Episode 1
Tear The Paper Ceiling Movement: How It All Began
In this debut episode, host LaShana, STARs Advisory Council Chair and, speaks with Byron, CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, about the origins of the skills-first movement, the Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign, and the creation of the STARs acronym (Skilled Through Alternative Routes).
They discuss Opportunity@Work’s mission to unlock opportunities for over 70 million skilled workers and how employers can value skills gained through work experience, military service, bootcamps, and on-the-job training, rather than relying solely on college degrees.
Transcript
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La Shana: Think about your favorite restaurant. Tell me what school the chef went to. You probably don’t know, and you probably don’t care.
Byron: Frankly, how could society and our culture move in a direction that really recognized people for the skills they had, not just diminish them for the degrees they lacked? You have people who have the skills to do the job, and they gain them lots of different ways. And just because they didn’t get them the same way and they don’t look the same way, that doesn’t mean that that’s not worth the talents. In fact, it actually means that this is incredibly important source of talent that not only gets you more skills, more skilled workers, but also gets you more diversity of perspectives and lots of other benefits.
La Shana: Welcome to the Paperless Pathways podcast. It’s a podcast for STARs by STARs. My name is LaShana Lewis, and I am your host. In this episode, we’re gonna sit down with Byron Auguste, the CEO and cofounder of Opportunity@Work. You’ll get to hear a little bit about how he got involved with STARs and the origins of the Tear the Paper Ceiling movement. I hope you enjoy.
Hello, Byron. We are back together again. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. You wanna give a little bit about you and, set the stage of, how you became involved with STARs.
Byron: So I’m Byron Auguste. I’m the CEO and cofounder of Opportunity@Work. And the purpose of Opportunity@Work was to ensure, right, that the people we were seeing out in the country who had already been, you know, doing everything learned, that they could work, learn, and earn to their full potential. And that if you could do the job, you actually could get the job. And that if you learn something valuable, you should be able to earn more. And that should not depend on whether you had a college degree or not.
And so that was the mission of Opportunity@Work from the beginning. And then over the course of time, we we saw, actually, first working with these tech hire communities, we would see over and over that a bottleneck they faced is that, employers might be at the table, but they don’t hire at the table. The large scale hiring requires data. It requires business process. It requires workflows.
And so we realized that we have to bring something to the field that it lacked, and there wasn’t kind of an intermediary that was that was really doing that on a scalable basis. Even though they were great nonprofits, LaunchCode among them, there were many others I could cite, who are doing great work on training and even doing great work on connecting employers. But we wanted to say, what can we learn from that, and how do we take it to to scale to a scale worthy of the opportunity of millions of the people we ultimately now, talk about a STAR Skilled Through Alternative Routes.
La Shana: Awesome. Well, you know, I’ve been obviously in this boat for a while too with you. Just kind of to see the transition from, tech hire initiative to, you know, having the various, you know, spots and programs around the country. I remember going to one meetup in Chicago where we all kind of got together and we talked about the initiative and and what it meant for us and now going into Opportunity@Work. So I’m wondering, right about what time did the STARs acronym, come about? Because I remember kind of being in there in the middle of it. But but it was one of those things where it’s just like it was there and then we just all kind of embraced it. Where where along the story or am I too far? If I’m too far ahead, it’s not that we gotta back up.
Byron: It was a really, really, really important part of the story. And it’s and this is a good time to talk about it because I mentioned a minute ago that, we were aiming to do this at scale. Right? Instead of, and, you know, like, from you think about a company or an industry, like, a big business can do a little bit of anything it wants to. But to do a lot of something, it actually has to have data. It has to have business process. It really has to be systematized. And now I say that, and someone listening might wonder, well, what does that have to do with with STARs?
LaShana: Right.
Byron: What is the name STARs? But it has everything to do with it. And here’s why. Companies would do campus hiring because college was a thing. Right? Like, I mean, college is actually eighteen thousand different things. It’s not really one thing. But, but still, the idea that it’s a thing, so campus hiring and you make a decision, do you do that or not? And then you might do some more some places than others, like, what’s a good fit for you? Oh, I like the school for these roles, whatever. But the point is there’s a whole system in place to do it. But there was no system in place for STARs and part of the reason why is because college was a thing, but everything else was not a thing. Right? Everything else was just sort of like a jumbled, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
La Shana: It’s like the default, If you don’t go to college, then you must be doing this afternoon. Yeah.
