, what do you think that should be? And in return, is there something they could stop doing to make room for that?

11:02.78

Allison Danielsen

I mean, I think some kind of actual work exposure early on in the process is so important. Either speaking to a professional on the job, actually going to a work site, doing shadowing, having a part-time job, or getting an externship, something like that, early on allows you to be engaged, understand how things connect to the bigger picture. You can decide what you actually want to pursue. And almost as important, you can decide what you don't like. There are so many young people who do things like say, I'd like to actually go work in a hospital. I want to be a nurse. And they get to an experience like that, and they don't actually like blood. Like we hear those stories all the time. And you maybe don't even realize it until you go and watch somebody in the hospital do their job, or you get into that moment, and you see that experience. Or you ask questions about the work, what the work really looks like. And so getting that exposure earlier to both identify what you like, but also what you don't like, is so critical and will be so meaningful to making the right decisions and being engaged in the future.

12:04.54

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, and one phrase that I've heard you say before that's related and ties into our next section here is trying on a career. So walk me through like what that looks like for our students, and, you've touched on this already, how it changes their behavior, their motivation. They're figuring out what they don't like, what they do like, and you know, I think schools are starting to kind of do some of this, but I think a lot of it's just, they don't think it's their job, and and I think there's some kind of balance of trying to figure out where that that is.

12:36.95

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, and I think a lot of this challenge, which is why I mentioned I was excited to bring the employers closer into the solution here, is that educators don't even know what to do, or don't have the resources to do it. So even those who want to give people deeper work exposure have to have employers who are local, who are inviting young people in or willing to have conversations, ways to connect. There's a thousand things they have to do every single day, and it's not always easy. To start to make those things happen and to have the bandwidth to be able to do it. So I do think trying on this career is so important. I mentioned, you know, something like the nursing and actually getting exposure in the hospital, but there are ways to do things through technology. So we have a partnership with an organization called Career Village. They're a large nonprofit, and they built an AI career coach, and we are thrilled to be partners with them; the first edtech platform to use it. Because they built this based on career readiness frameworks and trained it with professionals. And they identified places that they could train the bias out and identified the places they wanted to bring things in. And one of the opportunities that's available through this career coach is actually going through a day in the life experience. So if I imagined that I was a nurse and what it would look like, I would end up walking through a scenario of kind of being on an emergency shift and getting a patient who presented with these symptoms, what I'd have to do in order to handle this case, what it might look like in the hospital. And the coach will take me through, really kind of step by step. And you have this engaging conversation. What does it actually look like to have a day in the life of this experience, which is much more engaging than reading a summary of what the job actually is, right? You get a much more dynamic feeling for what this is. And young people are used to this, or consuming information on social media and TikTok. They're having people tell their stories authentically. So, where can we get them deeper in the experience? And if we don't have access to an actual ability to go to the hospital and shadow somebody, or to have a nurse come into the classroom. Where can we use technology to kind of bridge that gap and allow more access that people might have otherwise not had?

14:35.13

Zahra Massicotte 

So huge. I mean, you think about rural schools, and they're just not as connected to some of these career paths and these options that they might not be aware of. So I think that's huge to be tapping into this technology.

14:48.41

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, and there's a lot of rural students who really are left out. And we know that, you know, if you if you can't see these opportunities, it's hard to figure out that you wanna be something, right? And we wanna give people the best picture we possibly can.

15:00.98

Zahra Massicotte 

Right. And so... one of the things I was just actually going to ask you is… it can feel really high stakes, especially folks that don't, if you're not seeing people that look like you in certain fields, so you don't have access to that. How do you make that experience feel safe and fair at the same time?

15:20.86

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think you have to really make sure you're intentional about showing the variety of opportunities, and you're aware of your value set as you do it. Because we see there are a lot of these conversations and in different places that I've done this work, but like, what is a good job to show somebody? And, you know, an individual's perception of a good job can really vary. And it could be that you, you know, decide that something that is traditionally working with your hands is not a good job and something where you're working on a computer is a good job, and that's really an antiquated way of looking at it, and it doesn't serve young people as they're thinking about the potential pathways. Because we want them to think about what's your actual goal? What are you trying to get to? Are you trying to make a lot of money because you want to live a certain life? Are you trying to give a mission in the world that you're trying to go after? Are you motivated internally because you want to solve a problem? What is it that's actually getting you to take action and do something? And how do we then connect your career path to that interest? And it's totally fine, by the way, that you just want to make a lot of money and you want to drive a cool sports car and all of that stuff.

