Reducing Friction to Scale Real-World Work Experiences

Lynn Liao and Taryn Campbell from Cambiar Quest joined me to talk about their approach to scaling real-world work experiences for secondary students through micro-internships. This is an important topic because while people like me have been arguing for more real-world learning opportunities for middle and high school students, how to source those opportunities and make sure they are meaningful such that it’s not a burden on businesses and other organizations is a real challenge.

Lynn and Taryn discussed how Cambiar Quest handles this in their partnerships with schools and local businesses to create team-based, class projects that help students develop essential “durable skills” like communication, critical thinking, and collaboration. They shared insights on how the program reduces burden on partnering businesses so that it’s widely accessible, the scaffolding provided for both students and educators, and the strong positive outcomes they’ve seen so far. It’s early in their learning journey as you’ll hear. Highly recommend.

Michael Horn

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that, today, I’m delighted. We have two guests who’ve been at the front lines, I think it’s safe to say, of really thinking what that looks like in the current era, current age that we are entering as a society. We have Lynn Liao, she’s the managing director at Cambiar Quest. And Taryn Campbell, the director at Cambiar Quest. And so first I’ll just say Lynn, Taryn, welcome.

I’m delighted to have you both here.

Lynn Liao

We’re thrilled to talk to you. Our mission is so aligned with what you just described.

Michael Horn

Well, it’s going to be a fun conversation because you all, the three of us, had a chance to talk maybe a month or so ago and frankly, I had no idea the breadth of the work that you all were doing. And I think it really answers a key question that I think is so important at this moment in time. But we’ll get to that in a moment. Maybe let’s just set the foundation for folks. And Lynn, I’ll start with you. Just what is Cambiar? What is Cambiar Quest, sort of set the stage for our audience so that they know the organization in which you work and the work you’ve been up to.

Essential Durable Skills for Success

Lynn Liao

Sure. So Cambiar Education is a venture studio that is seeking to change the marketplace for education so that the products and services that truly make the biggest difference for students and educators and parents really succeed. And we know that that is not always the case in how the marketplace works right now. Our goal, our, our big vision is to have a life changing impact for more than a million students. And we do that both by incubating entrepreneurs who are creating these new ideas and supporting their development and growth. And we also direct run programs. So Quest is an example of a direct run Cambiar program. Quest is solely focused on career exploration and development for students, very much in line with what you described your mission is.

So we are really, we have multiple programs where we help students really build the durable skills necessary for career exploration and for them to really be the ones navigating their way to the future that they are seeking. And then we can dive more into the micro internship, which I think is the program we’re focusing on today.

Michael Horn

Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely want to do that. And before, before maybe we jump in that you mentioned durable skills. As we discussed when we had this offline conversation about a month ago, everyone has a definition for durable skills. Maybe ground us in how you all think about durable skills and how they port from one context to another or maybe which don’t and have to be specifically engineered.

Lynn Liao

Sure. I’ll toss it to Taryn just so we make it a three way conversation.

Michael Horn

Perfect. Go ahead, Taryn.

Taryn Campbell

Sure. I think we think about durable skills like, what are the key things that kids need to be able to do to navigate their life? They need to be able to communicate with people that they don’t know. What does it mean to work in a team and to work alongside others? How do you think critically about the decisions that you’re making and understand how to break problems down into smaller pieces? What does it mean to take initiative? Right. And so I think there’s a million different definitions and words for some of these core key concepts. Whether people call them durable skills, 21st-century skills, sometimes it’s pushed into social and emotional learning. Right. There’s a million definitions out there, but we’re really talking about the foundation that really all kids and all adults need to be successful both in school and the workplace.

Michael Horn

And what strikes me about that and Lynn, this may be the perfect place then to start talking about the micro internships is one of the things that I’ve come to is for, you know, kids to really understand how to communicate real world context is incredibly important. Being in real world situations, but also frankly, like to develop agency and things of that nature. They need to know what’s even possible in the outside world. And most of us as high schoolers, middle schoolers, just don’t. So maybe that’s the.