Byron: And well, I mean, because people weren’t going out of their way to come up with new ways to exclude people who were skilled. What they were doing is they were following the prompts. And they had built in colleges like a you know, just like a prompt. Like, okay. Well, that’s an easy screen, and you sort of do it.
So in other words, if we were trying to replace it, right, like so if we were trying to say, no. It’s terrible to screen people out for pedigree. Like, well, how do you on what basis do you screen them in, and how do you think about them? And there was both the fundamental problem that there was not a talent category. And by a talent category, I mean, like, yeah, college grads is like a talent category. Right? Like, it’s like people think, oh, that’s it. Right? I mean, that’s who I’m looking for.
So STARs is a talent category, meaning Skilled Through Alternative Routes. And the way STARs specifically came about, is, first of all, listening to people who had been on this journey and who were in this situation. And we did a lot of quali before we did anything else, we did a lot of qualitative, like, focus groups and just listening. We didn’t have STARs as a term. We didn’t, like, start by testing that out. Like, we just —
La Shana: Right. And what we heard. It wasn’t like a buzzword yet.
Byron: And what we heard over and over was that, hey. I have the same skills. Just got there a different way, a different route, a different, you know, a different path. People would say different things, but it was common. It was that idea.
Because remember, Skilled Through Alternative Routes. This is not alternative people, and this is not alternative skills. It’s alternative routes. K? It’s alternative routes. It’s STAR but what are STARs? What do employers most need to know about STARs? They are skilled. Right? STARs have have skills, and the question of, does this STAR have the skills you need? Well, that’s a good question. Go find out.
The same thing is true of college grads. They don’t say, like, oh, you’re a college grad, so here’s the job. But they use college grads. That’s a signal. Right? Now let me look deeper. Same thing with STARs here. Like, that’s a signal. Someone is Skilled Through Alternative Routes. So, and and and so the question we get a lot is, oh, well, yeah. But how do I go about hiring STARs? How do I know? And I always answer, now you’re asking the right question. Now you’re doing your job.
La Shana: Right.
Byron: Right? So and and that’s —
La Shana: You’re digging in.
Byron: Yeah. Yeah. Digging in because but that’s it starts with that talent category. What else? Without a talent category, you can’t have a definition. Without a definition, you can’t have data. Without a data without data, you can’t have structured decision making in companies. You can’t have the business process and workflow that companies depend on to, like, make important decisions. You can’t have a platform strategy where where Indeed or LinkedIn or Jobcase or others, like, start to right?
So all of those things depend on it. And what’s worse, the the kinds of more academic, kind of labels that are out there, like, literally define people by something they lack. So literally, as soon as by the other definitions you might hear, as soon as someone is successful, they disappear from the category. They’re no longer part of the category.
La Shana: Right.
Byron: But STARs can be wildly successful and still be STARs. In fact, millions of STARs are wildly successful professionally, are in high wage jobs. And right? And and so now when people say, well, oh, how do you know this could work? I said, because it’s already worked with, like, five million people. So, of course, work.
La Shana: Exactly.
Byron: Questions whether your company can make it work. Right? Like, so what’s incredibly important and it’s it’s I mean, it is partly a matter of respect. I mean, to sort of, you know and and I I’m happy to say that there’s been, like, huge uptake, and and I’ve honestly never seen, like, a newly introduced term like that sort of have as much of a positive resonance among people, whom it describes. But but I I’m I’m happy about that. I’m proud about that. But the reason why is because it started with STARs talking about their journeys, and that’s how that’s how the name came about.
La Shana: I love that people are embracing the terminology as soon as you, put it out. Because I’ve seen sometimes where people have a terminology given to them that describes, something about them, and they say, oh, no. You know, I don’t like using that term. I wanna use another one. And —
Byron: I think most of the time, don’t you? I mean, I think most of the time it feels weird. Right?