16:20.72

Zahra Massicotte 

Sure.

16:22.51

Allison Danielsen

But if that's what you want to do, then you're going want to pick a pathway that ultimately gives you enough money to do that. And we have to show you the variety of options to do that because there are a lot of jobs that you might perceive as not a high-quality job that, in fact, pay a lot of money, and a lot of jobs we might say, hey, this is a higher-quality job and it doesn't pay enough money. And if your lens for success is financial, we should allow you to make a decision through that lens. And so we've got to be able to present people with a variety of options and actually cover things. There are a lot of platforms that actually suppress certain career paths and occupations because they think they are of high value, when in fact, in society, we absolutely need a lot of different kinds of people to do the work. So I think that's one thing, is making sure you're showing the variety of opportunities. I think the other thing is treating people as individuals that then and allows them to make choices, but then giving them information related to their preferences. So, how do I understand how my interest values and skills connect to this? So if I come across something that could be a good fit, I know it's a good fit. And if I come across something that maybe isn't a good fit, I'm also aware of that. And then finally showing them the pathway that actually could get there. That's not just one-size-fits-all. I think a problem that many of us are reckoning with here in the education field is so many years of the only pathway as a four-year degree. And it is an incredible pathway to economic prosperity for many, many people. It is not the only way to be successful. In fact, it was never the only way to be successful. And I think there's a lot of realization that without showing all of the different pathways to success, including on-the-job training, short-term credential programs, different kinds of training, lifelong education. You can go to college when you're an adult. We are doing a disservice to people, and that is not safe. Like, if we're impressing our judgment without the lens of what somebody is actually trying to accomplish and what they need, without the information to actually make a good decision, we're not helping them, and it's not a safe platform that actually provides good guidance.

18:22.17

Zahra Massicotte 

Super important points. And it speaks to one, you know, you're talking about variety of options and that exposure and, you know, going through that process, whether it's, you know, through questioning or just a school doing those interviews or knowing their student or knowing their population and then having that learner go through that path themselves. And maybe they do want to make a lot of money, but maybe there are certain things that they know, like being a doctor, they don't want to do. They like blood. So having those different options and pathways and, right, it's not always four-year institution. And what are some of the different credentialings or things like you know, maybe you're not committed to that, or maybe you're financially stuck, but you can take certain courses. You can take, like you said, trying something on, or that's low stakes or something your high school could offer you, those types of things. So I think just knowing all those options is really important.

19:20.47

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, and presenting those things really with the lens of what matters to that individual. And I think for the next generation, that is increasingly important because they have written success on their own terms. They're looking up to, you know, my generation, generations before, and saying, you know, you guys are idiots. Look at you working so hard, all of these hours in debt, all of this stuff. And like, what are you getting in return? Companies don't have loyalty to people. And you have sacrificed a lot in order to do this. We're going to be smarter. In order to be smarter, it means you think success looks like something different. than working that way, than potentially you know buying into a system that has existed for a long time. And we just see this over and over and over again. So the systems not only have to show you those pathways, they have to help you understand how that relates to the personal goals you have.

20:11.38

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, and I imagine, you know, AI is huge to helping that personalization piece and getting folks to that pathway.

20:18.10

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think it can be. I think it also can be really risky and send people down, you know, things that maybe don't result in success, or if it's trained by models of what success looks like in one particular way, it's not gonna give the right kind of advice. So I absolutely think AI has tremendous potential to be helpful, but certainly has potential to do damage. And that's why you know, like the partnership with Career Village is important to us because there are not enough of these tools that have actually been trained in order to be aligned to best practices. And if you give people the wrong advice, something so critical as what they should do in their education, how they should think about their career, it affects their entire life. And so you have to be much more thoughtful about how you approach these kinds of solutions.

21:03.45

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, hugely important point. Great progress, but still a lot to be made. And yeah, you're talking about high influence. And, you know, in my own experience with AI, how it can shift to just like saying things that they know you want to hear and like you know based on your personality and what they've learned already from you. So it's very tricky and important point to bring up.

21:27.99

Allison Danielsen

Absolutely.

