Joe Fuller: The increasing competition for workers with technical, social, and business skills is forcing employers to rethink where and how to source their talent. Traditional approaches are simply not keeping up with the pace of technological change, creating an ever-widening skills gap. The shortage is particularly profound outside major Metropolitan areas, where the needs for state-of-the-art skills are just as high, but the sources of talent are fewer and farther between. Jumpstarting workforce development for the digital economy can take time. And efforts by states and the federal government have yielded little by way of results. Forward-thinking employers are beginning to experiment with new approaches to cultivating talent management pipelines. They are trying to tap into new sources of talent and design programs that help participant gain substantive workplace experience as they develop both technical and foundational skills. What are the challenges involved in creating such programs? What attracts young people to participate in work-based learning? And how can educators be convinced to collaborate in launching such programs?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is J.D. Hickey, President and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. J.D ’s training in medicine and law and his background in consulting equipped him to lead one of the “Volunteer State’s” largest employers. But he soon realized that, rather than running a healthcare company with a technology function, he was running a technology company that served healthcare customers. That led him and his team to consider how they were going to source the personnel needed for Blue Cross Blue Shield as it transformed itself in a state—Tennessee—and a city—Chattanooga—chronically short of such talent. An important part of their answer was to launch the BlueSky Institute, a degree-granting partnership with East Tennessee State University that draws on the population of local Hamilton County. We’ll talk about the challenging search for an academic partner and how BlueSky’s recruitment strategy reflects Blue Cross’s community-focused mission and its commitment to diversity. And we’ll consider the potential for programs like BlueSky to work at scale and across job types. J.D., welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, J.D.

J.D. Hickey: Thank you, sir. Glad to be here.

Fuller: J.D., I suspect a lot of our listeners are familiar with Blue Cross Blue Shield through their own health coverage or as an employer or just being familiar with large organizations like that. You run Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee. Tell us how you find yourself in that position in life and a little bit about your operations in the “Volunteer State.”

Hickey: We’re Tennessee’s largest health insurer. We are one of 32 independent Blue Cross plans across the country—a little bit unusual, compared to other Blues, in that we have a very heavy government presence, including both Medicare Advantage, but also Medicaid. I’m a medical doctor and lawyer by training. I spent most of my career prior to Blue Cross at McKinsey & Company, but early in my career was the state of Tennessee Medicaid director. I had the privilege of serving the Governor Bredesen administration through some pretty heady years of reform in that program. That both made some lifelong connections to the folks at Blue Cross of Tennessee, but also came in as a bit of a content expert on that side.

Fuller: What are your core operations? What are your key success factors, if you will? And how does that show up in terms of your workforce? What type of skills do you need, and how’s that changing, given all that’s going on in healthcare, but also with technology?

Hickey: Our big competitors are the big nationals, the big national for-profit: UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Aetna, and the like. We’re a little bit unusual in that we’re a mission-driven, not-for-profit. We are a full taxpaying entity. In fact, we’re traditionally Tennessee’s largest taxpayer. But we are mission-driven. In terms of our expertise, there was certainly a time in our industry, in our company, when we were probably best described as a “claims processor.” If you went back 30 years, in fact, that was probably the No. 1 job in the building. We had thousands of people who fit that description. Fast forward, all that work has now been automated. I think we have less than 50 people who touch claims as part of their day-to-day jobs, and it’s something definitely unusual if a claim actually requires any type of human intervention at all. We are, in the meantime, over that 30, 40 years, we became a clinical organization. We have over 1,000 nurses, spent a lot of time trying to steer and intervene in member care. But in the last five years, we’ve become an IT technology institution. We’ve got almost 1,000 IT professionals, primarily software developers in cyber security. And it’s, if we think about Blue Cross of Tennessee staying independent for another 75 years, it’s the talent pipeline that we spend most of our time trying to think about how we secure. We struggle to get the quantity or the quality of technology professionals that we need, and it’s something that’s only increasing in severity as the last few years have gone by, for sure.

Fuller: Do you find that struggle for talent, do you ascribe it to being a health insurer, is it just a shortage of skills in Tennessee, generally, or a shortage of skills that are accessible to you where you’re located in Chattanooga?

Hickey: Listen, I think this is a nationwide phenomenon. Certainly, when I talk to fellow CEOs—whether they’re health insurance, healthcare, or they’re in some other business entirely—there just aren’t enough trained students coming out of America’s post-secondary institutions in this field, generally, and certainly not with the practical skill sets that we need in order for those graduating students to be productive employees from day one. Prior to Covid, most of the new hires that we make come out of, they’re recent graduates of post-secondary schools, within a two-hour drive of Chattanooga. That’s certainly started to change post-pandemic, as we’ve moved to a remote workforce. But what happened is, we hire those tech students who are coming out of those computer science programs, and they weren’t trained in the tools that we use. They’re not trained on the platforms that we use. And probably more importantly, their education is not grounded in pragmatic team-based deliverables—so working together on active real-world problems. And what our IT team had done over the last decade or two is, we developed what I think of as a top-off program—so when new hires came in, they were essentially put through an informal 12- to 18-month program that our IT professionals had developed in order to try to turn those new employees into a more productive workforce. That was one of the original incidents when we sat down, and we said there’s got to be a better way to do this. And we turned our attention to BlueSky.

