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Blog Graphic STEAMe Fired Up Podcast - Career Pathways

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Career Pathways Connecting Youth Beyond the Four-Year Track

STEAMe

 

On the Fired Up Podcast, hosts Dr. Pete Bavis and Patrick Hughes sit down with STEAMe Founder & CEO Rachel Kohler and Co-Founder & Chief Systems Officer Dr. Nichole Pinkard to talk about how STEAMe powered the All Evanston Hiring Hub, a cross-community workforce initiative that will connect residents completing sector- or occupation-based training to employment through the Ryan Family Foundation Workforce Development Initiative.

Key Takeaways

  • An untracked career pathway is an invisible one. What happens to the kids who skip college? In Evanston, IL, for a quarter of every graduating class, the honest answer was: nobody knew.
  • Start with the end in mind. Show families the actual job and pay before asking them to trust the path.
  • Workforce systems only work as connected infrastructure. "Train and pray" becomes "Train, Place, Prosper" only when intermediaries, training providers, and employers share real-time data instead of working in silos.

Episode Highlights

Nichole's connection with Evanston, IL

Nichole Pinkard's tie to the city goes back decades, to a summer LEAD program at Northwestern that first exposed her to the gap between opportunity and reality. She stayed connected to Evanston through her faculty role at Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy, later joining the Evanston school board and co-founding STEAMe, bringing systems-design thinking to the same community that shaped her.

Rachel's background in tech

Before STEAMe, Rachel Kohler was CEO of NowPow, a social care referral platform that connected health systems, patients, and community organizations to manage referrals at scale. She is now applying that same model of building multi-sided technology for a fragmented system to workforce development. At NowPow, the goal was to put people on pathways to better health. Today, STEAMe helps workforce initiatives put people on pathways to greater wealth.

 

At STEAMe, we're connecting workforce intermediaries like Trade Collective, learners, training providers, and employers, and helping those learners get to and through training and to a good job.

Rachel Kohler, Founder & CEO, STEAMe
Rachel Kohler, CEO, STEAMe

The All Evanston Hiring Hub

The All Evanston Hiring Hub is a three-year demonstration launched by Northwestern and STEAMe, funded by the Ryan Family Foundation, connecting Youth Job Center, Evanston Own It, The Trade Collective, National Louis University, and Per Scholas into one shared hiring system. Northwestern acts as the anchor institution, convening partners and overseeing job placement and outcome measurement, while STEAMe supplies the underlying data and digital infrastructure.

No one owns the problem once you graduate from high school. If you go to college, the college owns it. But if not, then you own the problem. Someone has to say I own it, and we (STEAMe) own creating a system that anyone who's from here can connect into and find their place."

nicole pinkard steame co-founder headshot
Nichole Pinkard, Founder & CSO, STEAMe

Begin with the end in mind

Rather than asking learners and families to trust an abstract path, STEAMe’s job portal helps workforce initiatives work backward from the destination—showing the real job and real pay before training even begins. Watch the podcast to learn how a first-generation family became comfortable with their son’s decision to pursue a career in the trades instead of attending college.

Job Search Tools

 

 I've sat in meetings for a long time where we talk about the economic viability of living in Evanston, how you get a wage that's going to allow you to live in Evanston. What I'm seeing here is a system that can intentionally scaffold that, shepherd you along the way to that reality. 

Dr. Pete Bavis, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at Evanston Township High School
Dr. Pete Bavis,  Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction, ETHS

Workforce intelligence

STEAMe's workforce intelligence runs on daily labor market data rather than static reports. The system collects and refreshes labor intelligence information every day, so employers, training providers, and educational institutions aren't waiting on state data that's already stale, "postmortem," by the time it lands. That daily data curates the job portals that align with each workforce initiative's pipelines, giving training providers a real-time view of what employers need in the market, information they can then use to attract and prepare the right learners for those pathways.

STEAMe Job Portal Product

If we do this well, I think we're going to shock the hell out of the industry. We're going to wake up a whole world of kids to potential.

Patrick Hughes, Jr., Trade Collective Founder
Patrick Hughes, Jr., Trade Collective Founder

Fired Up Podcast

Fired Up Podcast: A Trade Collective Production focus on the Evanston community and the approximately 10 mile radius surrounding it. This show is a dedicated space for the conversations that matter most to our local students, families and businesses. 

Hosts: 

Patrick Hughes: The Founder and Chief Connector of The Trade Collective. Patrick is an Evanston entrepreneur and advocate who has spent decades building inclusive partnerships through organizations like Natural Ties and Inclusion Solutions.

Dr. Pete Bavis: The Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction at Evanston Township High School. A veteran educator with over 16 years of leadership, Pete is a champion for academic rigor and ensuring every student has access to a successful pathway.

FAQs

What is a hiring hub?

STEAMe Hiring Hub(™) is shared digital infrastructure that connects training programs, employers, and community organizations around one goal: moving learners from training into real jobs, and tracking what happens after.

Instead of every program running its own disconnected pipeline, a hiring hub gives an entire sector or community a single system built to close "the last mile to employment," the point where talent pipelines usually break down.

What is STEAMe's Job Portal?

The Job Portal connects talent pools to real, up-to-date jobs, scaling employer matching so qualified learners reach high-demand opportunities faster. Postings are auto-sourced and refresh daily, curated by geography, sector, and occupation, and learners, navigators, coaches, and employers all work inside the same system rather than separate spreadsheets.

What is the All Evanston Hiring Hub?

The All Evanston Hiring Hub is a three-year workforce initiative, funded by the Ryan Family Foundation and anchored by Northwestern University, that gives every training and hiring effort across Evanston, Illinois a shared system to plug into. Rather than each partner tracking learners separately, the hub is meant to be, as Dr. Nichole Pinkard described it on the episode, "the central organization that every talent pipeline initiative in the city will feed into." It runs on STEAMe's technology platform and launched July 8, 2026.

What is STEAMe's Advanced Analytics, and why does real-time data matter?

Advanced Analytics turns workforce data into a single, real-time picture by combining a program's own data with outside sources like labor market and census data, instead of the delayed, siloed reports most workforce systems rely on.