Rick Laferriere, Lead Director of Workforce Initiatives at CVS Health, discusses his team's 25-year commitment to building what he calls "non-traditional talent pipelines" by partnering with workforce systems, educators, and community organizations to reach individuals who face barriers to employment. Drawing from his own journey starting as a CVScashier in high school and spending over 30 years with the company, Laferriere shares the philosophy behind creating relationships rather than transactions with community partners. He explores the complexities of operating across all 50 states where workforce systems, funding priorities, and political landscapes differ dramatically, emphasizing why customization matters more than one-size-fits-all approaches. The conversation delves into practical strategies for employers looking to engage in workforce development, including the importance of sharing curriculum and training rather than keeping it proprietary, offering work-based learning experiences before hiring, and dedicating resources to build genuine partnerships. Laferriere also addresses the challenge of measuring success in work that carries both quantitative and qualitative value, explaining why his team takes pride in the fact that only 30% of program participants come to work for CVS while the other 70% strengthen the broader community workforce. He calls on employers to get curious, join workforce boards, and find champions within their organizations who can balance passion for community impact with demonstrating business value.

Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to the Work Forces Podcast. I'm Julian Alssid

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine, and we speak with innovators who are shaping the future of work and learning.

Julian Alssid: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin LeMoine: This podcast is an outgrowth of our Work Forces consulting practice through weekly discussions, we seek to share the trends and themes we see in our work and amplify impactful efforts happening in higher education industry and workforce development all across the country. We are grateful to Lumina Foundation for its past support during the initial development and launch of this podcast, and invite future sponsors of this effort, please check out our workforce's podcast website to learn more. And so with that, let's dive in.

Julian Alssid: Welcome back. For a long time, the education and workforce system was tasked with preparing people for jobs, with employers often playing a more passive role. But that dynamic has shifted, with employers increasingly leading the way on workforce development.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It's true, Julian employers have stepped into that gap, not just to solve their own talent gaps through internal training and upskilling initiatives, but also through broader partnership initiatives designed to expand the overall talent pipeline, to reach and educate those who may otherwise not know about those career opportunities, or those who previously faced barriers to employment or educational attainment?

Julian Alssid: Yes, absolutely Kaitlin. And as more companies are seeking to innovate in this space, it's helpful to look at models that are established and continuing to respond to the evolving needs of their industries and the labor market. Our guest today is Rick LaFerriere, Lead Director of Workforce Initiatives at CVS Health. Rick leads CVS award winning programs that are designed to create opportunities for people facing barriers to employment, partnering with education, community organizations and government agencies to build bridges to meaningful careers. Rick serves as the advisor to CVS Health Abilities in Abundance programming, and has oversight of CVS, highly regarded Workforce Innovation and Talent Center concept. He also contributes his time and expertise in the workforce space to several advisory and workforce boards locally and nationally. Rick, welcome to Work Forces.

Rick Laferriere: Thanks, Julian, Kaitlin, nice to see you both and glad to join you today here. This is great.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Yes, thanks so much for being with us today, Rick. It's great to see you as well, and looking forward to jumping into this conversation today. So as we get started, could you please tell us a bit more about your background, your trajectory, and what led you to your current role at CVS Health?