La Shana: Yeah. It feels a little strange. But I’ve actually seen something different with STARs. Like, even with LinkedIn and getting on there and talking about my story, you know, as a person who is Skilled Through Alternative Routes and being able to share that. But you know what? The the the big signifier is after you get off the stage.
You know, when people come come to you and they say, you know, thank you for sharing my story, and even just recently, being at the the ACT, workforce summit, getting off of the stage after doing the keynote. I was approached by four individuals almost immediately. I am also a STAR. Like, they had not really heard the term, but I go and I give a speech and then they come to me and say, I already identify with this. And let me tell you my story and let me share what I’m doing so that I can help other STARs as well.
And I think that’s kind of one of the beautiful things about being able to, you know, people are like, oh, you know, how do you feel about labels? And I’m like, well, you need to be able to name a thing in order to just to solve it. So it’s, you know, one of those things where, you know, that this is a way for us to signify to people, there is this community of people and for people to also find their, you know, their own community, because it’s easier to find a community if you know the name of the community than it is to kind of just wander around and hope that maybe, you know, through serendipity, you’ll you’ll, be able to, find them. But this is not a podcast about me. This is a I mean, kind of. But yeah.
Byron: Really I’m really happy to hear you say that and that experience. I I, I will say that I’ve just seen the light bulbs go off so often, including people who are not STARs, but suddenly,
LaShana: Right.
Byron: When they when they kind of hear the term in context and everything, they realize, oh, wow. Like, you know, this person for example, this person who was my mentor when I first started the the company, who showed me the ropes and who without whom I could never been successful. I’ve been promoted three times, and they’re in the same job. Like, suddenly light bulb goes off. That’s why. Right? Like, I mean and so I just think —
LaShana: Mhmm.
Byron: It’s it’s really I mean, it’s important. I’m like, I’m like, it wouldn’t work, and we would if if STARs didn’t embrace it. So that’s the most important thing. But I I think it also allows there to be, a recognition by non- STARs who are disproportionately in in kind of decision making positions in companies just because of the way things have played out over the last thirty years. And, and it makes a big difference. And but I I’m happiest about it when, when when when stars feel that resonance.
Like, I, I I do a lot of interviews, and I remember, like, one actually, the Today Show was kind of a big one. And, the, both the sound technician and the, the video tech you know, the the camera person at the end of it said to me, oh, I’m a STAR. I’m a STAR, too.
LaShana: Wow.
Byron: Yeah. And and then, actually, another person was filming for that same show,
LaShana: Mhmm.
Byron: Like, three hours later who is a STAR themselves. And at the end of that, those two technicians said not only to the person they were interviewing, but to the reporter and to the producer that they were STARs. And funny enough, the reporter and the producer had no idea. Like, even though they’ve been and they they were they were they were, like, blown away. And so, like, because these people are, like, they depend on them, right, like, completely. They have, like,
LaShana: Mhmm.
Byron: Huge technical aptitude. They’re doing very complicated things that the success of the whole thing depends on.
LaShana: Right.
Byron: There was just, you know, a lot of people assume that, oh, that must mean they have all sorts of, you know, degrees and credentials where it’s actually so many people. Like that’s the thing about it. Like as I said, millions of STARs are already in high wage jobs, already highly successful. And if you look back at what they were doing ten years before, they might have been doing something that you said, oh, I wouldn’t hire someone from there, but you’re wrong. Look at the talent you missed. And so don’t keep making the same mistake.
LaShana: Mhmm.
Byron: Because work is solving problems. Companies have problems to solve, and stars are problem solvers.
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LaShana: This episode of Paperless Pathways is brought to you by Opportunity@Work. They’re on a mission to unlock potential for over seventy million STARs – Workers who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes – like with apprenticeships or military service. See how they’re connecting talent with opportunity at opportunityatwork.org. Opportunity@Work, unlocking potential, creating upward mobility, and building pathways.
