Podcast Introduction (music playing): Welcome to Work Trends RU, presented by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. In this podcast, we speak with experts, policymakers, and thought leaders about issues affecting work, education, training, the economy, and well-being. Each episode of Work Trends RU provides insights into important topics like changes in the job market, economic challenges, and how artificial intelligence is shaping the future of work. Our guests share their thoughts and reflections on how public and private sectors can better address the needs of workers, job seekers, and employers. Join us as we discuss the evolving landscape of work and education on Work Trends RU. (music ends)

Carl Van Horn: Welcome to Work Trends RU. I’m Carl Van Horn and I’m the Director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development and a professor at Rutgers University. Today, we’re fortunate to have sharing with us his thoughts and views about education, education policy, Kevin Dehmer, who is the Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education. Kevin, welcome to Work Trends RU.

Kevin Dehmer: Thank you so much, Carl.

Carl Van Horn: Kevin served as the Executive Director of the Heldrich Center for a couple of years.

Kevin, you’ve led the Department of Education in New Jersey as Acting Commissioner under a couple of governors and then you were confirmed by the Senate as the permanent director of the Department of Education So, you obviously have a huge amount of experience in that role. And it’s difficult to summarize, I’m sure for you, that career of leading the department. But, from your perspective, I’d like our audience to know, what do you think has been the greatest impact on education by the department and the state government under your leadership the last several years?

Kevin Dehmer: Like you said, I’m coming up on close to two decades in this work. This is the third time I’ve served as Commissioner. So, I think that’s given me, you know, some perspective on what’s happened in the state of New Jersey, in particular, and also just generally in the public education landscape. A couple of things, well, several things have happened during that time that really stood out. So, the first thing was the financial crisis in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. And, honestly, I thought that that would be the most significant single event that happened in my lifetime. It looked like our version of the Depression, it was going to be the most impactful thing that we saw. So, that was, that was obviously kind of a tone-setter. Similarly, we had Superstorm Sandy, we’ve had some state shutdowns, then all of a sudden COVID comes along, and I think that kind of superseded the 2008 financial crisis in terms of impact. So, across all of that, we’ve seen a lot of changes in public policy, generally, particularly in education policy.

And I often get asked what sets New Jersey apart, particularly when I’m at a national conference or something. We’re kind an outlier when you look at us, we’re a very high performing educational state, and yet we don’t have, you know, a major city. We have big cities like Newark and Jersey City, but really New Jersey is pulled by New York and Philadelphia. And so, when people look at that, it’s hard to understand. Then you kind of dig a little bit deeper; we’re a small geographic state and have close to 600 school districts. So, how do you succeed kind of in that environment? And so, when I talk to my colleagues across the country, I highlight a few things. First and foremost is it comes down to our communities. There’s a huge commitment from our local folks in public education. You talk to anybody that’s buying a house, they’re talking about what the district is, what the schools are like, how far away are the schools. That’s a central focus in New Jersey. It is nationally as well, but I think particularly so in New Jersey as well. And I think with that comes the financial commitment to schools. And we see that, obviously, local property taxes are a big point of discussion in New Jersey, but you’re talking on average 50 to 60% of your local property tax bill goes to our public schools. That’s a big commitment for our taxpayers. And then you look at the state side and 25% of our budget each year goes in direct aid to schools. And when you add on top of that teacher pensions and post-retirement, you get close to 40 cents out of every dollar spent in New Jersey, in the New Jersey state budget going to public education. So, you combine those two things as an enormous financial commitment in the state to our schools. Also, in New Jersey, we have a state board that’s constantly looking and reviewing our standards. We have at least a five-year cycle to look at those, keep those updated. And those standards are set very high and particularly when you compare nationally. And, so, when you have high standards, financial commitment, and you pair that with high standards and rigorous training that we require of our educators, that all comes together as a very strong public policy approach to public education in New Jersey. So, having committed a significant portion of my working life to this and all the things that I just said, I think the end point is maybe a little bit surprising because, despite all of that commitment to public policy and public education and all those resources, when it comes down to the individual student, the most impactful thing is what happens at home. Are the parents engaging with the student? What kind of resources can they provide them? What kind of supports? Is there food on the table? All those things combined, and that can have as much or more of an impact on each individual student as of all those public policy things that we do. So, we’re not gonna walk away from that. We’re gonna continue to push. I think we’ve set up an enormously successful system of public education in the state. And that means we also have to coordinate with our families to make sure that we make that as seamless as possible across those two domains.