Rick Laferriere: I've been with CVS Health for over 30 years. I actually started in a local CVS Pharmacy store when I was in high school as a cashier. And so my career here started at entry level in our stores, doing customer service. And at the time for me it was, it was a job to make money, to save money to go to college. And interestingly enough, it turned out to be a lot more than that. I ended up staying with CVS throughout my time at college. I went to school at Boston College and ended up working at CVS all throughout my college career, and when I graduated from college, realizing I had five years with CVS and an opportunity to continue in the management program, I jumped at it. It was an easy transition for me from college into the workforce and to the full time workforce. And so I ended up working on our retail side of the business for about eight or nine years as a store manager in the management program, being at ground level, really working with customers and patients in our stores. And then one day, at the end of 2007 I got a tap on my shoulder asking me if I wanted to run our brand new Regional Learning Center in Boston, which was this new concept of having a training facility, co located inside of a community partner, and in this case, it's Jewish Vocational Services in Boston, where we could work together with JVS and other community organizations and government agencies and the educational community to provide individuals from the communities we serve with the opportunity to engage in workforce and education. And at the time, I'll be honest, I didn't know much about it. I didn't know much about this team. I didn't know much about the workforce or the education space. I had had all my time at retail, but it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. So not knowing a lot about it, I said, sure, let's go for it. Let's do this. And so at the beginning of 2008 I joined the Workforce Initiatives team. Still here today, 17 plus years later, and it's pretty amazing to me to think about this journey, because I never expected to be here. I never expected that this, this was going to be my career. I never expected that I would be so invested in workforce and education and supporting people with barriers to employment. But I quickly realized after I joined the team that this was this was my calling. This is where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in this space. I had the passion, the creativity, the interest of doing it. So hopefully, my career has grown since I've been with the team. This is my fourth different position on the team. I'm now co leading the team, along with two of my colleagues. We have a team of about 40 across the country. And so when I think about the work that our team does, and I think about my own pathway here, they're very similar. We want people to engage in careers with us, because you never know where you'll end up. And I did not know that I would end up here, but I certainly am glad I did.

Julian Alssid: You're the embodiment of walking the walk, I guess, or talking the talk, or whatever that term is, even though it's really, really cool. So today, then Rick, your current role, you know, what are the main workforce challenges that you're looking to solve in this role? And some of the key initiatives?

Rick Laferriere: Our workforce initiative team has actually been around for 25 years, and at the core of what our team does, it's building what we call non traditional talent pipelines. Think of a traditional talent pipeline is what your talent acquisition team is doing the standard sort of recruiting approach. Our team takes a non-traditional approach, which is working with the workforce system and with education, looking at individuals who tend to be overlooked, who tend to face barriers to employment, and working with the community, working with government to build programming that helps folks attain the skills they need to come to work for us. And folks know CVS Health, mainly because of CVS Pharmacy, which are our retail stores. And of course, we've got, you know, we've got thousands of stores across the country. Retail tends to be a very high volume, high turnover type of industry. And so, you know, part of the strategy for our team and our company is, how do we find people who we've never engaged with, and have not been in the workforce, or have never considered retail for a variety of reasons, and get them interested in coming to retail. And so for us, you know, there's a bit of an existential need for talent. You know, we're constantly looking for folks for our stores, for the front part of our stores, for the pharmacy part of our stores. And you know when, when you've been doing this for as long as we've been doing it, you discover that the community has, in some way, shape or form, engaged with us at some time, but they may not know enough about our careers and our opportunities. And so there's, there's a portion of that, which is just engaging the community about what it's like to work here. But at the same time, the other part of this is being a solution to filling skills gaps and to providing people with opportunity to enter the workforce. And so for us, we are constantly hiring. We're constantly growing. You know, healthcare, even retail pharmacy is still growing. So we always need talent. And if you, if you're doing it the same way with your talent acquisition folks, or you're doing it, you know in a traditional way that others are doing it, you're gonna you're gonna run out of you're gonna run out of talent to find at some point. And so our team's job is to find new talent and find folks who have not been engaged or don't feel like they fit into the workforce or have a barrier, and so that our team is is in the community, doing that, digging deep to find folks who want to come and work for us, opening the doors to opportunity, showing them what it's like to work at CVS, and then putting someone like me in front of them, saying, I started at entry level in this company, and now Here I am. I never thought I'd be here, but here I am in a leadership role, you know, 30 plus years later, and so we really try to frame it up to the community that we want to work with them. We want to provide you with skills and training and opportunity to come and work for us and grow and eventually thrive.

Kaitlin LeMoine: It strikes me as you painted the picture of how you have that conversation with an individual around like here are the opportunities available through CVS that there really is this, this customized approach to working with individual learners, but even I would imagine the community organizations themselves. I'm curious, building on that, what are some of the challenges and opportunities that you've come across as you address workforce needs, recognizing that I would imagine each area is different, and that you work across many states and regions.

