Talent Summit - Mark Lindgren and Lee Kaplan

really humbled to talk to all of you I know many of you personally and just the amazing work you do in this community and have done. Our only hope is that we can continue to support you and continue your efforts and at the same time align those efforts. I also want to thank Danny for his comments but also just point out that you know he mentioned he's been here five years and you know for a CEO to come into town what Danny has and the way Wells Fargo has gotten behind so many of our organizations in here and just his tremendous support I think deserves a round of applause as well. And it's that type of leadership that I think is surrounding you today. I believe everything like Danny I'm not from St. Louis I moved here 15 years ago from Chicago area and I've been just amazed at this community and how people jump in and just are so willing to help on any cause. And so our goal today is to really help you connect with the business case. It's a little bit of a history lesson peppered with some facts and our goal is to really help all of you connect with why do we see this one metric of college attainment as that North Star metric. That's the goal. Some of you will hear some data you've already heard but we hope to add a little color to that so that we all embrace that as a goal. And I think we can all embrace that as a goal. All of you represent boards, all of you represent other organizations. Our hope is you take that message back to those other groups and continue to build this momentum that we're trying to build. Doug talked about it as movement, that's how we've come to think about it. You know as business folks we like to think about managing things, you don't manage something like this, this is something that we all need to create energy around, put our resources behind and work together on. So with that, before we get started in the spirit of getting to know each other, I want to ask Lee Kaplan to introduce himself and then we'll get started.

Blair, where are you? So I don't think we're going to have any idea whether we have time for questions given where we're at. So would you let us know and then if we're clicking ourselves so if we forget, would somebody start waving their hands at us when you see the slides out of sync with what we're saying? Thank you. That's great. I got Mahendra over here, he said he'd head to the door if I don't do well, so he's my gauge for the discussion. Just a little bit about myself, Mark Lindgren. I have the great opportunity to lead the HR group at Ameren. Many of you know Ameren from how involved we are in the community. We truly believe our position is focused energy for life, but also you'll see our new mission start to come out: power and the quality of life. And that's something we take seriously, but really I want you to think of me more today as a member of the community, father of three, somebody who cares deeply about where I live, maybe a servant and a steward for creating a region that's better than when we leave it. And I think like Danny said, this is the start of something and that's how we need to think about it. One other thing I'll leave you with, and this is just set the tone: we talk internally at Ameren about levels of listening and we talk about some of the highest levels of listening or listen to the influence. So I would ask a lot of you have many, many years, many things you've done in this area. All I'd ask for the next 30-40 minutes is kind of get to that level of listening where you're thinking about listening to the influence. That's what we're looking at, and then let's have great, rich debate, dialogue, everything that comes with it, because that's what's going to drive the change. So as we jump in, Danny mentioned this earlier: 19th population, 14th. That's relevant. United States is relevant, being 19th in the United States as a city is relevant. But the interesting thing is that five-point difference to the 14th in terms of educating adults, so this would be the 14th in terms of bachelor's degree for the population. And so when we think about ourselves, and Doug mentioned it earlier too, the economy today is a knowledge economy. This metric to any business person is going to say that's a good advantage. We got the size, but we got a greater percentage of resources in that size to out-compete. So that's a good thing. But as Doug also said, this is a new day. We don't necessarily need our riverways for bimodal, but cities originally formed around rivers, they've formed around raw materials, they formed around industrial sites. That's changed dramatically, so we have to figure out how to reinvent ourselves as a region to be that knowledge hub, to be that international knowledge-able level. Talking yesterday to Dick, one of our speakers, and he said, 'You know, international is where the international key of Chicago is where the international community comes to lunch.' I thought that was a really interesting comment, but you know there's a lot of truth in there. How can St. Louis be where the international community first launches? Right. So as we jump in, please listen to the influence. So again, just a map picture of where we are. But when you look at the Midwest, we have a distinct advantage. We are the hub of the United States. That has some advantages to it. By lifting the St. Louis region into the top 10 by 2025, you're going to hear us repeat this because that is the goal. That is what we want to do. Does that mean when you think about bachelor's degrees that we don't want to focus on tech education, we don't focus on associate's degrees, we don't want to get kids through high school? Absolutely not. You have to do all those things to attain the scope, which is why we chose this goal as the overall overarching metric. But simply put, we believe it's also the top metric for economic vitality. And we do know that people pay attention to this metric, and so whether we think it's the right metric or not in some ways doesn't matter because that's how we are measured. So you can either work to change how they measure