21:29.27

Zahra Massicotte 

So let's shift to talking about that big skills gap question. You touched on this a bit, but something that stuck with me that you said skills gap isn't about missing talent, it's about envisioning invisible talent. And I'd love to unpack that a moment because I feel like this gets a ton of attention in our industry, that skills gap, whether it's You know, so employers are looking for more soft skills. That's what's lacking currently, and you know, versus a hard skill. Maybe you can speak to that for a moment.

21:58.26

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think this is a really core issue in the work that we do. And I think even the term skills gap can be misleading because some of the issue is around the language that we use and how we arm people to describe what they're capable of doing. Because often times we say skills and we mean competencies. And how do we distinguish what's actually needed in the scenario? And if we can't use the right language around this, how do we expect a 17-year-old to be able to describe the skills they have? We send messages about our values around different jobs and what they bring to the world that are often rooted in like an old way of thinking or an old workforce. And then we don't arm people with a way to identify when they actually have a skill that could be valuable. And so, as an example, I know a 17-year-old who was a waitress, and she was thinking about what she needed to do next. She needed a big girl job, as she described it. And she really felt like she said to me, I'm getting no skills right now. Basically, an employer will not look at her being a waitress as having kind of any valuable background going into the future workforce. And that was like an alarm for me because as I think about my own experience working in customer service, retail, food service, but also the employees that I've worked with over the years, it absolutely arms you with a set of durable skills that are so meaningful, that are so transferable. Like one of my best software developers came out of the restaurant industry, and there is nobody better at putting out a fire or prioritizing what's actually important than a person who has worked with fire that has to put it out. That has to decide in the moment what actually matters. And then you get the skills training on top of that. You really have a powerful package of skills. So we need to do a better job with our own language and talking about what do we mean. And then we need to arm the next generation with the right language to describe that. And then we need to understand from this experience, how do I translate the experience that I had into value for the future workforce? Because there's so many employers who are saying, I just can't find anybody who's able to work on a team, who's able to problem solve, who's able to think critically. And they're overlooking an entire group of people who have so much capability, but don't have a way to communicate that to these employers. And they become this invisible set of talent.

24:22.74

Zahra Massicotte 

I think that's a really important point because, and I can relate as a waitress. I was in the food industry for 11 years. And I used to use that all the time in interviews, but I didn't necessarily verbalize it or communicate it in a resume or things like that. But you know, when asked certain questions, like, wait a minute, I dealt with that. And until I had like one of those resume builder coaches or someone that guided me, you're right, I didn't know how to use that as a skill to really speak about it. I didn't think of it that way at the time. So I think that's really great to bring up.

25:00.82

Allison Danielsen

Yeah. And I think this is a place just to say it, where there's so much potential for AI, because if we can start to decide which of these things matters, we can help people do some of that translation. That's where they can be really powerful at scale.

25:17.08

Zahra Massicotte 

What do you think are the top three signals employers respond to now? So if, for example, a university wants to help their students make some of these things, some of these skills more visible without redoing their curriculum, you know what are some steps it can take?

25:35.19

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think this is a good question, especially as employers are getting increasingly frustrated with the technology that exists today. Our recruitment process has, I would argue, been broken for a long time, but the interjection of AI in the screening and applicant tools has meant that the signals that come through there are almost useless.

25:45.05

Zahra Massicotte 

Hmm.

