Business/Technology Reporter
Brian Ysasaga took one step inside the building during Colorado Aerospace Day at the Capital in March 2022 and turned around.
“I’m not going to lie to you, I ran out. I walked in and everybody was in suits,” said the jeans-clad Ysasaga, who was studying to become a pilot at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “I’ve never owned a suit in my life. I didn’t feel comfortable.”
He’d already gone further educationally than anyone in his family in Texas. The first to graduate from high school. The first to go to college. He wanted to be a pilot and picked MSU because the school “helps with your first two lessons.” But as the airline industry ground to a halt and pilots were furloughed during COVID, his professor encouraged him to consider other careers since he could always get his pilot license. So, he started looking into aerospace.
Call it happenstance but on his way back to his car, he bumped into an unfamiliar face, Carol Carter, who said to him the event hadn’t started yet and asked where was he going? She listened and encouraged him to wander with her through the Capitol. It was life-changing for Ysasaga — and not just because he wound up meeting the person at Lockheed Martin who later would hire him. It’s because of Carter, who became a mentor and called herself his “Colorado mom,” he said.
“I probably wouldn’t have finished my degree,” said Ysasaga, whose older brother passed away unexpectedly a few months later causing Ysasaga to nearly drop out of school. “If it wasn’t for running into her, I probably wouldn’t have made it to where I am now.”
Carter calls it “the hidden curriculum” — the little things one learns or finds outside of the classroom that provide career support. Not all students, especially the first-generation in college, have access to a network of professionals and mentors, which is why Carter started GlobalMindED a decade ago in Denver. This type of access can make all the difference between landing that first career-building job versus being underemployed for years. Carter credits her older brothers for helping her find her path into a career of publishing, ending up as a vice president at academic publishers Prentice Hall and then Pearson before starting her own ventures.
“GlobalMindED is to the students we serve what my brothers were to me, and that is the hidden curriculum — the kinds of things that a lot of people from ZIP codes of privilege have built right into their neighborhoods with neighbors who work at IBM or can provide internship guidance or coaching, that kind of thing,” Carter said. “A lot of our students don’t have anyone who can provide that to them.”
Ysasaga, who graduated earlier this month, began working full-time at Lockheed Martin Monday. He’s also attending his third GlobalMindED Conference, which starts its 10th annual conference next week in Denver. He’ll be attending as a mentor.
“I do have people asking me to show them the ropes or ask me questions on LinkedIn,” said Ysasaga, who’s been mentoring a sophomore on a similar career path this year. “And I take it, like how Carol would.”
Underemployment impacts 47% of Colorado workers
Programs like GlobalMindED that try to narrow the equity gap that impacts Black and Hispanic students and those from low-income backgrounds are more likely than others to face the curse of underemployment, which is when college grads end up in jobs that require no college or high school degree.
It’s a situation that appears to be getting worse, according to a recent report by The Burning Glass Institute, a research firm that tracks work trends. By analyzing real-time labor market information like job postings and professional profiles, Burning Glass and the Strada Education Foundation found that 52% of graduates from a four-year degree program were underemployed a year after graduating. A decade later though, 45% were still considered underemployed. In Colorado, that figure was 47%.
Getting that first-college-level job after graduation is critical, said Carlo Salerno, Burning Glass’ managing director of education insights and a lead author of “Talent Disrupted: Underemployment, College Graduates, and the Way Forward, 2024.”
“It’s a big concerning number. People do not go to college to not get a college-level job afterwards,” Salerno said. “What it suggests is that we have a large-scale issue to be addressed because we spent all of these years focusing on access and getting people into college. And then the narrative shifted to completion — how do we get people through college? And now we’re realizing that even getting them through college is not enough. Now there’s this bigger challenge of when they do get to the workforce, they don’t always get to leverage the degrees they earned.”
Many factors for underemployment sound plausible. New grads with no professional experience, not even an internship. The student’s choice of institution, degree or location all impact job opportunities (“You can’t study marine biology and live in Des Moines,” Salerno said). Science, math and other STEM-related fields had a much higher rate of college-level employment than other majors. Baristas with English degrees may be a myth but underemployment was the majority outcome for those with degrees in the performing arts, humanities and cultural studies.