Lynn Liao

Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. So our micro internship is a team based project where students work with a real employer on a current business challenge they’re facing. And what’s different about it is it’s actually embedded in class time. So when you think typically about an internship, a student goes off site. Maybe they’re learning from osmosis, like many of the things you’re talking about. But because they’re very brand new to the world of work, there’s really limited time for a manager to truly support someone at that skill level. So students are picking up things, but they’re not really digging into the skills that Taryn was talking about. So we’ve created a really scaffolded experience where we’re hyper focused on Students building those critical skills.

So critical thinking, communication, collaboration. And because it’s in that work context where they’re directly talking to an employer, it raises the stakes in such a way that it actually really juices the learning. I was stepping back to reflect because we have 30 hours for our micro internship. That’s typically what we spend in an average school year. For a high schooler, it’s about a thousand plus hours. I bet you if you ask an average high schooler, they do not remember anything about most of those hours. And our goal is completely the opposite. We want every one of our 30 hours to be high impact, sticky, memorable.

Learning Through Challenges and Growth

Lynn Liao

And that’s oftentimes where the deepest learning comes from. It’s like context rich, it’s unique, it’s something they, they’re slightly uncomfortable, but we also work super hard to support them to get through that so that on the other side, they’re reflecting exactly what you had mentioned, Michael. Like, they’re able to say, not just like, oh, I worked on some project. Instead they’re able to say, I supported a client to figure out how they’re going to reach more customers for this new product. And I was able to actually take in this really tough client feedback and do a 180 and come up with a new presentation by the end. And I was really proud of myself for being able to do that. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re really seeking, that students can talk about their own competencies, whether that’s to a future employer on a college app or even frankly, just to say it to themselves. Right.

To feel like they have that sense of personal power and sense of agency as a working, working professional.

Michael Horn

Can you talk a little bit about maybe a couple case studies? Right. Just to give our listeners a sense of what kinds of businesses are they working with. It was a pretty diverse group, as I recall. So maybe just a couple examples. And Taryn, maybe I’ll kick it to you for this, to give a few examples, but then also maybe you know that scaffolding that Lynn talked about, like go deep into one of them where like day one, how are you making sure that they’re able to competently do this so that they’re actually getting something out of it.

Taryn Campbell

Sure. So the first thing I’ll say is all of our content is industry agnostic. Right. So we have built it to make sure that there are no technical skills that students are required to have to be able to engage. And so we have worked with really small mom and pop shops like a local ice cream shop that is around the corner where they were trying to figure out, how do I get more of the foot traffic passing by my store to actually come in and buy ice cream, to really large advanced manufacturing firms… who’s trying to figure out, you know what, we have a talent pipeline challenge that we’re trying to solve. How do we get more young people interested in advanced manufacturing? So what does that look like? What insights can students help us gather and synthesize? And so those are two totally different ends of the spectrum, right? One highly technical and industry related, one really community based. And we see engagement from students regardless of the type of project that they’re engaging in. And what we do at Cambiar is we help right size.

What’s the right grain size for a business challenge? We write up a project brief alongside those employers and then they come in at three specific points in the project. So they come in at the beginning to launch the project, live with students. Students get to ask questions based on their project brief and say, okay, who are these people? What are they asking me to do? What do I need to be clarified? Then they work with their teacher. Every lesson is scaffolded. So there is very much a, like, how do I introduce myself to an adult I’ve never met? What does it look like to write a great question to an employer that’s coming in and giving me a business question? They practice it with each other, then they practice it with others to get feedback, and then they do it live. I think another sort of hallmark when we talk about scaffolding skills here is we have a hallmark of the program is that they all have to do, every student has to go and do live interviews with a client or a stakeholder related to their project challenge. So that means they are interviewing adults, students, community members that they may or may not know.

And that is terrifying for students, right? They’re like, wait, what? I can’t text them. Wait, I have to do it in person, live? And so we really break it down, right. What’s a great interview? What does a great question look like? How do we write some of those questions together? How do I come up with my own question? They practice with each other. They practice with mentors and others who push into the classroom. And then they go out and do it live and get feedback. And they’re doing this collectively in teams. And so that’s what we mean when we say we really break it down. We don’t just say, go forth and do an interview and come back to us.