25:56.50

Allison Danielsen

You've got 3,000 applications. They're all optimized for the keywords you have. You can't tell anything. So employers are really trying to understand what's real. And so, I think having some kind of evidence of your actual work, a real work sample, like do you have a portfolio of designs you've done? Is there you know an actual product that you could send me that you could build? By the way, there are so many kids out there who are building products right now that really have some talent, and they could show that as an actual artifact of their work. So where is their evidence? Where does that portfolio add up to evidence of actually being able to do something? It's not you just telling me that you were able to do that. Another thing I think is really external validation. So I mentioned at the beginning that there's so many of these tools that are driven by educators, and employers are often not as connected to the conversation, and educators have to guess what actually happens in the middle of what matters in the middle. And so if I tell an employer I have a 3.8 GPA, they don't know what that means because that is a metric around, you know, a young person's competency in school. It doesn't necessarily translate to the workforce. So, is there a place where I've had work experience, or I've done a project with somebody, where they can validate that work in a way that actually matters to the employer? That is going to be something I think we're increasingly going to see. Where do we get referrals from people, but also this, like evidence of having worked with people, and you know something that's outside of like my course or grade or something like that, that might be more meaningful in an actual employment screening. And then I think you know employers are really looking at assessments. in a different way. I remember when I was at the College Board, like we were talking to folks who did screening, and they said, you know, people are so excited that they're removing assessment at the front end. And so maybe you don't have to take an assessment in order to get into college, or you don't have to take an assessment in order to get into a different kind of training program. But employers are increasing the number of assessments they're taking. So we've essentially just moved where the assessment is happening. And people are not prepared for that. That's what I've heard from employers is that young people maybe don't understand that they might face these assessments at different places. There's a lot of anxiety, rightfully, that comes along with an assessment scenario. So we need to prepare them for that, but they are a different kind of measure of the skill, right? It's back to that, like, what's the evidence that I actually have this skill versus, you know, a proxy or a signal that may not actually be meaningful to an employer who needs to decide if somebody is going to be good to have on their team.

28:32.76

Zahra Massicotte 

Can you just explain that a little bit more, that assessment piece, and where it's taking place?

28:37.37

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, it's taking place in a lot of different places. So sometimes you'll have like an early assessment in the funnel where you might try to assess communication style, right? Many of us have done just to use a very generic example, like a disk assessment that would tell you about your communication style. You might see something like that very early on to understand, like communication style, cultural fit, different things like that. As you get further down the process, you may take more specific job assessments. So you might actually have to do a coding project. You might actually have to do a design project. These are just a couple of examples that we know employers actually use. And there are companies out there that, for a very long time, have built assessments that are very particular to different kinds of roles. And then there is a growing number of companies that are building assessments based on AI that can be more flexible in actually testing the tasks and skills that you need for that particular job. So you can see assessment at lots of different places, both to understand your kind of organizational fit and to understand technical skills. And, you know, you're going to, in some ways, you might see different tests around other kinds of durable skills. Some of these things exist. Many of the durable skills are usually assessed either through interviews, or referrals, or different kinds of reference checks. But there's lots of different ways where you're going to be evaluated in the process. And the reality is that employers make expensive mistakes if they actually hire the wrong person.

30:02.55

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah.

30:02.57

Allison Danielsen

They get worse productivity, if there's turnover more frequent, it costs them a whole lot of money. There's a lot of things that can go wrong if they make a bad hire. So there's actually been an increase in investment on the front end to try to do this screening. And as the job market's gotten tighter, and we're saying actually there's like fewer jobs available than there had been before, there's a wealth of strong talent out there vying for a smaller number of jobs. Employers get to be more selective, which means they're going to put more gates in front of people that they have to actually get through.

30:34.78

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you for diving a little bit deeper on that. And yeah, from a technology perspective, I mean, of course, I see it a lot in our organization, the technical skills, coding projects, even, you know, anything from IDs, even copy editing, having a little assessment to make sure you're the right candidate. I think we're seeing that quite a bit, to be honest.

30:56.73

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's happening in a lot of places.

31:00.79

Zahra Massicotte 

And speaking a bit, one more question around this visibility line. How do you think that fixing that visibility problem specifically changes the outcomes for underrepresented students?

31:14.78

Allison Danielsen

I think, you know, so much of workforce success still relies on your network. And so, you know, people who are more affluent, people who often have stronger networks, and that ends up benefiting them in a tremendous number of ways. They are able… they get the benefit of the doubt when they're looked at. They get coached and trained on the right things. They get earlier opportunities to get the internship after all or get into a school that is going to more directly prepare them for, you know, the next step in education, and you have so many students who don't have access to that, if there's a way for us to provide more signals of what talent competency skills actually exist for people, we can help that invisible talent pool be seen. We can give them the benefit of the doubt that today only exists for this smaller group of people. So I think there's just a tremendous amount of potential that comes from needing to look at different signals. And I think we're in a moment where employers are actually desperate for other signals because of this broken recruitment system that right now we're actually seeing. I think we've got to solve the problem of them knowing what to trust and how do we make sure that people are able to share that and show that in a way that's actually, you know, gets them that kind of visibility, gets them that ability to actually get their foot in the door and be seen in a way that today they can't.