Rick Laferriere: Yeah, each area, region, state, is completely different, and that is the biggest challenge our team faces. Which is finding out how we best fit into workforce. You think about how workforce is set up broadly, you know, in the flow of federal or state dollars into workforce, programming and education, every state has a different priority. Every state is focused on different industries, has different populations, has different political goals as well, and all of those pieces factor into what workforce looks like. And so as a company that has a presence in all 50 states, we need to figure out how we best fit into those landscapes in each of the 50 states. What we do here in Massachusetts, which is home for me in terms of workforce, is entirely different than what it looks like in Texas, than in Florida, than in some western states. But the Northeast tends to be a bit more similar in terms of workforce and how states support workforce and the industries here. But if you're not familiar with sort of what that looks like as an employer. You're going to struggle to find your place in that workforce system. And if you come at it with a one size fits all approach, or you come at it with, you know, say, a team or an individual as an employer that is walking in with with no knowledge and no understanding of how workforce and education works in a particular region or state, you're not going to succeed. You're going to need folks who can dig deeper and understand the landscape and understand how all of that works, and also express what you're looking for as an employer. So you know, for us, it's it's challenging to understand all of those different spaces, but our team was built and designed to do just that, to understand how workforce operates. And of course, we have to do that as a big national corporation. If you're a more regional or local employer, you're able to dig in deeper where you are. And so, you know, there's certainly a little less complication for the smaller employer dealing in a smaller area, but as a big national employer, you've got to figure out everybody's systems. And so we've deployed a team that does just that, that learns and understands what what each workforce system is doing, how they're funded, how they're funding vendors or providers, what the adult ed landscape looks like, what the community college landscape looks like, the education, all of those pieces are important factors into what we do to build programming that likely is very customized, not just to us as an employer, but customized to the population, the funding, or the community partner or the provider that's doing it and really building something that works locally. Because what we found is that if we build a book and we just hand that book out to everybody and we go, here's the book, it's not going to work. It isn't going to work for a certain population. It's not going to work for a certain region, all of those pieces. So for us, customization is critical and key, and thankfully, CVS has invested in a team like ours to figure that out. And so I think that, you know, we're really well positioned as a team to do that, because we get local, because we understand, you know what, what the priorities are in each state with the federal government as well, and that helps us do our jobs even better.

Julian Alssid: Well, and I imagine that understanding what those priorities are within the state and in your industry even more broadly, also requires some gazing into the crystal ball, or at least making some bets about the future of the healthcare industry and and how employers can play a role in addressing anticipated needs. Can you speak to that a little bit? I mean, how do you do that? Are you doing that? And what are you seeing in your crystal ball?