We help them every single step of the way so that the next time they have to ask somebody a follow up question or introduce themselves to an adult, they’re like, oh yeah, I’ve done that before. I know how this works. Right. Lynn, curious if you have anything to add.

Lynn Liao

I think the one other thing I would add, I know Michael, we had talked about the importance of scalability. This is sort of a micro aspect of that. But we really think a lot about what is the skill that we want students to build. And as Taryn was breaking down, it’s around. It’s essentially a form of active listening. It’s maybe not the most exciting thing, but I think most on the surface. But if you think about what it takes to be successful in life, being able to access somebody else’s understanding and knowledge is absolutely critical. And so being able to think on your feet, really take in what are they saying to me or not.

That’s really core. Spending time finding people to schedule interviews, like scheduling and coordination is a necessity, but it’s not the core thing. So in our modeling, part of the right sizing is finding a business challenge that has stakeholders that students can interview that are widely accessible. So that’s one of our screens when we think about it, because sometimes we’ll have a potential client that has kind of a niche product like let’s say it’s a medical service. And it only applies to people who have this certain condition, you couldn’t interview anybody versus we’ll go to somebody like our regional hospital. They were asking anybody under 18 what their most pressing health needs were. Right. So like that, that’s a way that we address it at the front end so students can spend their time on the thing that’s actually the highest value add to them versus something that could end up being a blocker or hurdle for execution.

Michael Horn

I think that’s super interesting. It gets into something else that I was thinking as you guys were talking about, which is like lessons learned as you guys have implemented this. And Taryn, maybe I’ll go to you first on this. But I’m also thinking, not just the lessons you’ve learned, but also how you help a teacher in a school put this into action. Because I think something we’ve talked about in the past is, you know, teachers are really good at their instructional, you know, their content area. I teach ninth grade, you know, math, whatever it might be. Doesn’t mean that I know how to help scaffold a student through these sets of conversations or set them up to build social capital in the ways that you’re all describing.

So I’m curious, like, lessons you’ve learned both to really help this go smoothly and be implemented well and maybe to get the spread up, as Lynn was just talking about, in terms of scalability.

Taryn Campbell

Yeah, I think we’ve learned a lot with each different sort of cycle that we run. We take a look back at our content curriculum and training and say, okay, what worked and what didn’t? I think we have created really detailed lesson plans where we have set the content and then you sub in the different client challenge or business problem that students are working on. And we’ve gotten it down to scripts, if that is what teachers need, as well as accompanying slides. So really, they are only focused on understanding who is the client and how do I serve as a coach. Actually, right to your point, it is a shift from direct content teaching to how do I support students to wrestle through this on their own? Because there is no right answer. And so we’ve created a hybrid training for all of our facilitators that has a pretty condensed, asynchronous component that walks them step by step through all of the materials, all of the coaching stances and coaching moves. It’s essentially a playbook for how to facilitate. And then we supplement that with live facilitation training.

So really, walking each facilitator through, we’re going to go through the exact same activities that your students go through, and you’re going to wrestle with it, and we’re going to do it with past student work products and past client challenges so that they can try it on because it is new for them. And we’ve actually seen pretty awesome results with facilitators who are brand new to teaching, go through the training. And when we look at the scores coming out of their student surveys, we see that students are still gaining at the same rate that other students are. And so that’s exciting to us because it tells us that there is something in our content that has solved for some of the variation in facilitator experience. We’re still working and improving and tooling, tooling up on that front, but it’s really, really promising early signs.

Michael Horn

Well, I want to get to impact in a moment, but maybe a dumb question, which is how many cycles have you gone through? How many students or teachers, businesses have you been working with? Give us a sense of the scope so far.

Lynn Liao

Yeah, for, let’s see, last spring. Oh, Taryn, you might have to help me with this one for I think it was about a couple hundred, about 200. And then we’re on track this school year for about a thousand and next school year we’re, our trajectory is about 3,000.

So essentially.

Michael Horn

Yeah, yeah.

Lynn Liao

So we kind of like our approach was to go really slow and close with the first spring set. And then we did a major overhaul for the summer, got really strong results and then we felt really ready now to be growing it.

Michael Horn

Well, so you just mentioned results. So maybe talk about impact that you’re starting to see from the program as you’ve gone.