“If I end up as a barista and then a year later, I’m still out in the job market looking for that first career position, not only am I now competing with the people I went to school with who not only have the same degree as me but I’m also competing with the new crop of graduates with the same degree as me. And I’m also competing with other people who’ve been in the job market a couple years before me and who may have some work experience as well,” he said. “What happens with folks who are underemployed is they increasingly get squeezed.”
His advice? Get an internship and work experience while still in college. Major in subjects where jobs are plentiful, like math. And make good decisions.
“It’s about giving prospective students a better sense of the opportunity landscape in front of them,” he said. “The more they make good decisions and good fits, the better the chances are they will find majors that help lead them to better employment outcomes later.”
Building a local network
Carter, at GlobalMindED, essentially is sharing her network with those underemployed college graduates. And she’s got a vast network full of professionals from Microsoft, IBM, NASA and more.
Mentors, who can tap into GlobalMindED’s platform to schedule time to meet with students, are gracious with their time and include people like Tom Fuchs, a cloud architect at Microsoft.
He’s mentored a few students through GlobalMindED. Some haven’t been on a technology track and in those cases, he’s there to listen, answer questions and share a professional’s perspective. It’s a way he feels he can give back for the support he’s received in life, which includes moving to the U.S. from Poland when he was 15 and not knowing a word of English.
“I realized the importance of these small touch points that have been made in my life,” said Fuchs, who is currently mentoring Roger Businge, a recent cybersecurity grad. “Oftentimes there are people who are kind of shy and don’t want to speak up and you really want to get them to believe in themselves. I relate to that because my culture was very much kind of like ‘don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.’”
Businge graduated June 1 with a bachelor’s degree in IT and cybersecurity from Colorado State University Global, the virtual program of the CSU system. He’s still looking for a job. Ideally, he’d like to get one as a systems security specialist. He’d learned about GlobalMindED during school and felt he really needed all the opportunities he could get.
In a past life in Uganda, he worked as an IT consultant providing training at the local internet cafe and doing repairs and installations. But his passion was cybersecurity and after moving to Denver, he enrolled at CSU. But it was a challenge to take on an unpaid internship to gain experience. With three young kids at home, he started renting his car out on Turo, which helps pay the bills. He got the idea to car share after attending a GlobalMindED seminar on how to get started in real estate. While he’s working on additional security certification, he’s ready to work a college level job in cybersecurity and appreciates the support Fuchs has provided.
“When you’ve just come here as an immigrant, sometimes people, the first people I talked to, for example, they would always limit you to those casual jobs like working in a warehouse. They would feel like as an immigrant, you can’t easily go into corporate places,” he said. “But at GlobalMindED, I’ve met a number of people who have moved up the ladder in the corporate world who started just like me. I think GlobalMindED has helped me a lot to believe in myself and believe I can reach the heights.”
Some resources:
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Other working bits
➔ Denver inflation slowed to 2.6% in May. That’s lower than the U.S. rate of 3.3% in May. Both rates are compared to 12 months prior. The Denver region has been experiencing lower consumer price increases than the rest of the nation since March. Prices were still up slightly though and the biggest culprit was energy, which was up 1.9% due to the increase in the price of electricity, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. >> Report
➔ Big wins for Colorado businesses, says chamber. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce is patting itself on the back for taking down eight “job killing bills” debated during the recent legislative session. In its annual report, the chamber said 76% of bills it supported passed while 82% it opposed were killed. What did it take? Reaching out to legislators more than 4,300 times, according to the chamber. >> View Colorado Chamber’s 2024 Annual Report
➔ Dinner, theater and a babysitter? Just Call Emmy. Denver babysitter matching service Call Emmy has teamed up with Nightout, an entertainment ticketing company, to help busy parents plan an evening by booking tickets and a babysitter in one place. Nightout connects directly to Call Emmy’s digital platform so parents can add vetted sitters right after their ticket purchase. Denver is the first market, said Call Emmy founder Arezou Zarafshan, who took over the tech developed by Nanno to vet babysitters. Call Emmy has sitters and other folks offering household help in 50 states. >> Details
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