Learning to help while helping to learn: Insights in our journey to support formerly incarcerated jobseekers

In 2019, I was channel surfing when I happened to catch a snippet of a documentary, College Behind Bars. Like most Americans, I had no understanding of the education and employment obstacles faced by incarcerated folks in our country. The documentary was heart wrenching and transformatively inspiring, and I decided that day that I wanted to find a way to improve education opportunities for justice impacted individuals. As a Product director at LinkedIn working on Learning products, I felt like I was in a unique position to help.

As I asked around, I discovered that I wasn’t the only LinkedIn employee looking to make an impact here. Everywhere I turned, I met another person who was a volunteer coach, a non-profit consultant, a passionate advocate. I started teaming up with these amazing coworkers and in the last 3 years we’ve launched 4 non-profit partnerships, a job search filter that helps previously incarcerated applicants, and today: a LinkedIn Learning course that gives these job seekers the training, tools, and confidence they need.

I’m proud of all the great work we’ve done in this space, and consider myself exceedingly lucky to have been involved. All of these projects (and other well-intentioned but ultimately failed ones) have taught me a lot about creating social impact at work. Here are some learnings – I hope that you find them helpful!

#1 Don’t assume that you can help by only giving what you have

In 2020, we launched a partnership with Mount Tamalpais College (formerly the Prison University Project) in which formerly incarcerated graduates from their San Quentin AA program were enrolled in a Life Skills workshop (Computer Literacy, Financial Skills, Workplace Skills) supplemented with content provided by LinkedIn Learning. At the program’s conclusion, we talked to participants and heard that much of our content was not a fit for them because it wasn’t tailored to their specific circumstances. For example, our computer literacy content assumed technical knowledge that someone who had been incarcerated for 20 years could not follow. Our workplace content assumed continuous employment history and didn’t talk about navigating criminal background checks. There was no mention of how to best represent certifications or work licenses. Our financial literacy content wasn’t well tailored to folks who didn’t have access to traditional banking. The takeaway? Learning isn’t one-size-fits-all, our content needs to fit the populations we are trying to help.??

So we partnered with justice advocates closest to the issue, like the Center for Employment Opportunities. And? today, we are launching a new course, Job Seeking with a Criminal Record taught by Dr. Dr. Genevieve Rimer . Dr. Rimer is a Re-entry Employment Expert, Director of Inclusive Hiring for the Center for Employment Opportunities . In addition to being a highly respected expert in this field, Dr. Rimer herself is formerly incarcerated and has direct lived experience. This free course (available to everyone) is specifically designed to help people with past convictions get recognized for their unique skills and experiences, identify their goals and interests to match to opportunities, and build the skills they need to land that job.?

#2 Maximize your impact by joining forces with other teams throughout your organization

At LinkedIn, different teams are responsible for Learning and Hiring products and other teams manage nonprofit partnerships and charitable giving. While in the short term it might feel easier, it is much less impactful if each team launches isolated social impact interventions. Instead, an integrated approach where every department contributes their expertise is the best path forward. For example, in 2021 we launched a partnership with renowned nonprofit The Last Mile (TLM). One TLM program, launched in Putnamville Correctional Facility and expanded to San Quentin State Prison, helps train currently incarcerated students in audio engineering and video post-production. The TLM program takes an integrated approach combining live virtual instruction, software and resources donated by LinkedIn and SiriusXM, licensing and certifications from AVID and DaVinci, and partnerships with fair chance hiring companies to help folks find meaningful employment? post-release. Within LinkedIn, we also chose to support the TLM program in an integrated way. Our product and content teams helped to select the right content, our engineering team helped to deliver the video assets within the specific prison IT requirements. Our instructors helped to train and certify the program’s instructors. And for the graduates, our Premium team helped to grant free LinkedIn Premium access so that they could continue to learn and get key job seeking resources. The combined, integrated approach spanned departments and product lines ultimately drove more real impact. To date, 43 participants have watched 477 hours of content, earning 177 course certificates, and two graduates have been using LinkedIn Premium to find work.?

Of course to do all this, you need to first create company cultures that are prosocial by nature and make social impact a core value. I love this article by Meg Garlinghouse , VP of Social Impact at LinkedIn, that talks about looking? “Up River” to find out why people are “falling in” to inform your decision-making process when creating products that are fair and equitable.?

#3 Meet your users where they are, always.

This common product adage is often neglected when we think about social impact. In the early days of working on these initiatives, I took for granted that folks who are incarcerated have very limited internet access and very limited free time for learning as they are often simultaneously job searching and working multiple part-time jobs. To that end, I’m really proud of a recent product integration we’ve launched which links our new free course Job Seeking with a Criminal Record directly to our Fair Chance Employer filter within the job seeker experience.

We hear from previously incarcerated members that a challenge they face is finding employers are committed to considering applicants like them. LinkedIn’s Fair Chance Employer filter helps these folks find some of these committed employers. And this new integration helps us reach the people we are trying to help.

#4 Lean into your organization’s superpowers

After several failed partnerships in 2020, I was pretty discouraged about the impact that LinkedIn could have in the incarceration education space. Every state seemed to have its own complex laws around internet and social media permissions, and it felt like the most practical thing would be to temper our expectations. But the mistake I made was to think of our impact as confined only to the incarcerative or re-entry experiences.

In fact, LinkedIn’s broader “skills first” vision is to empower all job seekers, including justice-impacted folks, to more equitably find work through skills they can prove. I’ve had the privilege of working on alternative credentials like Professional Certificates (like these from Microsoft/LinkedIn/Github) for in-demand roles in engineering, project management, and IT. I’ve seen us make strides in Academic Credits to allow professionals to economically redeem learning activity for college credit. When I stepped back to think about LinkedIn’s global footprint (not just our influence on prisons and states), I realized how much great work was underway that would help formerly incarcerated job seekers to gain skills and confidence to transition into the workforce.??

Conclusion

I hope these learnings were useful to you and inspire you to also find opportunities at work to give back, especially opportunities that utilize your expertise, your company’s resources and footprint. All too often, we separate our social impact aspirations from our professional aspirations. I hope this article helps you broaden your thinking on how you can do well at work and do good at the same time. Thanks for reading!