I love using the analogy of the restaurant, like we’ve we’ve done before where I ask people, you know, think about, your favorite restaurant. Tell me what school the chef went to. Most people don’t know. And I said, you probably don’t know and you probably don’t care. You care that the food is good and that it’s safe for you to consume. You’re you’re putting your life in the hands of a person that could possibly be a STAR, but that wouldn’t make a difference as to whether or not you go patronize that restaurant.
It’s literally about kind of understanding the whole person, and what their personality is like, but as well as the skills that they can bring to the table. You know? And we’ve all seen, you know, five star chefs and personalities on TV that are STARs, that are people who maybe got through, you know, their cooking regime through an alternative route.
May it be stay you know, standing in the kitchen with their grandmother and helping them out all the way to, you know, maybe, you know, working at various restaurants with various different backgrounds and getting all of this together and then deciding to create their own, version.
And a lot of times, what I hear with STARs is that they saw this hole. They saw a gap somewhere that needed to be filled. They did the research and the work that they needed to do to figure out, you know, went through the trials and tribulations, used to being wrong, used to correcting themselves, and, you know, righting the ship, and then being able to kind of offer that same opportunity to another person who was walk who walked the same path as them.
Byron: Wow.
LaShana: So I think that’s kind of this beautiful thing about about, you know, looking at the STARs journey. So what I wanna get in here, though, is Tear the Paper Ceiling, which, I I I am obviously, for those who are just listening, I’m actually wearing a Tear the Paper Ceiling pen and a Tear the Paper Ceiling shirt. There is paper behind me because I actually have a, a screen, a paper screen, but, the whole thing of Tear the Paper Ceiling seems to be something that is starting to now resonate in addition to using the terminology STAR. So can you talk a little bit about the origin of Tear the Paper Ceiling?
Byron: We always felt, from the beginning that this had to have something of a movement character. And I think it was very important to have STARs first because, both because that centered who the movement was about and it also, it also, as I said, allowed you to do things at scale, like through platforms, through business process, like, we have this talent category.
But there was something, bigger, about the sort of the social movement, and we wanted to tap into an experience that kind of everybody has had to some extent and in a sense, everybody’s and this idea of tearing the paper ceiling came, there’s a lot of work that went into that too and did that, you know, together with our our partners at the the Ad Council and Ogilvy and so forth. When I say we, I mean Opportunity@Work. But the idea was to have this big kind of tentpole, where it could say some people describe it. Describe it. I don’t tend to describe it this way, but some people say, like, every movement needs an enemy. And, like, okay. But companies can’t be the enemy because, like, they’re your hire. Right?
LaShana: Right. Like you’re trying to work for the company.
Byron: Yeah. Yeah. Right. And it’s sort of like but it’s really the enemy. And I and so this idea of the enemy is actually a paper ceiling. The enemy is this this thing that’s, like, that’s holding us apart, that’s kind of keeping employers from the talent that they could have, and that’s, like, keeping, resourceful, skilled, hardworking people from, like, the jobs they could do and the careers they could have and the contributions they could make. And it’s just, like, it’s tragic.
And at the same time, it’s paper thin because it’s not like a lead ceiling. It’s not like an iron ceiling. It’s a paper ceiling. It’s literally, like, you could tear right through it if you want to. And by the way, I wanna say something because sometimes people say, oh, is that against college degrees? Well, it’s absolutely not. It’s not against college. It’s not even against degrees. If you wanna think about degrees as paper, I’m gonna say the worst possible use for that paper is to hold other people back. Right?
LaShana: I love that part. I feel like that that needs to be somewhere. Maybe we put that on —
Byron: Yeah. College can be an incredible bridge to opportunity and it is for millions of people, and I wish it were for millions more. And it should never be a drawbridge that pulls up behind it and anyone who doesn’t get across it because they’ve got family responsibilities, they’ve got work responsibilities, they don’t have generational wealth. I mean, people drop out of college not mainly because they’re irresponsible, but because they’re responsible. They’ve got other responsibilities. They’ve got —
LaShana: Life happens. Yeah.