us or you can align with how they are measuring, and we chose to align with how they are measuring. So that's a way to think about this goal. So I want to hit you with six reasons why this is important. As also mentioned, you're going to have this material. We hope you use this material with your own audiences and discuss these issues. Here are six reasons. The first is: the percent of college population degrees will gauge the workforce quality. So as we continue to look at how we think about this metric, we are going to need a significant workforce going forward. The top 10 ranking will set St. Louis apart. So when we think about how that sets us apart, there are two ways: one, any good investor knows confidence and a positive perception actually helps the investment. So if we go from 14th to 10th, we are going to create a perception that something's going right here and people will automatically pay attention to that, and it really sets us apart. The other thing that sets us apart is when the economic development analysis is done, they might only say let's look at the top 10 cities. If that's the case, we're in. If we're not, if we're 14th. So keeping up with this top 10 ranking will really set us apart as a competitor, particularly with our size. This was mentioned earlier, but as greater education goes up, there's greater earnings. Of course these are broad averages, but it's absolutely a telling picture when you look at how earnings go up, and this is us compared to other cities. So if we're going to move up that path and have greater earnings potential as a region, we are going to need to focus on educational attainment. Number four: this number was aware but it helps everybody in the community. We talked about it as lifting everyone up. It really does do that. And if you think about on the surface, degree attainment, but we all know that goes deep, that goes very deep. It goes into high school, it goes into career choice, it goes into support structures and mentoring, many things that it will take to get kids through the college process. But as they go on and become that first generation college graduate who earns a greater living, that has a ripple effect for the family, their kids, and everyone that's affected. Number five: this is more on the global scale for the region. So if you think about just imagine if you will, an extra 2.4 billion dollars that are going into the economy with the same number in the population. Just think about that. So if we think about that higher earnings potential, bigger jobs, new innovation, new startups, you can create a much higher earning workforce, and just think of the ripple effect of that through the entire economy, and it's positive for everybody. And number six: as you move the college attainment level up, this is where it brings everything else along. I mentioned I get the opportunity to do human resources at Ameren. We have line programs at community colleges, we hire significantly from tech schools that won't be bachelor degree, but we still care deeply about the bachelor degree metric. And we do because we believe in this, that as you continue to move people up into attainment, those folks will support and mentor others to finish, and you'll see more people move up their path. And the folks that get the associate's degree might say, 'I did this, maybe I can get a bachelor's degree and maybe I can get it faster.' So you move the entire group and you raise the entire level of the community up. And I'm going to turn it back to Lee, but one quick comment: we're doing good on the tweets, and I think it's appropriate to mention Jack Dorsey is from St. Louis and he is a Webster grad and he does care about our community. We didn't retain him, we got to work on that, but I just thought that was important.

So you've now seen this graphic many times. You saw it on your invite, you see it on your tables, you see it on the banners, you see it on the board. It's a more powerful graphic than you might have first looked at it. And I want to walk you through this graphic a little bit. So we're going to talk about these five groups that are kind of the anchors of this graphic. Little history of how this graphic came about. We started as a group talking about it as a pie chart. So if you say your goal is degree attainment, you have to look at what are all the things you need to do to get degree attainment higher. Well, an obvious one is if you produce a degree, you can't lose a degree. So retention is a key part of that. We also looked at what are the various sectors that we would focus on to say how can we all help each other with degree attainment. So this is what pulls everybody in the room in. And this graphic really is a way to illustrate that if we're going to focus on this area as a community, these are the categories that we need to pay our attention to. I also want to point out what we call the rays that come out from this diagram. I want you to think about that as short-term, mid-term, and long-term. We know that, for example, high school attainment is a long-term issue. It won't create a bachelor's degree next year if we can get one child to stay in school, but we know if we don't do that, we don't have a sustainable model. So we have to look at these rays as the short-term, long-term, and mid-term goals. And that's what unites us here. And you think about who's all in the room, we need everybody working together. And it's not just those hiring and it's not just those graduating. It's a variety of organizations. So hopefully this picture is already starting to have a little bit more meaning for you. And I want to walk through each of the components. If we look at our current students today, you'll see that there's 200,9555. So about 210,000 residents that are enrolled in college. 