32:38.87

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah. And that reminds me of similar issues with getting into college, SAT prep, and being able to afford a personal tutor, and all these different things that kind of give students certain advantages.

32:52.22

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, exactly. And you know, we just know that the outcomes are better when you have those kinds of resources. And so, how do we level the playing field for people? How do we give them the kind of opportunity that they should have, especially given the potential that they have? And many of these people who are underrepresented have a level of grit and potential for success that is so high and employers would be desperate to make that connection and find them. They just don't know how to do it today. And so we can do a better job there.

33:22.20

Zahra Massicotte 

So shifting a bit from skills to resource gap, if we want to identify and fix the point which students are quietly disengaging, what would you say the most common missing moment in their journey that leads to the fall off of the pathway?

33:35.74

Allison Danielsen

There are so many places because this is such an individual process, but I do think a lot of times young people make the transition into high school, and it feels very high stakes, and they're not clear why they're actually there, why they're learning what they're learning. And they have this, you know, they have pressure growing up, and they have pressure actually understanding what they do now matters. And when they don't see how those things connect, and they're not seeing immediate success, and maybe socially they become isolated, they will withdraw. And so I think that's a really vulnerable moment and a time that we can try to inspire more and be more deliberate about that because so much of what happens in that transition moment actually will set you up for the success of what's next. But it doesn't mean you can't pivot if you decide something in ninth grade and in 10th grade, you want to do something else. 11th grade, you want to do something else. But we can't allow somebody to pivot, change, and be ready if they're totally disengaged.

34:37.14

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah. And we're seeing this across the board, even with education technology and just general student engagement on its own, of like, why care? Why am I learning this? What, you know, make that connection for me, make it personal, right? Like, you know, kind of ties into all of that of making it important to me and making me understand what… where this could lead me and and what that um that pathway could be.

35:01.65

Allison Danielsen

Yep.

35:03.73

Zahra Massicotte 

What does Tallo's data show about some of the disparities? I'm curious about the cases where access looks equal on paper, so same school, same platform, but then the outcomes are still different. What do you think is driving some of that gap?

35:17.59

Allison Danielsen

So much of this has to do with your family situation and like what you're actually exposed to. We talked about earlier, like the importance of being exposed to a variety of jobs and a variety of pathways. People cannot be what they cannot see. And there are, you know, folks who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds who have maybe smaller families, only see a couple of types of jobs. So they don't even know that they could be a graphic designer, let alone a graphic designer who works in manufacturing, all different nuances that happen with work, right? They don't hear from their family, they don't see around them what those possibilities look like. So when they're faced with them, there's absolutely no context and no familiarity. And so, there's not the same kind of interest. They don't have the same confidence in going after the opportunities that somebody who has been exposed actually has. And so part of our work in that cycle around that career journey is actually understanding where are you? Are you at that beginning point of needing more exposure and more discovery? Are you in a place where you have an idea, and you're trying to get validation, make a plan, and take next steps? And young people may look exactly the same in terms of like their developmental milestone, but be in a very different place in that journey. And now I do think it's our job to try to understand where each of those people is starting and to really assume that they have not had the right kind of exposure information.

36:39.51

Zahra Massicotte 

I like that, assuming that they haven't had that exposure, because like you said, it's your responsibility, but really, whose responsibility is it? Like, you know, the families only know what they know, or you know, doing their best to expose their children to different things. And then the institution, their school's responsibility. But then having a partner like you to really bring it in, and bring it in full circle, to bring up that exposure. Because again, time, budget, lack of resources, things like that play into it.

37:11.51

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, and I don't think it's reasonable for us to expect that all of these things will be solved by a school or that every family has equal time and resources to try to make these things happen. But we know young people all need the economic opportunity that should be available in this country to them.

37:30.10

Zahra Massicotte 

Absolutely. And the landscape, like you've said, is changing so fast, right? Like, there are so many jobs.

37:35.72

Allison Danielsen

Yes.

37:37.14

Zahra Massicotte 

I know everyone says it all the time. Like there's jobs, you know, that my child… we don't even know are going to exist by the time she gets into that arena.