Carl Van Horn: One of the things, as a parent who had two sons go through the public school system in New Jersey, what struck me then was how curriculum kept getting expanded as to what needed to be taught, and less and less time was available for anything other than the next class. And I understand that it’s putting all the aspirations into the schools. And I wondered whether that has continued and what’s your view of that? Is it too much? Is it we expecting too much from the schools? Do we have a good equilibrium point at this point?

Kevin Dehmer: So, I think it’s a balancing act because each year we see new requirements come in, whether they’re through the legislature or through our, our standard setting process. But new events happen. How do we teach, you know, more current events as we learn more about science? How do we change how we do that? I think we’ll talk more about this, but there’s been significant changes in how we teach early reading and kind of a big evolution there that requires change both at the state level and then how districts interpret that for teachers to execute upon that in the classroom. So, it’s, it’s a balancing act. We have to manage time and kind of all of those requirements. But this is, public education is a living, breathing, breathing thing. And it needs to have that flexibility to evolve with time. And as we learn and how to do things better, but also what areas we want to focus on. It’s a reflection of the commitments of us as a society, as a state. So, that I think is important to… We have to allow that, but we also have to be flexible to make sure that there’s time to cover all of those things that we want to discuss with our kids.

Carl Van Horn: Thinking about the curriculum, what is the, what in your opinion is the next big thing on the curriculum development front?

Kevin Dehmer: I think the biggest thing that we’ve done most recently is a big change in early literacy. In New Jersey, the governor signed a bill package last year that really effectuated this. But we’ve learned through a lot of research, getting back to the basics, kind of a phonics-based instruction level, some people call it the “science of reading”, there’s a lot of different names for it. So, that transition is formally happening in New Jersey. In the, the most recent school year last year, we introduced a new ELA, English Language Arts, standards as a state that started to implement that. Next year, we’re doing a significant shift for the first time requiring screeners of all of our K through three students at least twice a year. Importantly, sharing those results back with families when they’re available. So, this helps bridge that gap that I talked about between the schools and the families. So, I think that early literacy is kind of, that’s very timely. But looking forward, going into next school year, we’re gonna be implementing a New Jersey new math standards. And I think that’s part of the thing that we’re gonna bridge. And a lot of that focuses on what we call data literacy. And that’s really just improving your fluency with data and numbers. I think, just having had conversations with you, we’ve talked about the famous instance of whatever burger chain came out with the one third pound burgers that are obviously bigger than the quarter pound burgers, but most people perceive them to be smaller because three is smaller than four, so helping to identify those things to make it better as we roll out these new math standards. If I can, I want to share a really quick story on this because it’s really stuck with me. I was at a national conference recently talking and there was a presentation by somebody that was really focused on the evolution of math and how we’re teaching math. And she said something that was really poignant, I thought. Every day you hear somebody say, “I’m not a math person” or “I’m not good at math”. And we all just kind of like, go about our day and it’s, we don’t even notice it anymore. People say it so frequently. Now, what if you change it and said, “I’m not literate. I’m not, I can’t read. I’m not good at reading”. That will be a jarring thing for somebody to admit. And yet every day people admit, “hey, I’m not a math person. I can’t do basic math”. And we just accept that as okay. And I think really our push going into this next school year is to say, no, that’s not okay. We need to do things to make sure that we are focused just as much on basic literacy as we are on math literacy. So, I do think that that is our next big push in the education space.

Carl Van Horn: You alluded to COVID and of course in our lifetime, hopefully we never experienced that again, but that was a enormous, enormous shock to the country, to the world, but certainly to the education system. You led the department during a lot of that period. What lessons did you take away from that? And how did that improve, or did it result in some improvement, in the way we teach and the way students learn?

Kevin Dehmer: So, I think it did, but I think maybe it’s worthwhile to kind of walk through what that was like. And this is one instance where there literally was no guidebook. We had no clue what to expect here or what to do. And people talk about building the plane as you fly it, or overuse phrases like that. But that’s what everybody was doing. There was no real honest information. I mean, we were in real time learning ourselves,“Hey, you don’t need to wipe down your fruit and vegetables anymore, because we learned that the spreads through airborne means”. So, quickly we shifted to a strategy working on indoor air quality and things like that. And what that meant was it required probably the most, at least in my experience, the most massive inter-agency coordination in order to work through this because, as individuals within their realm of expertise, we’re learning things, we were sharing it amongst ourselves.