Rick Laferriere: That's the really interesting part of our jobs. Our team has to be equally focused, both internally and externally. Internally in that we need to work with our internal leaders to understand what their needs are for talent and what is coming down the road. We're a healthcare company, so obviously, things are changing almost daily in the healthcare space, in terms of healthcare delivery, in terms of the types of care or the types of services we can provide the community, things such as vaccinations or primary care that are that are coming a little bit closer to outlets like ours. That's a whole new frontier for us as a company, we've traditionally been in the healthcare space, had pharmacists and pharmacy technicians and, to some degree, nurses, and now we're looking at expanding into the primary care space and more broadly, into nursing. And we are serving, you know, the Medicare population, with Medical Assistants and with doctors and so all of these things are fascinating. They make our jobs very, very interesting, and we have to have some understanding of how folks get into those roles, get licensed or get the skills they need to do those jobs. And obviously, for doctors and pharmacists, it's years of schooling for pharmacy technicians or for medical assistants or, to some degree, nurses, that doesn't require that amount of schooling or professional certification. And so we tend to kind of look in those areas there, and we'll talk to our internal folks and say, what are the positions you're looking for now, where are we going with this down the road? So we can, as a team, get in front of our community stakeholders such as education and community colleges and adult ed and say this is what's coming. So if you build training for this, it will be job driven training. It will be training that leads to a real job that is coming now, that's coming down the road, that's, that's now, that's that that will, that will sustain long into the future. And of course, in the healthcare space, like that's everybody's questions all day. How is artificial intelligence gonna impact all of this? And I'm not sure we know yet. Yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting, but it's out there. And so these are the conversations we have to have internally, which is, tell us your talent needs, tell us where you're seeing gaps. I'll give you another quick example. Actually, internally, some of the conversations we're having with our retail leaders is around pharmacists. They see down the road a shortage of pharmacists coming because young students in high schools are not going into pharmacy schools at the rate they were going into pharmacy schools 10 years ago. And so they're already sounding the alarm and asking us and our team to get involved at the high school level exposing students to pharmacy that can be something as simple as having some classes or curriculum on pharmacy or pharmacy technician, or giving students a work based learning opportunity while they're in school, but those are some of the nuances of our work, where you wouldn't think we're recruiting pharmacists as a team from the workforce system, but we do have a place in ensuring that We're helping to cultivate talent in some way, shape or form. So all of these conversations happening internally, big challenge for our team now externally, we've got to take everything we just learned from our partners internally and go externally and go, This is what we see coming. This is what's happening, and largely the workforce, system, community providers, they'll have a sense for that, but when they hear it from the employer, that validates that thinking, it really validates the hey as a workforce system, broadly, we've got to go down this path. We've got it. We've got to get more focused on health care. You know, certainly here in New England and in Massachusetts, where I am, you know, healthcare is a big focus, because we have large, you know, regional healthcare systems that are constantly in need of talent. So largely community partners and educators know that here, but they may not know, hey, medical assisting is going to be huge in three years. Hey, you know, we're going to have a need for pharmacy technicians, because they're going to be operating, they're going to be operating closer to the, what we call the top of their license, which is, they may be doing immunizations, which is not something pharmacy techs have traditionally done, but a certain, you know, state board of pharmacy allows it. Yeah, we're going to do that. We want to notify our partners of that, because what we do as a team has a long tail. It takes time. It takes time to build programming. It takes time to ensure that it's right, and then to sustain that programming. So we're not always an instant solution for our own company, but rather, we're a sustainable solution that that takes a while to get going and can sustain long into the future, which is better for us, better for the community, to ensure that they have a place to come to get training that's that's ultimately going to be, that's going to tie to a job.