37:50.55

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, and there's, you know, the workforce is transitioning every single day. And so, if we rely on what we knew or what our parents knew or what, you know, the last time your teacher was actually in the workforce, like the information is going to be outdated. Like we have our labor market information update every single day because there are new types of jobs that are getting posted all of the time. And if you follow the news on product releases, I mean, every day there's some new capability that exists that unlocks the potential that people actually have to build and produce in the world. And so then more roles are going to be created around those things. So it's not something that really any of us can ever totally stay on top of. And we need systems that are going to help us keep that information.

38:33.33

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah. Great point. So coming back to this interview and hiring process, which is unique and you said keeps changing, and there's different assessments and things coming, but it's a very anxiety-driven one. And AI is definitely changing that landscape. And it's even becoming more common for people to blame AI for their losses. But you've also pointed out that overhiring is part of the story, too. How do you help students and institutions separate those two things?

39:03.73

Allison Danielsen

Yeah, I think this is really hard because I think the news would have you believe that AI has fixed every single business problem there is, and humans are unnecessary in the workforce, or at least that's what young people are hearing. And we have a thriving community, more than 2 million users on our platform, and they're coming in and telling us that they hate AI and they fear it because it is replacing people. That's the message they're getting. They don't like it. They want to, you know, solve problems in the world, and they're seeing the technology is doing it. But the real story is more nuanced because, as a business leader myself and talking to employers who are hiring and other business leaders, there has not been a silver bullet with AI. And in fact, many of the studies have shown that you know the majority of AI projects so far have failed. And we're seeing that AI, in fact, is like augmenting tasks versus replacing entire roles. Will we see big shifts in the future? Absolutely. But I think many of the layoffs that we're seeing and the retraction in hiring is actually a result of an overinvestment during COVID and overhiring. And there is now a course correction. And if you're a CEO of a business, it looks really good. You look really smart if you say technology helped me do this. I save money because I use technology, and that allowed me to be more efficient. Instead of saying, I made a bad business decision a few years ago, and now I have to rectify it and now I have to right-size the workforce. So the message getting sent out is purposeful, that like we're using technology to do these things, only I would argue it's masking a more complicated issue, and young people are hearing something that is really drastic. And the problem with that is that then they're getting disengaged. These are the people we actually need to be using AI. We need them to train it. We need them to harness it. We need them to leverage this technology to help us actually solve big problems in the world that we haven't been able to solve before this stuff came along. And we're scaring them away from using it. And so I do think it's hard to separate fact from fiction. I think it's important to get the next level down. Like when you see, hey, these jobs are being replaced by AI, ask exactly what, how, what jobs still exist, what's being created. As a result of these technological changes, I will tell you, we have only added technologists in our organization to try to take advantage of the kind of evolution that's happening in the world. But otherwise, we're going to scare the next generation away, and we're going to lose people out of the workforce that is going to need them to move to the next phase.

41:32.82

Zahra Massicotte 

And so building on that, what do you think are like, say two or three skills or signals that are becoming more valuable as AI spreads?

41:41.98

Allison Danielsen

I mean, I think there's a lot about problem-solving, right? You need to be able to identify a problem. You need to be able to think about potential solutions and work with AI in order to actually solve a problem. I think judgment is increasingly important and the ability to actually understand what's fact and fiction. You mentioned earlier where AI will tell you the thing that it thinks you want to hear, and that happens all the time, and you need to say, hey, wait, like, is this actually true? I mean, it continuously, and so many of these will have gotten better, will make facts up for me. And then when I ask it to cite something, it's like, oh, whoops, sorry, that isn't real. And that will lead to obviously serious problems if we take things at face value without actually investigating it. So I think being able to use your judgment, being able to solve problems, and really this is perpetual, but has become only more important, and that is communication. And so, so many of the people who for so long said, you know, you don't need to study the humanities, and you don't need to study English, are now saying, like, you know, how's your prompt engineering and how are you thinking about communication? And the reality is this is a core skill. It has been in the workforce. It will continue to be a core skill in the workforce. And you have to be able to actually engage with these tools in an intelligent way and communicate what you mean in order to do that.

43:04.54

Zahra Massicotte 

Huge point because something someone said to me recently is that English majors are having their moment right now because they're knowing how to communicate back, use the AI tools, write thoughtful prompts, and like really dive in.

43:19.70

Allison Danielsen

Yeah.

43:20.56

Zahra Massicotte 

It's like word finessing right now, right? And English majors and communication folks are great at that.