So, like I said, in the schools, we need to share this information out to our school leadership so they can start to implement it. So, to convey that spacing and indoor air quality are now kind of paramount as, as we look to reopening schools. Those are things that we didn’t know immediately, so we had to work with the Department of Health, work with DEP to learn those things over time. But, as we kind of progressed through it, one thing that really stuck with me and something that I kept harping on with, with my team is that we do have systems in place to deal with a lot of these things. It doesn’t look exactly like COVID, but we do have processes on how to deal with a crisis situation or something like this that arises. And we need to lean into those systems as much as we can. So, we aren’t reinventing literally everything as it happens. So, I think that really helped as we got a little bit further along to recognize that there are systems and practices that we already knew about that we could build from. And that really helped. And I think this kind of goes to what the governor has done. And I think this is a really smart idea, and that was to put together a task force of Cabinet-level folks across the state to plan in case anything like this happens again, that as a state, we can go back and at least have a framework on what to do. It’s probably not gonna look exactly like COVID, but at least we’ll have some kind of framework to look for and what to do. And in that sense, we don’t have to panic. And I think that was the big thing for leadership. There is this immediate thing where we don’t know what to do, but we didn’t have space to plan, we didn’t have time panic. We had to just forge ahead. And I think that was, that was a learning experience for everybody that was in a leadership position at that time.

So, coming out of it, I think for everyone, COVID had enormous and lasting impacts. We see that in our students as well as parents. And this comes across in a lot of ways, whether it’s our academic performance, because students were not in the classroom during that time and maybe didn’t have as much engagement, or on their mental health. This impacts students and adults almost equally. And this has now become a new area of focus for us. It’s something that always existed, mental health concerns, now it’s got kind of this renewed focus. And I think that’s a very good thing to be able to put resources and some expertise behind those mental health challenges that we see across all individuals impacted. And another thing that I think really stood out with COVID is that parents got a front seat view on what education looks like, what it’s like to be a teacher. And I think some of this has already been forgotten, but there are those early days, and I remember parents coming and saying, “Wow, teachers are really put through the ringer on a daily basis. They do this with 20 to 30 kids. I’m struggling to do with my one or two kids”. So, I think that’s important for parents to remember. This is… Education is a tough thing and our teachers are incredible at what, at what they do. It is a, it is a profession that requires training, and certain unidentifiable quality almost, to overcome what they do on a daily basis.

So, in addition to all of that, we can see, long term, COVID has brought really significant positive aspects to public education or at least opportunities. First and foremost, we had the opportunity to make sure that every student had connectivity to the internet and a device. Most, if not all, school districts now give one-to-one devices to all of their students. That is something that we didn’t have available before. And that’s changed things like you no longer get handed a big textbook at the beginning of the year. It’s now part of that device that you’re handed and that allows for more frequent updates. It’s no longer replacing that book every five to 10 years and hoping that we get all the updates included in that print document. Now it can be updated in real time as things evolve because it’s a subscription model and there’s, that has a lot of positive aspects to it. And being able to have all of our students connected and more fluent with using the devices opens up opportunities so that we can get real-time feedback in the classroom. That opens up ways to use AI and other technologies to really evolve education in the classroom. I, I’m really optimistic about what all those technology changes and introducing those devices in the classroom. And I think that’s the positive aspect we see coming out of COVID.

Carl Van Horn: Of course, one of the other things, and it’s still evolving question, is how you regulate the use of personal devices in school. And, what’s the status of that policy development that was introduced by the governor and several legislatures?

Kevin Dehmer: This is a focal point, not only in New Jersey, but nationally. Within New Jersey, we’re close to getting final recommendations on a commission that’s studying the mental health effects of social media on adolescents. And while that’s focused on social media, it’s very closely linked to cell phones, because that’s the means to access social media.

And I mentioned before the mental health changes that we saw coming out of COVID. It may be related to COVID or it may be the rise of social media. The timing is very similar, so parsing that out is something that we researchers, I think, will be looking at for some time, but for the more immediate thing, like how do we manage the use of social media and also access to devices for our students while they’re in school?