Impactful Program with High Approval

Lynn Liao

Yeah, absolutely. So are immediately like what Taryn mentioned that we do a post program survey right away with kids and have consistently got really strong feedback from them. So with over 90% recommending to a friend, 96% saying that it’s more engaging than the typical coursework. And really importantly, given our focus on durable skills, every single student, 100% of students say they’ve grown in at least one durable skill. But even better, 87% say they’ve grown on three or more. Because we’re really trying to get them to grow in all of these. So that’s really important. I think what’s intriguing as we’ve had and really kind of meaningful to us is that not just right at the close of the program, now that we’ve had a little distance, we’ve stayed in touch with our partners. Another good sign of our impact is all of our partners, our implementation partners, meaning schools after school programs, intermediaries have all continued and most of them have increased their enrollment.

So with that we’ve been able to. They’ve been able to keep track of some of their students, like if their students were sophomores or juniors, you know, versus seniors who had graduated. And they’ve shared that students have said, have retained the kind of what I described earlier that they were. It was so great to hear that there were students who were juniors who did this program in the spring who were writing on their college applications about the experience. Like exactly what we had mentioned, like these. This is what the challenge that I faced going through it. This is what I learned about myself. This is what it means about my skills.

So really good to hear that there’s been retention essentially of the core learnings and students are able to talk about the impact.

Michael Horn

Super interesting. Oh yeah, go ahead, Taryn.

Taryn Campbell

Yeah, the other thing I’ll add is we also have client partners who have actually gone forward with student suggestions to implement them. Right. So some of their folks are actually continuing to work with that school and some of those student groups to implement their ideas on how to expose more students in high school to advanced manufacturing to get them excited about it so students get to see the full arc. I was asked about this challenge. I actually came up with a solution that my client enjoyed and now we’re getting to put it into an action which is really, really cool.

Michael Horn

Yeah, that’s, have you seen any students get internships then as a result with some of these clients and so forth is like. Is sort of their stage two in some cases.

Taryn Campbell

I think that’s the goal, right, is maybe not for every single one. We go in saying that we don’t. That is not part of the expectation. But I will say in all of the ones where I have at least pushed in, there have been students who have followed up with employers say, like, I am interested in helping you run your social media strategy. I am interested in helping you figure out how to connect with more community impact and X, Y and Z strategy.

And often the businesses that we work with are open to those conversations. Right. For several of those that we have that are seniors, where that would have been a possibility. The seniors were like, I wish I had done this earlier because I’m going off to college now and I can’t spend my summer doing this. But that is definitely on our roadmap.

Lynn Liao

Michael, I just wanted to break in. Can I share just a couple student quotes? Because I think this captures what you mentioned around identity and a sense of agency. So this came from. Yeah, two different students. I feel more prepared for college and careers after high school because this felt like a real job where I was held to certain standards like you would for a job. Another student said, I feel a lot more confident because I now feel that I belong in these big spaces. So I think that speaks to what you mentioned at the beginning, which is there’s such a divide between the world of school and just a lack of transparency. It’s just like

A world that’s behind a wall for many students. And this micro internship is meant to give them a boost so they can walk forward into the opportunities you’re talking about. So a lot of their feedback is indicating that they’re having a mindset shift to be much more open and feeling more ready to dive into those next opportunities.

Michael Horn

No, it’s really cool because you’re, the fact that students would feel more comfortable right. In those settings talking to those people, making those connections and then the employers or the clients. Right. If you will on the other side, excited to continue to engage, do this again, implement an idea, whatever it is, in some ways, that’s the end customer. Right. Like, so you’re getting both sides of it. I want to go back to the clients in a moment, but the other question that’s occurred to me as we’ve been talking is how you integrate this in a school. Like, you know, there’s not a ready block in many cases.

There’s blocks for college preparation, there’s blocks for all sorts of things. One of the big arguments that I’ve been making is that middle and high schools need to become much more permeable with the outside world and have a lot more opportunities for real work experience. Because my observation, frankly, is students with means are going to get access to that in a world of AI where we’re requiring several years of experience before that first job. And if you don’t have that, I’m not sure where you get it unless your school does it. But I’m curious, like, where do you, you know, where are the modular interfaces where you find time for that?