Byron: Yeah. And they’ve got you know, if you’re working thirty, forty hours a week and your your work schedule does not match your course schedule and you can’t get the prerequisites and you don’t so, I mean, more than half of stars have college credits. Right? And so whether that’s so it’s not about, like, whether you took a college trajectory or or whatever. It’s really about what skills did you gain along the way, whether in school, whether in work. And the fact of the matter is most skills, even for people who are very highly educated and highly credentialed, most of their skills come from what they learn on the job.
And and that’s understood across the board. But, in the system that wasn’t working and that we’ve started to change, what you see is that and we’ve we’ve actually, we see this in an academic research that went into the National Bureau of Economic Research that was actually as stars are moving or were moving, you know, in the last thirty years as if that on the job experience didn’t matter. And we know because, again, once we have the STARs category, we could go very, very, very deep on the data. And what the data tells us from a hundred and thirty million job transitions and the skills distance from every every job to every other job… People move through skills, whether they’ve got a bachelor’s degree, whether they’re STARs, whether they’re not even high school graduates. They do tend to move through skills, but the movements that are allowed to start are just much, much narrower for the most part. And many moves that STARs could easily make based on the skills they have where they absolutely have highly relevant skills, adjacent skills, sometimes completely overlapping skills.
Only forty percent of job transitions from STARs, like, results in a wage gain. And, you know, and so there’s a lot of this sort of lateral movement. But I I think that what we can see of of seventy million STARs in this country, thirty million STARs today have the skills for jobs that pay fifty percent more than the ones they’re in. And that and these are jobs —
LaShana: That is a large number. Yeah.
Byron: These are jobs that are in demand, and their jobs are in demand in the geographies where they live. We’ve we’ve adjusted for all of that. So, fundamentally, when any industry that’s saying, hey. We’re not sure if we can get the talent. Like, we’re doing an energy transition, but can we get the skills for that? The answer is STARs. The first order answer is STARs. Skills STARs who have the skills, STARs who are close to having the skills. And if you think about additional training or onboarding as a top up, wow, you’ve got a universe of talent that is available to you, both for existing jobs and for new and emerging jobs. And we really can rewire the labor market, and we really can tear the paper ceiling.
That’s the first step. It’s like the first step is to make it possible by tearing the paper ceiling, then the work begins. And I’m really happy that we have a coalition now of over seventy organizations, lots of great employers that are bringing not only their job demand, but also as companies, the capabilities they have, whether that’s Indeed, it’s the largest, you know, job boards, like, very active and tear the paper ceiling, whether that’s Google, which is supported with gen generative AI capability. And and, I mean, there’s just so many, there’s so many examples. And, and one thing I say often is that we cannot solve this problem in silos, and we won’t solve it by accident. But we can solve it together and on purpose. And I just believe the Tear the Paper Ceiling coalition that we built and the campaign that that is powering it is really such an example of how we’re gonna solve this challenge together and on purpose.
LaShana: I I I love the ending on that too, but I am gonna spoil it and ask you one more question. Okay. So throughout this entire, you know, saga of of being able to shine a light on STARs, and I know you talk a little bit about your father. Do you wanna give a little, background about, his inspiration to you?
Byron: Yeah. Well, my dad, in nineteen seventy was working at, he was a shipping clerk in a in a factory in Detroit and felt he wasn’t really making, you know, that much progress and didn’t see any kind of real career through upward opportunity there. And, and he saw an ad in a newspaper saying, learn COBOL and punch your own ticket, which you’ll recognize as a COBOL joke.
LaShana: Yeah. Exactly.
Byron: What was COBOL? Like, what was COBOL? People might be asking themselves. Well, he asked himself too. He didn’t know what COBOL was.
LaShana: Back when we punch cards. Yeah.
Byron: He found out that it was, like, an IBM, like, computer programming languages for mainframes. There was huge demand. And by the way, they hadn’t it was new. They hadn’t really been teaching it in colleges anyway. And so he quit his job and learned COBOL. And, my mom actually got like, talked to someone in the MIS department, IT department of of of the company where she worked to, give my dad a job shadow just to, like, see what he can do. And he did that. Turned out he learned some COBOL. They had him, you know, read some, had some write some, and they’re like, okay. He knows a bit. And so they took him on as an entry level programmer.