And the governor has put forward kind of a bold plan to offer districts the opportunity some additional grant funding to develop strategies for what you could call a bell-to-bell ban or something like that. There’s a lot of different names for it, but how it looks in each school or in each district can be a little bit different. Some school districts have these lockable pouches where they put devices in there. Others have, you know, manage it more through social means. But the idea of keeping the devices out of instructional time seems to have a lot of legs in current research in helping students stay focused on the classwork. And the wriggle here is trying to figure out a way so that, if a student does need their device for emergencies or other communications, to make that available. And so, this is kind of what we’re working through now. I would say early indications are that there, there’s a lot of momentum behind the notion of limiting access to cell phones and potentially social media and things like that for our students to really keep them focused on what’s happening in the classroom.

Carl Van Horn: One of the most important movements over the last number of years has been to improve preparation before entering kindergarten – the preschool period – to try to create, not necessarily a level playing field, but a similar preparation for what’s going to happen once they start school. Talk a little bit about what New Jersey and the department’s doing in that respect.

Kevin Dehmer: This is an area where we started comprehensive preschool education really coming out of litigation with what were formerly called the Abbott Districts. It was 31 urban low-income school districts. And coming out of that litigation, it was required that we offer full-day preschool to every three- and four-year-old child in those districts.

That later expanded. We had 35 core districts for a lot of years where we were offering full-day preschool to three- and four-year-olds. And, in recent years, particularly under Governor Murphy, we have significantly expanded that, that scope. So, where we started with, you know, those 35 core districts, we’ve now expanded to well over 200 districts. And that represents more than 50% of our elementary serving district. We do have some high school only districts and things like that. But we’re over half. And that expansion has happened almost organically each year, whether…well, Governor Murphy has proposed, and the legislature has supported as well, in each annual budget, money to support expansion of those programs. And I’m happy to report, I think it was on July 9th, the governor signed really landmark legislation for the state of New Jersey that sets the tone looking forward for preschool education. So, it made a couple of significant changes. First, not directly related to preschool, but for kindergarten. While almost all districts in the state have full-day kindergarten, not all do. So, this legislation set a path for every district to be required to offer full-day kindergarten. And we’ve set that primarily as a prerequisite to have preschool education, because what we don’t want to have is three- and four-year-olds going through a full-day program, then they get to kindergarten and they’re going to a half-day program. So, that’s kind of the starting point to get every district on full-day K. We have fewer than 10 now that need to kind of get over that hump. And I’m confident that they’re gonna do so in the next few years.

So, looking at preschool, full-day three- and four-year-old preschool education with a limit of 15 students per classroom, highly qualified instructors, a curriculum that sets the bar for across the country, those things are unique to New Jersey. When you look across the preschool landscape in other states, some, and I’m not gonna name states, but some claim victory in saying, “I’ve got universal preschool”. And when you really dig into the details, it’s, you know, 10 hours a week. And what that means for families, it’s almost an annoyance as much as it is a benefit, because how do you…how do you get to and from school? If you’re working, how do you get your child to 10 hours a week? It just doesn’t work. So, when we’re doing full-day programs, we’ve also offered wrap around, some startup for wrap around services and things like that to help working families. And when you do that, so that it’s full-day, and you’re talking three and four, now you don’t have to pay out of pocket for daycare or a private preschool. And when that can be provided through your tax dollars, that’s an enormous benefit to families. And I do want to emphasize that, as this change is occurring, one of our really our points of emphasis as we look to expansion is to build and expand our relationship with those private providers. For decades, those individuals have built small businesses where they have helped our youngest kids through daycare and then they move into the preschool space within their buildings that they own, these small businesses. And, so, we’re leaning into that by making sure that’s a part of this expansion. But, at the end of it, this is not only academically sound, all the research shows that preschool education makes an enormous difference for kids entering the school system. There’s talk of you get your money back six-, seven-fold based on the long-term effects. And whether or not that’s true, we know that it helps kids get better prepared for entering kindergarten, first grade, and it helps with that early literacy that we talked about before. And, so, this is a, this is a big commitment from the state. Not only are we at more than 50% of our school districts over the Governor, Governor Murphy’s tenure, I think we’ve increased our investment by $600 million a year to support these programs. So, our money is where our mouth is on this. And I think as we continue this expansion and meet that last 50% of school districts, families across the state are really going to see the benefit of what this program offers.