Lynn Liao

Yeah, totally agree with what you’re saying. And that’s actually why we fought really hard in designing this is, we wrestled through what to do, because when we think about a scalable solution, I think many in this, like ed take age, think, like, put it online, just package it, and like, roll it out everywhere. And when I think about that, I think the students who have access to other opportunities are going to be the ones who take that online opportunity. So by placing it into a school, it then became incumbent on us to figure out where does it go in school. So we’ve really designed it to be flexible and easy to implement. So it’s 30 hours. It can be implemented however the school thinks it makes sense. So we work with them to kind of think through that.

A typical might be twice a week over, you know, 10 to 12 weeks, just depending on what their blocks are. Some of them have extended them. Some of them do it really, like, in a tight burst. We’re just learning right now, I’d say about, like, what really works best in all varieties of classes. So we’ve definitely been working with different CTE pathways. So it can fit in as an introduction or as a capstone project for some CT courses. It can go into other kind of core classes like economics, financial literacy. We’ve done an English class, we’ve done a Spanish class.

I think Taryn, you maybe rattle off a few others. But, like, we’re pretty open and it’s really just wherever the teacher feels like they can dive in and have like a meaty project based learning experience for students and where the school is seeking a career, a supported career connected learning opportunity.

Michael Horn

Let me ask this question which is let’s, let’s flip to the client side now and maybe, Taryn, I’ll start with you on this and Lynn, jump in. It strikes me that it’s great to say schools need to be doing more real world work. Career connected learning for all. Like all the slogans that I can imagine that I’ve probably written at some points as well. But you all have made the observation several times like, hey, a manager is really busy, they’re not going to be able to give this kind of feedback. Right. And we know that a lot of managers like, I mean take my town offices.

Right. I’m sure there’s dozens of problems that they would love to solve, but they’re like, yeah, I’m not having a 17 year old come in here because I gotta execute against this thing tomorrow. Right. As opposed to train up someone with how to even present themselves at a workplace, an interview on our behalf, et cetera, et cetera. So like talk a little bit about how you’ve reduced that friction. I mean if I’m doing the math right and you have say even with the 200 students that you ran through the program at first, that’s probably like 40 or something different projects that you’ve got going or something like that. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but. So I love you to talk through how you’re enabling so many different clients to work with these projects.

Taryn Campbell

Sure. So we actually have an entire class of students attached to one client and one project.

Michael Horn

Okay, gotcha.

Scalable Project-Based Learning Process

Taryn Campbell

One, it allows the teacher who might be new to this project based learning to this coaching stance. Focus on really understanding one core client challenge and then working with the whole class to scaffold and understand. How do we write these questions? How do we ask our client X, Y and Z? Right. And it allows for the groups to compare against each other how things are going. Every group, depending on who they interview, ends up in a totally different place, which is also very cool. There’s a value add for our clients at the end when they don’t have to sit through the same presentation over and over and over again. They actually get five, six, seven ideas that are brought back to them based on what student teams come up with. And I think one of the ways we make it scalable for local businesses is we say that the all in-total time is about six hours.

That’s inclusive of prep time. Right. So we get on the call, we all brainstorm sort of what are some business challenges? How do we right size up for high school students? We write the client brief for folks. We are working to figure out how to leverage AI to help us do that in the future. But we write the client brief for folks and the client comes in three times. They come at the beginning to launch it live with students. They come in at that interim point that Lynn had talked about to give feedback. And let me tell you, they give real feedback.

Collaborative Student Projects Simplified

Taryn Campbell

Sometimes it puts students on their heels a little bit and then they come in at the end to get the final presentations and to hear what students have ultimately come up with. And so that’s really manageable and really reasonable for folks. We try to work with organizations and companies who have more than one individual. So even those mom and pop shops, if there’s like at least two or three employees that are employed there, so that if there are scheduling hiccups, which we know are all too common in schools these days, there’s always somebody to fill in and come in and do the live portion because we think that matters. And so six hours, people like, oh yeah, I have six hours across two months. I can do that on three different dates. And we’re not asking them to manage the students. We’re not asking them to walk students through the project.