And, and that was really our family’s that was the start of our family’s trajectory into the American middle class. And so the the thing about my dad’s story is I knew we could do it because it had already done. We’d already undone it. So, like, we and a lot of things changed that didn’t you know? And, it’s a new era. There’s more technology and everything, and the first wave of technology was simplistic. So it was like keyword, you know, searches and keyword filters. Well, like, then it’s not ridiculous to say, oh, college degree. That would be one of the more useful ones. Again but that was, like, a minor convenience when you started having digital job search. But then it just, like, took off into this crazy monster of, right, of exclusion that really was completely necessary. And now roll the tape forward, we’ve got big data. We’ve got predictive analytics. We’ve got all these tools that make it, Why the heck should we use —
LaShana: Large language models. Yeah.
Byron: Large language so I’m saying, like, if you are still using two thousand two keyword filters, like, you’re behind. Like, do your job. Like, get it I mean, like, really, it’s it’s people should be embarrassed to be using, like, such, like, old school, simplistic, outdated methods as college degree screens. If you really can’t figure out a better way to do it, like, I mean, really, let’s get moving.
So what I’m happy to say is that, there are better ways to do it. There’s multiple better ways to do it and that you don’t have to know when you start, oh, which is the exact way to do it. You can get started a bunch of different ways, and you can come to, you know, to Opportunity@Work or to tearthepaperceiling.org, you know, or I mean, we have we have lots of tools. And and, again, these aren’t just developed by Opportunity@Work. These are developed by many of our partners. They are very including, like, a lot of companies that people depend on the companies depend on for their their business processes. They’re buying into STARs. They’re creating STARs, friendly tools, and we’re on our way to rewiring the labor market. We’re on our way to really put performance over pedigree and to recognize, and reward the talent that STARs bring and the problem solving they do, that we call work.
LaShana: No. I love, the fact that so many organizations, even those that you would think, you know, traditionally would not be on board with something like this. Again, I mentioned the ACT. You know, I remember taking the ACT before, you know, going to college, and, it was, you know, the only thing that I knew that was associated with college. And then for them to, you know, have the workforce ready communities or work ready communities that they have, really kind of opened my eyes of the way that they’re kind of turning this page and starting to be, a lot more broad, in their their perspective. I I had a wonderful chance to meet the CEO. She, definitely believes in the mission, knows STARs herself, and it’s just more of a, you know now they see, you know, how much, higher education can be a partner in this as opposed, to an enemy, in in in the stars movement.
So I’m I love that we’re starting to embrace that. I love that people are now coming out as STARs, even those that are sitting in the C-suite and, executive positions that are identifying themselves as stars and then finding this, embracing community, that that comes around them and says, you know, hey. You know, thank you for saying that I am also a STAR and, you know, what can we do to make this system a lot better for folks, like us, so that we can kind of all work together, both degreed and non degreed individuals who are seeking the same path, to success.
So, with that said, thank you so much, Byron for taking the time. I know you have a busy, busy schedule. So, one of the things I definitely want to do is capture some of these wonderful conversations that we’ve had some things that you’ve said. I feel like, you know, there’s, there’s little spots here and there, but, I’m glad we were able to capture them here today. So…
Byron: I appreciate you taking the time too, and I always enjoy our conversations.
LaShana: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Paperless Pathways. You can listen to our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and on YouTube. Make sure you follow us and subscribe to the Paperless Pathways newsletter so that you can stay up to date on future episodes.
Next month, we’ll sit down with Lafon Davis to talk about what it’s like to be a shining star. And I think it’s a great episode, and you’re not gonna wanna miss this one.
If you wanna support stars, we encourage you to join the movement and create a fairer workforce by visiting tearthepaperceiling.org. Pledge your commitment to break down barriers for STARs today.
About Opportunity@Work
Opportunity@Work is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is enable at least 1 million working adults in America to translate their learning into earning – generating a $20 billion boost in annual earnings. Opportunity@Work engages with corporate, philanthropic, and workforce partners to directly address the barriers that STARs face, recognize STARs talent and remove bachelor’s degree screens. Learn more at opportunityatwork.org.