Carl Van Horn: So, you’ve talked about a number of your priorities. One we haven’t gotten around to yet, which I know you care a lot about, is the education and preparation of the teacher core. We expect a lot of them and they do an enormous service, but, again, they’re expected to do more and more every year. So, what, what are some of your thoughts about how we support teachers and recruit people to join the profession and remain in it?

Kevin Dehmer: Well, first of all, in New Jersey, we’re, we’re blessed incredible educators. And I think that, that rises to the forefront. And some of that comes through the requirements that we put into place, working with our Ed Prep programs that are institutes of higher education and setting the tone for what we expect of our educators and through the credentialing process that we oversee.

But at the end of the day, it’s the individuals and those teachers show dedication, administrators and on down the line. Everyone in our schools is severely committed to helping our students do the best that they can. And that comes with challenges. It’s become harder and harder on our educators. You talked earlier about all the different things that we try pile on to our educators. And, so, we’re trying to find ways to manage that, to make it just a little bit easier for our educators to, to get through the day. We have some kind of exploratory grants, I guess, trying to find ways that are creative within the school day to, to make it easier for our educators. We just are completing our first round of those grants and then we have a second round coming out. But the idea from that is to learn from educators and in schools, like, what’s an innovative way that we can address paperwork concerns or how better to interact with parents or those things, those stressors that we see on educators that may be driving them out of the profession or keeping folks from entering the profession. And all of this comes down to… Well, we’ve talked about for a lot of years in terms of a teacher shortage. And this ebbs and flows every year. We learn from it kind of as we go along. But, addressing those key stressors with our educators seems to be one of the most impactful things that we can do. So, we’ve made, we’ve made some changes, some kind of superfluous assessments that we require of educators. We’ve, we’ve rolled back because they didn’t seem to have significant impact on their ability in the classroom. So, those things I think we’re playing out, we’ll see how they do. We’re keeping an eye on it. But a lot of these ideas have come forward really from educators themselves. And this, this goes back to a task force that the governor put together several years ago to address teacher shortage, and really, it’s educator shortage, and getting folks into the profession.

And, we’ve been slowly working our, slowly and quickly, simultaneously, working our way through the list of ideas. And, as we can implement them and try them out, we’re making progress. And this has resulted in paying teachers stipends when they’re doing their student teaching, helping to pay down student debt, things like that, just to, to really help get folks into the profession and make it more attractive.

And going back to teacher compensation, I think a lot of people look at that as like a primary driver. Number one, New Jersey, we continually rate as one of the most highly compensated educators in the country, which I think is good news. But, I think if you ask teachers to rank their top 10 reasons why they like being a teacher or concerns that they have, pay isn’t top of the list for most of them. It’s these other things. What are the day-to-day stressors and how do we mitigate them? That’s why we’re focused on that side. But then on why you enter the profession, it’s not for the pay. We all recognize you’re not going to get rich entering this profession, but it’s rewarding in a lot of different ways. And those rewards when you talk to teachers really come through. And I will say one of the most of emotionally impactful things each year is when we do Teacher of the Year awards and our County Teacher of the Year, they do a little video that interviews, like, their colleagues and students. And that really hits home to me, listening to people talk about these educators and what they’ve done. And I think when you watch around the room what it means to other folks, you just feel everybody lifted up a couple of notches and, no matter what stress they might face on a day-to-day basis, what they mean to individuals and what they can see from their colleagues, that’s, that’s really what matters. And then you hear from families, et cetera. So, I think that as we continue to focus on those things that really, really, truly matter, we’re going to make significant progress in attracting more folks into the field and continue our progress that we’ve made.

Carl Van Horn: So, we’ve touched on a number of priorities of you and of the state. Are there any others that you would like to highlight?