Kaitlin LeMoine: So it's really helpful to hear you talk about how you go about this work. You know, there's so many, so many I guess. You know, evolving factors at play. There are a lot of details to consider, changing policies, changing funding streams, changing industry needs, the labor market. And it was interesting to hear you talk about, okay, well, how do you deal with a particular labor market shift or the need for one specific role in one community? I'm curious to go a little bit deeper there, and would love to hear you describe, you know, what does it look like to partner with a community organization and an educational institution to address these needs. I mean, coming at it from an employer perspective, I'm just, I would love to hear a little bit more about, like, what is it, you know, what is the nitty gritty of, how do you go about these partnerships? And, yeah, and how to make this work?

Rick Laferriere: Yeah. So Kaitlin, it's really for the employer standpoint, it's dedicating the time and the people to doing this. Largely, you know, over my years doing this, I've heard from a lot of community partners, a lot of government agencies, who've said to me, you know, that a competitor or someone else in this landscape came to them asking them to build a workforce solution. And they started with all the enthusiasm to do it. Showed up with a whole bunch of senior leaders at some meeting with you know, this community partner, and said, Hey, we want to do this. And they're like, sure, this sounds great. Let's do it. What happens after that is really, really critical, and largely, if you don't have enough resources dedicated to building a partnership that is more than transactional, but is relational. I like to say that, like you build a friendship. You know, almost because you're you're talking with these, these providers, these community partners, nonprofits, adult ed, education, whoever it is, they're very passionate about what they're doing, and if you're not, if you're not passionate, you don't have the time to do that, that's that's never going to be a fit. You're not going to figure anything out at that point. So, one of the pieces, I think that's really important, is that employers have to come to the table intentional and ready to provide resources and time and effort and energy into this . That's long past the transaction of sitting down and doing it. And so that's largely most employers don't have a team like ours or folks like ours who are dedicated, doing this work all day, every day. I don't have a generalist job. I don't have something different to do. I get to lean into workforce all day, every day, and the more employers who do that, the more they will see benefits for working in this space. So it really starts from the employer's perspective, with leaning in and being in and really staying in after that. You know, employers need to think about what tools they can provide in this conversation, to to a provider, to an educator, that they don't already have. And so, you know, a lot of times employers come to the table saying, you train them, and I'll take them, I've got the job, I'll do an interview, and I'll do all that sort of stuff, and that's nice, but there's more that can be done there. Employers can bring curriculum to the table. A lot of employers get very protective of their training. They, you know, it's proprietary. They don't want it to show up in the internet. They don't want to, you know, they don't want to show competitors what their training is. But you know, largely that's only hampering their efforts to train people, because if you're not willing to give your curriculum to to a trusted community partner so that they can train folks to come and work for you, give them exposure to to learning your careers, then, then you're already behind the eight ball. You're not, you're not, you're not providing that community partner with anything of value that could help them skill folks up for you and for your workforce. So for me, the number one piece is, come ready to share your training. Come ready to share something about your company, your culture, your application process, success stories, all of those pieces. It's not just as an employer, sit down and have the partner tell me what they can give to me. I need to come and say what I'm going to give to that partner too, and that's a big miss for employers. I'll show up with training curriculum, show up with the opportunity to provide work based learning experiences before the hire. We call them externships, or work based learning or unpaid internships, something that allows a student an immersion into what it's like to come to work for us, and those are tools that our team uses every single day to allow individuals the opportunity to experience what it's like to work at CVS. And that's great, because for some folks, they opt in and they're like, this is great. I do want to do this. I want to be a part of your company. And then for some it's like, this is not for me. Pharmacy is not for me. Healthcare is not for me. I'm gonna opt out, and that's a good both of those are good outcomes, because we we've helped someone identify what's right for them, and we've hopefully eliminated the possibility of turnover before it ever happens, which largely for our work, we want folks coming into our organization well prepared, understanding our culture, understanding what our jobs are like, so they can succeed and they can stay, and we provide a service to our internal partners of talent that's ready now and wants to stay. Those are a couple of tools in the tool belt. It's just so important for employers to understand the speed, the language, the environment of working in an education or workforce outfit, that it's hard. It doesn't operate the same way as a as big business does, and you've got to find a way to meet in the middle, and you've got to find a way to communicate talk the same language, and really develop that beyond relationship, but that friendship that will spur all kinds of new ideas and other growth that leads to creativity, customization, seeking additional funding that people say, hey, that's great. You're doing something awesome. I want to invest in that. We want to see more of that and also to have a benefit to the entire community and that industry. It's not just about us. This work isn't just about CVS Health. We love having people come work for us, but only 30% of people who come into one of our programs end up working for us. The other 70% don't, which means they likely go to work for someone else after the program that we've helped create, and that's fine with us. That's great. We actually do look at ourselves as a greater good function that's lifting up the community and workforce, and that's a source of pride for us.

Julian Alssid: I'd like to hear a little bit more about your results. And you know, how do you measure your success? And perhaps, you know, punctuate that with an example or two that you're really proud of.