43:27.16

Allison Danielsen

And that's why it's also so important that we don't get wrapped up in the trends around these things, right? There's the moment of four-year degree is the only path. There's a moment of  humanities and English as a major are dead. It's coding only. And there is right now a moment of AI is going to take your job. And, you know, there's not going to be any work in the future, or you have to do this kind of work because it's going to be the only thing that exists. And the reality is it's never that extreme. And so we have to be able to tell a more nuanced view and not get wrapped up in these kind of wholesale changes that really take time and usually do not apply universally. So I do think we're going to see a lot of AI impacts play out in different ways across different sectors. And I think we'll have a lot of aha moments about things we told people in the past that, in fact, maybe don't hold true for the future.

44:18.74

Zahra Massicotte 

Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much for that. All right, Alison, we've made it to the lightning round. I just have three questions for you. Just whatever first comes to mind, you can throw it out there.

44:32.29

Allison Danielsen

Okay, great.

44:33.69

Zahra Massicotte 

Okay. One thing a career readiness dashboard should include that most institutions don't measure today.

44:40.29

Allison Danielsen

I think network density is so important. How many people do I actually know that I've spoken to about work? How many people are in the community of people that I can reach out to for support? We know that's going to matter more and more, especially as technology gets more confusing. And we should try to understand where are young people's networks today and how do we help them grow them?

45:02.04

Zahra Massicotte 

Great, yes, thank you. One type of tool institutions over-index on because it's easier than fixing incentives and workflows.

45:11.80

Allison Danielsen

I think they over-index on like a singular interest assessment as some determinant of the future or as a whole picture for somebody, because we know that we need to have interest values and skills, and we know that this needs to be a continuous process because we evolve as people over time. So I would say if we just have kind of a one-and-done interest assessment for careers, and say we did it we will not actually help people be successful.

45:35.86

Zahra Massicotte 

Love it. Okay. What is the earliest career readiness outcome you can measure and trust?

45:44.52

Allison Danielsen

I think you can try to understand the number of careers that people actually know exist. So, you know, we talked about earlier how there's a whole group of people who only see a narrow pool of potential opportunities, and we can understand how many careers can you name if it's just doctor, lawyer, police officer, we have work to do. And that feels like one of the things that we could know pretty easily, and we could start to do very intentional exposure work and actually help people get a rounder picture of the possibilities.

46:13.82

Zahra Massicotte 

Love it. Thank you. Is there one change that you think districts, colleges, or platforms should make this term, like if you were to pick one thing?

46:24.70

Allison Danielsen

I really think it's about treating this as this ongoing cycle instead of a series of checklists that have to actually be done. And I know that's incredibly hard because these people are so, so busy, and the list of things on the checklist keeps getting longer. But I think we do people a disservice if we check off the boxes for career readiness, but they actually don't have any skill to continuously think about it, or they don't expect they're supposed to. And so there's a lot more anxiety that comes into the process.

46:54.07

Zahra Massicotte 

So, last question, just putting things in a close here and wrapping things up. What do you think gives you the most hope when you look at the next generation entering into the workforce?

47:05.45

Allison Danielsen

I think there's a lot of things to be hopeful for. I think we should be really hopeful about the fact that so many of the next generation are skeptical. They ask themselves questions about what they're being told. They ask if you know the success that prior generations had is actually success that they want. They look hard at things because they've grown up in a world of, you know, clickbait social media, they can't trust. And so I feel like that skepticism is going to be really valuable. And if you combine that to the fact that so many young people are actually out there building things, like you really have potential for, I think, revolutionary impact. And this generation has such an interesting mix of, you know, that kind of healthy skepticism and critical thinking, with like the drive to just go and change it.

47:56.83

Zahra Massicotte 

Well, thank you so much. I love that note to end on. Alison, appreciate the time today.

48:03.58

Allison Danielsen

Of course, thank you for having me.

48:06.04

Zahra Massicotte 

So that's a wrap for today's episode of Tech in EdTech. Huge thanks to Alison Danielsen for a thoughtful conversation on starting career readiness earlier, making talent visible, and designing systems that actually expand opportunity. We'll drop the link in the show notes. If this episode was useful, please follow or subscribe, leave a rating, and share it with a colleague. I'm Zahra, and this is Tech in EdTech. See you next time.