We’re asking them for their viewpoint and their feedback, which they don’t actually have to prep for. Anytime the client has come in, we’ve created playbooks and guides to say, hey, here’s what you’re walking into, here’s what students are doing in their class, here’s what’s expected of you, and here’s a template for how you might structure a conversation with the student so everything feels like it’s plug and play and designed to be really easy for clients to come in.

Lynn Liao

One additional thing on the value prop for the businesses. Oftentimes this right size business challenge is one where the business is in particular seeking youth perspective or perspective of people our students have easy access to. So like the. We’re not purely saying to the business, do this because it’s a nice thing to do for your community. We are thinking do this because it’s a nice thing to do for students in your area, but also because it’s great for your business. You’re getting fresh perspective, you’re getting access to early talent. So some of the organizations we work with are seeking a talent pipeline and want more exposure to students. So like there is a real win for them that’s pretty concrete that we can pitch and make more explicit to businesses too.

Michael Horn

Very cool. Let’s wrap up with this question that’s on my mind which is look, if schools want to learn more, they want to put this into place, right? Like how should they get in touch with y’all? What’s, what’s the process from their end to get this up and running? Because I think that’s the ultimate goal, right. We want a lot more schools, students, local employers engaging in these projects together. So what’s the first step for schools that are interested after hearing this?

Lynn Liao

I think the easiest thing is they contact one of the two of us. We have a smallish team right now, so we’re heavily based in Los Angeles initially, but we’re also in several other states right now. So in Tennessee, Texas, we’re in St. Louis, Missouri, New Orleans. So like just depending on the depth, there’s different places we can go. So they should just like reach out to us. We’re open and like our whole goal is expansion. So if you can find the right size and scale, we’re happy to dive in.

Michael Horn

Perfect. So jump on, Cambiar Education contact y’ all and then go from there. Basically. Terrific. Lynn Taryn, any final thoughts that you all want to make sure we hit as, as we wrap up and then we’ll, we’ll conclude from there. But this is, I, I’m fascinated by a lot of facets of this, so I could keep going, but I want to make sure you guys have the last, last word, if you will.

Lynn Liao

I think the thing I want to say is like we don’t see this as a replacement to a deeper internship or a true job where a student is really diving into something that is aligned to their personal interests and passion area. Because even the way we’ve constructed it, because it’s a project for the entire class, some students are going to be more interested than others. But I do think this experience fills a big gap in kind of the current career connected learning, work based learning offerings that are easy for schools to do because essentially most of those are easy for schools to do because they’re passive. It’s like a career panel or job shadowing. Students just sort of have big eyes and are listening but they’re not doing. So I really do think we’ve worked hard to make this something that is super high leverage. Again, like every hour of the 30 hours makes a difference for students and the hurdles for both employers and educators. We worked so hard to slim down, so it should be very low friction.

So like, maybe this is just encouragement to any of the listeners who are interested in implementing to come talk to us. And like I said, every partner who’s worked with us has wanted to continue working with us and to expand. So that’s probably a good sign that it is meeting that bar.

Taryn Campbell

I think the thing that I would hope to leave folks with is the in person still matters. And I think there’s especially for some of these core skills around communication. You can practice all day with an AI chatbot and that’s great, but unless you actually go out and put it into play with a real person in front of you, it’s all for nothing. Right? And so how do we get kids more of those opportunities to like to do the hard thing? They all drag their feet. They’re like, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this. And then the confidence that you see on the other side where they walk taller and they actually want to keep going to do more interviews and more interviews and you have to stop them. I think that’s that to me is the exciting energy that you see when you do programs like this. And so just really excited to talk to you, Michael, and share the work that we’re doing.

And hopefully this inspires more people to get into the career connected learning space.

Michael Horn

Well, thank you both for the work that you’re doing and frankly the doing of it for students I think is really what’s so exciting about this. And all these skills you mentioned, not the least of which active listening you said, gee, that can be sort of a throwaway. It’s not right. Like we need more individuals in society being able to do that and you all are facilitating that. So huge thanks, Lynn Taryn. Check it all out at Cambier Quest and thank you so much. We’ll see you next time on the Future of Education.

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