Rick Laferriere: Yeah, this is, this is a really interesting conversation, Julian, and this has evolved a bit for us as a team in the last five years or so. So, you know, recognizing that we're working for one of the largest corporations in the country, and when you work for a, you know, publicly traded company, there's a lot of challenges that come with that you have to provide data for everything. Everything's got to have a return on investment. There's just a lot of hard and fast things that you need to show your value to the broader enterprise. That's a little tricky for what we do, because so much of what we do has more of a qualitative than a quantitative value associated with it. It's our team. You know, we've mentioned, we have 40 of us, and pretty much all of the 40 start with their heart and because we're working with communities, and we're working with individuals who look at us and go, I need you. I need the opportunity that you're offering and for various reasons, and that pulls right here for us and so, but in order for us to stay relevant and stay a part of this company, we've got to figure out measurements that show just exactly how impactful we are to the business. And so, you know, I mentioned the qualitative piece. We do success stories. We get so many wonderful thank yous from the community and from people who ultimately come working for us, or people who don't work for us. And those are great, and we'll share those all day with everybody, because it's such a big part of what we do, showing that we want to be a part of the greater good, and we really care. That's still an important part of what we do. But, but quantitatively, we've, we've begun honing on some metrics that at least have have given us a place to operate from with our leaders and and those metrics largely look like the number of participants in programs that we are we're actively partnered in and this year, we're on track to provide about 8000 people with experiences in a workforce program across the country. And that experience looks different everywhere, but that's the largest number of people we've provided a direct experience to in our team's history. So it's growing, which is great. And so we look at the number of participants that we put in programs. We look at the number of participants who completed those programs. We obviously want to see folks start and end a program, successfully complete it, and then, and then move on from there. And so we do look at the number of completers of our programs. We know people start, they stop for various reasons. We want to, want to measure that. We want to know why people opt out of a program. We want to make sure that we provide support, if it's you know, for a reason that you know may not be voluntary for that participant, but largely, you know, 95% of the folks who start a program with us complete it, which is great. That's, that's a, that's really great efficacy for us. So that's another measure I mentioned, that we, we measure the number of hires that come to work for us, and we, we, we aim at 30% we want 30% of those 8000 people to come and work for us, and largely, that's about where we sit, and we think that's a great value for us, because that's, that's, that's an entire group of people, roughly about, you know, 2000 people around there coming to work for us who may not have engaged with us before that, we've sort of introduced To the workforce, introduced a CVS that had an opportunity to grow and gain skills. And so we look at that conversion rate. We look at the number of hires that we have internally, although it's not necessarily a goal of ours, we do look at that. We're also looking at things such as the number of folks who come to us in a program that's not where. Where, where employment is not the intended outcome. So for example, you think about youth with disabilities. I'll give you an example there. Think about students who are transition youth, students who are towards the end of their school age, and 22ish or so who are still attending their their school system, but are about to age out. There's a large subset of students who need to figure out what's next once they age out of the school system. And we look at building programs for that population to immerse those students into the world of work through work experiences and work based learning or whatever it may be. And those students may not have employment as the immediate desired outcome, it may be down the road. We love working with programs like that, where we can be part of the steps towards employment for a particular population. And so now we're looking at measuring, hey, if we have a group of students that go through this, this programming we've built, and they weren't ready for work necessarily coming in, and that wasn't the intended goal of the program, but we're hoping that they're ready for work in a year, or even six months, or in some cases, two years, if we're a part of that journey, and then they come work for us in two years. That's an amazing story. And so now we're beginning to capture those individuals who come through our programs that don't have necessarily employment as an intended outcome, and seeing them come to work for us in two years after they've gotten all the experience and the confidence they need to work, and that's a tremendous success for us too. So we're looking at those data points as well. We're tracking the number of folks who come out of our career driven programs, the programs that are designed for hire, to be hired right now, and we're looking at the number of folks who go to work in the community for other employers as well. And we love that, that we think that's great, that you know, 60, 70% of the participants in one of our programs are going to work in another community setting. That's great, too. So those are some of the data points that we look at. It's not a perfect exact science. Nothing is in this space. We operate in the gray every day. So to get black and white is challenging, but those are some of the data points that we look at. Those are the data points that our senior leaders believe in, and believe in the value and what we do so well.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much for sharing where you're going with the data right now. And it I mean you're, you know, so thorough, and to be it's this. This work is incredibly nuanced and certainly requires, as you said, right that mix of quantitative and qualitative data collection. And I really appreciate how you shared. You shared how you go about doing network effectively. I guess as we start to wind down our conversation today, Rick, you've provided so many, I think, very practical steps and takeaways and examples. But is there anything else you'd like to share about how our audience can become forces in supporting workforce development, especially from the employer perspective. And you know, and also, would love to hear how our listeners can continue to follow your efforts.