Kevin Dehmer: I, I mentioned the early literacy and I think that that’s gonna continue to be touch point for us. The expansion of preschool again, not only is that a huge accomplishment to the administration, but I think for us as a state. We have significant ongoing work on this one, school funding. It rises to the top of conversation every time the state budget comes out. But we did achieve a significant accomplishment in New Jersey in Fiscal Year ‘25, which is the year, fiscal year that just ended in June. It was the first time ever that we fully funded our school funding formula in the state. And that goes back decades. And in fact, you can trace that back to 1974 when Robinson v. Cahill started that later evolved into the Abbott v. Burke cases that I think are commonly known. But, for decades and decades, we’ve been talking about how to do school funding. We created a school funding formula. Supreme Court said, “Okay, this is constitutional”, then we had many years when we had to work towards actually funding it. And we achieved that in 2025. And that gives us a huge jumping off point into the future on what this looks like. Where do we need to tweak? What edits do we need to make? And now that we’ve funded it, that came with a huge cash commitment, by the way, by the governor and this legislature. Since governor took office, we’ve increased funding to our schools by 50%. We went from eight billion to 12 billion dollars. That is such a significant investment in, in our schools. I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it in our history. But that means that we need to continue to push forward and make sure that we’re using those dollars well and continue that investment as we move forward. So, I do think that we need to recognize that accomplishment; it’s been decades that we’ve been trying to do this. We’ve reached that benchmark, but we can’t stop. We need to continue to push forward and improve how we do school funding and make sure we keep those investments up. And, just one note, and this one is a little bit… This is not going to be as visible to the public, but it’s extremely impactful to folks in the school system and certainly for us as a department to make sure that we’re operating efficiently. And that is updating our data systems. We’re going through a major transformation here where we’re going piece by piece and creating entirely new or updated data systems where we’re moving to cutting edge technology, number one. We’re also looking at the impact on school districts and how they communicate with the department to reduce the friction points there so that districts spend less time worrying about those data submissions to the state. And on our end, we reduce error, we speed up all of that processing time, and things like that. So, across the board, we reduce the administrative burden on that. We increase our access to data and all of that makes us a more efficient education system in the state. And that, I think, is going to have long-term benefits. That investment will really pay off.

Carl Van Horn: Thanks for your review of the department and your priorities. Now, I want to shift gears to a question I ask everyone on Work Trends RU, which what was your first paid job when you were a teenager, a young adult, not just raking leaves for your parents’ house, but doing something you actually got paid to do. And what lessons did you learn that carry forward today into your career?

Kevin Dehmer: I had a couple of smaller gigs, but the, the first one that really stuck, I, I worked at Larson’s Ace Hardware. I think I started when I was 14 years old. And, because I was 14 years old, there’s a quirk in the, in the law, which meant I could get paid below the minimum wage because I was learning as we went. So, I didn’t get paid much. And, that being said, I learned a huge amount. And my boss, of course, leaned into that and said, “Look, I can’t pay you much, but you’re sure going to learn a lot”. And that really proved true. And learning, like, the entirety of the hardware business meant learning plumbing, electrical, and all the other things required of home repair. And, as any homeowner knows, it’s a never-ending cycle of fixing and refixing. And still, to this day, leaning on the things that I learned in that job, I do most of my home repair myself.

And I, I would say it’s not just the skills I learned in that, but the folks that I worked with, the owner of the store, it was a small family-owned business. And they instilled a lot of values, I think, that still stick with me. The owner was known to, to make sure you worked hard. And I think that’s important. But he also took a teenager, I was a teenager… here’s his family’s livelihood and he entrusted huge amounts of that livelihood on this teenager because he saw potential in me. And I always appreciated that because I had the opportunity to learn far beyond just sweeping the floors. I learned about supply and demand, how to manage pricing, how to make sure that the orders are coming on time, looking across a section of the store and figuring out what items are not moving and which items are selling well and how to price them accordingly. And, so, learning the economics of the business, I thought was very fascinating and not too many places will allow a teenager do that work. And so, that mutual trust I think was really important. In addition to installing those values of, of hard work. And I think, as it translates now, you know, “hardware store” may not have the broad impact of running a public education system, but what you learn is that you have to put the work in. You have to learn these things. And I think when you work hard and learn all these aspects, you build up that mutual trust. And whether that’s with educators, the legislature, or parents, that’s something that I have to continue to strive to today. But that first job, getting out of the gate, that really matters.

Carl Van Horn: I agree. And, and that is very good lessons you’ve learned.

Kevin, let me thank you again for spending time with us and explaining your work and your ambitions and what you’ve done so far, and wish you continued to success in that role. Look forward to seeing you soon.

Kevin Dehmer: Likewise, thank you so much for having me.

Podcast Close (music playing): Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Work Trends RU, where we explore the issues affecting the future of work, education, and how the workforce can be better supported by both the public and private sectors. Tune in next time as we continue our conversations on the evolving landscape of work and education. (music ends)