78% of those are undergrads, and I'll point out that undergrads does include the associate degrees of the group. It is the degree programs, so it's a broad metric. And 22% are at the graduate or professional school level. So a significant portion of the population is already engaged as a current student. We need them to finish. We need them to stay in school. We need to mentor them, we need to support them. I commit personally and then for Ameren that we're going to look deeply at our tuition programs and say can we do more to help people in those programs. Today we offer it as a benefit. We need to do more than that. We need to mentor, we need to do things, and you'll hear more about what the commitments many employers have made around that. The other thing we know is that a significant number are going to school part-time. So I find it interesting that for a four-year college, 35% are part-time. What are the odds they're going to finish in four years? Bottom line is, it's not always four years. There's a significant number of current students that are in our colleges that are doing it part-time. As we've made the comment, life can get in the way. So we need to help those folks on this path, which could be a long path. Two-year colleges, 55% are part-time. So as we think about the delivery, and I know the Higher Ed Council has been spending a lot of time talking about this, what is the right delivery model for education today with technology and everything else? One of our guest speakers also said he did a Skype class yesterday morning. We didn't have Skype classes not too long ago. So those kinds of things, we need to really think about. Full-time students are slow to complete. 46% complete a four-year degree in six years. That's a pretty amazing statistic when you really think about it. 61% complete a four-year degree in six years. I know what the Illinois people are thinking: 'Why don't you come over and we'll tell you how to do it right.' There's something there. What is the difference? So we need to get behind this data. Today we're not answering that question; it's the data that we need to answer. So when we look at the college graduates, then this gets into retention. So programs through the Chamber, through the RBC, through Focus, all those programs are so important as we think about college graduates today. So we had 38,687 degrees awarded by 49 colleges and universities. Folks, we are a college town. We don't think of ourselves that way, but we are. We have tremendous colleges and universities, and this is in our counties that we have today. So 8,400 are post-secondary awarding, so you can see the breakdown. So the point is we need to focus on our current college grads, find them those jobs, get them in the right place, and we need to work together with the institutions so they're job-ready and learning-ready when they join the workforce. Struggling to attract college degree individuals. It's interesting to me if we're not going to do this, but if we did a show of hands of who was born and raised here, I think you'd be pretty surprised at the statistic in the room because I think it may outweigh 50%. People don't perceive that in St. Louis, but the reality is we do attract a lot of people, but we do struggle to make any ground in this area. That's the issue. And so in the 07-09 period, basically you can see we did attract people but we lost at about the same level. So unless we change that equation, retain more and attract more, you can't move the statistic. You're going to constantly lose water at the bottom when you pour it in the top. So we need to really focus on our current college grads. Sixteen thousand six hundred adults with a BA moved out of St. Louis area, 18,600 moved in. So you can see we're not gaining a lot of ground there. Working adults: so these are the folks that are in our companies today. You can see 41,000 adults are employed and enrolled as college graduates. So a significant portion of who's in your school, if you are an educator, is working today. As you know, we can do a lot to help folks that we're not doing today. This population of working adults is about 621,000. I think there's a tremendous opportunity to find individuals in our companies that are learning-ready, they are looking to do something, but maybe they haven't had that mentoring, they haven't seen what's possible. We as companies have committed that we're going to do a better job in that area. That's part of our commitment. So but you know, as you look at that potential population, 41% have high school degrees and so on, but these are the folks that have high school already, so we can work with these folks. Workforce unemployed adults: there's about 6,800 unemployed adults that are enrolled in colleges today. So they're between jobs, they're unemployed, and they're looking to re-educate, retool, some with support, some not, because they recognize that they need to really get themselves more marketable through education. But this potential student population of unemployed adults is about 68,000. Now for those familiar with statistics, you know that's not the total number of unemployed, but this is the unemployed with high school degrees that are education workforce capable. Veterans: we have tremendous veteran support in the St. Louis region. The veteran population has tremendous opportunity to bring those skills that they've learned serving this country into the education process. There are already many programs out there. The biggest issue I've seen is just helping people navigate the process, helping them when they become active in the community from active service, and really help bridge those gaps into the school system and providing the right support network through that process. But you can see the numbers and also an opportunity to ... So as you look at this particular graph again, we've just spent about probably 10-15 minutes together on it. We now recognize the colors, we look at the bars and realize they're short-term, long-term, and mid-term goals. We realize that we can't look at one and not every one of these areas without having to have success. And my hope is each and every one of you in here sees a connection for you, your organization, to somewhere in this graph now. And so when you see this image, it can become a rallying kind of piece for us. So I hope that's where we are. And I'm going to turn it back to Lee.