Rick Laferriere: For the employers out there who are interested in doing more here, who have not been terribly involved in workforce you know, I'd say this is an enormous opportunity to find talent at every level. And we've talked a bit about, you know, sort of the typical entry level points for our own organization, but there are entry points that are different in every every company out there, and not even that. It doesn't even have to be at entry level. It could be at a mid level position, you know, I would say to those employers as a call to action, come to the workforce space. Come to the workforce and education space, and learn what's happening around skilling members of your communities up towards careers with companies like you, and be a part of it. Be active. Get to know, you know that the larger workforce providers in your area, talk to them. Reach out, join a Workforce Board. Workforce boards are great places to network with other employers and with providers and also understand how workforce dollars flow and within the community you're in. From an employer perspective, it's just, it's get involved. Be curious. Build relationships, build alliances. Find people in your own organization who are champions in this space I mentioned earlier. It kind of takes a special person to do this work, particularly if you're in a big corporation. You've got a big heart, you want to help the community. You've got to balance it with I need to show my worth here. There's a way to do that. You can be very passionate and champion great causes for the community, while also showing those great results to your own senior leaders. You just have to be involved. You have to be passionate. These things are transactional. Make them relational. There's lots of touch points there. Your community college system. Your big adult ed providers. Go to, you know, go to your local one stop employment center and talk to the folks that are there. There's lots of ways to enter in and get curious and be there. So for employers get, you know, just get out there and see what workforce is all about. Because it's growing. It's building. It's a necessary part of all of our communities to ensure that the folks that are around us have the skills that they need to do the jobs that we're that we have today and now into the future. So certainly, for employers, I'd say, you know, get involved for the community and for those out there providing services, and for individuals interested in doing this we love doing this work. My team loves doing this work. We love being creative, and we love finding ways to support our communities and the individuals in our communities with workforce and educational programming, and it's really, you know, to some degree, it's, it's thinking creatively. You know, workforce can be creaky. It can be a little old. Workforce policies are a little old in spots. And, you know, a lot of folks kind of associate workforce with sort of like, you know, there's, there are layoffs, and there's, you know, you've got it, they're jumping in to help people who've been laid off. Or there's, you know, they used to, they used to help skill people up for, like, the factories and all of these sorts of things. And that's not workforce now, workforce is very, very different, thinking more progressively. And I really like that. And so for folks in the community, be be be ready to think creatively about how you can invite an employer into your your organization, or into your educational facility, and think creatively about how that you could, you know you could, you could leverage a really engaged employer into something you're doing to give people an opportunity. And so I think about it from those perspectives. You know, how can people learn more about our team? So interesting doing this work? I say a lot that we are a well kept secret, and that's not a good thing. And oftentimes we're a bit of our own enemy in this work, because we're very, very humble. We are not a look at me type of organization or group. We believe that we're doing good and that the spotlight should be on those who are benefiting from that, not our team, but those folks who are benefiting, who are becoming independent, supporting their families on the path to something like those are just those are, those are the things we think about. And so we're not self promoters. We don't do a good job with this, and our company doesn't do a great job helping us either with that. We're just too humble at times. But I tell people all the time, go open up your browser on your phone or on your computer and type in CVS Workforce Initiatives, lots of things will come up. A lot of the little stories that we have out there, you'll probably see little pieces about our workforce, innovation and talent centers. We call them WITCs. I mentioned I started in a Regional Learning Center in Boston. We renamed those regional learning centers as WITCs. So we've got more than 10 of those WITCs across the country now, and they are. They're really exciting. We do grand openings. A lot of wonderful things happen in those facilities, where we invite the community to work with us and enjoy them. You'll find everything out there with our community partners, you'll find a few things on our corporate website. There'll be some videos out there, some success stories. Um, that's the best way to figure out where to find us. And for those of you who ever want to connect with me or a member of my team for any reason, for any interest, do not hesitate to reach out to me anytime. I love hearing from people. I love talking with folks who are curious about our work. And so anytime please do reach out. I love hearing from folks.

Julian Alssid: Well, thank you so much, Rick for taking this time to speak with us today. You're the energy and thoughtfulness and nuance, as Kaitlin said, and dynamism of your work and enterprise is palpable, you know, through the whatever this is ether. And we hope that we will help bring your very humble work a little bit more to the fore through this, this podcast and and that folks will follow up, as you've suggested, and search for CBS workforce development, and we certainly look forward to continuing to track your work as it unfolds. But thanks again, so much.

Rick Laferriere: Well, thank you, Julian, thank you, Kaitlin, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for the opportunity to join your podcast today and for getting to share a little bit about my team's work, and for your interest and your support and your partnership as well. It's been it's been wonderful, and look forward to many great successes in this space to come, indeed.

Kaitlin LeMoine: Thank you so much, Rick. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Conversation and appreciate you tuning in to workforces. Thank you to our listeners and guests for their ongoing support and a special thanks to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. If you're interested in sponsoring the podcast or want to check out more episodes, please visit workforces dot info forward slash podcast. You can also find workforces wherever you regularly listen to your favorite podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like and share it with your colleagues and friends, and if you're interested in learning more about workforces consulting, please visit workforces dot info forward slash consulting for more details about our multi service practice.