Fuller: You mentioned, J.D., in passing the BlueSky program, that was actually what first started my conversation with you, my curiosity about the origins of that program and how you’re using it to augment that talent pipeline that is too constrained for you to get the talent unique. Can you describe to our listeners what BlueSky is and its origins?

Hickey: Sure. BlueSky is our accelerated Bachelor’s of Computing degree. It’s a 27-month program. It’s a hands-on, in-person model. Almost all of the curriculum is based here on our campus, side-by-side with our IT professionals. It is free tuition. It does have a guaranteed high-paying job on the back end. Right now, that job’s going to be about $68,000 to $70,000 a year. We do targeted recruiting, specifically, from what we call Hamilton County’s “priority schools.” Diversifying our IT workforce was one of the goals of this program, as well. We’ve done pretty well on that so far. And then we’ve got an intrusive counseling program that we certainly didn’t invent. We cribbed heavily from Georgia State and some other institutions, but that’s the core of it. We’re now in our second cohort, so we have 60 students today. We’re in the process of recruiting our third cohort. And our first group is now in the final term of that program, which incorporates paid internships, and, hopefully, those will all be new Blue Cross employees as we come into the second half of the year.

Fuller: So when you talk about priority schools, how do you go about attracting candidates to the program? What are you looking for? How do you sell the idea of being part of BlueSky to a potential participant?

Hickey: We partnered early on with a Hamilton County non-profit called PEF [Public Education Foundation]. Dan Challener leads that institution. And what they brought us was, goodness, multi-decade relationships with the professors and the leaders of these local high schools that then knew the students and helped us get direct reach into students who could be interested. We’ve also, our recruiting revolves heavily around—we call them “game challenges”—that we do on campus, and we bring as many students that are interested onto the campus so they can get experience for what it’s like to be on here and work up here on our campus. And we run a multi-hour game-design challenge with our post-secondary partner ETSU [Eastern Tennessee State University] and PEF to try to generate some real excitement on what this program’s like, give them some interaction, not only with us but with our existing cohort of students, as well. If I think about ways that we want to improve this program going forward, reaching deeper down into the high school and middle school programs is really high on our list. And if I think about one of the big surprises of this program so far, when we were whiteboarding it originally, I would’ve told you that 90-plus percent of the students we attracted were all techies. In fact, the most common characteristic of our students is they want a high-paying job, and they want as short a path to a high-paying job as they can.

Fuller: So J.D., you mentioned earlier that it was controversial that this be a program that leads to a bachelor’s degree. You mentioned ETSU, Eastern Tennessee State University, as a partner. Why was that controversial? What was the argument for it being a certificate program as opposed to a degree?

Hickey: There were a few aspects of this. One was, frankly, we struggled early on with finding an interested post-secondary partner who was offering a bachelor’s component. We had lots of would-be partners who wanted to partner with us on certificate training. So it certainly would’ve been an easier route. We have a partnership with Google that offers certificate training to our BlueSky students today along the path. We also hire lots of people who are certificate-trained elsewhere in our organization. So we don’t have anything against certificates and that background. But I’ll just say, I’ve always found that the deep irony has always struck me that the folks who will pontificate that you don’t need a college bachelor’s degree anymore, if you look around the room where that’s coming from, it’s always from people with advanced professional degrees. But for us, it came down to who we were training and for what purpose. We were not interested in producing the next generation of frontline IT staff and software production. For better or worse, that skill set is really easy to come by in terms of outsourcing. It’s cheap, it scales easily. What we were interested in doing is training the next generation of business leaders and not just technology business leaders. I think there’s a good chance that my successor, not my immediate successor, then the next one after that will probably have a technology background. That’s what we are interested in doing, and there’s no doubt that the bachelor’s degree is more powerful, particularly if you want to build on it with advanced analytics and the like. The last thing I’ll just say is, listen, if you can condense the bachelor’s degree into two years, then why not?

Fuller: Well, it certainly provides your graduates with that much more purchasing power, if you will, in the market for jobs, should they ever be leaving your employment or maybe even more serious consideration or advancement beyond their technology jobs with Blue Cross Blue Shield. You mentioned that you’ve been working with Google. We’ve had Lisa Gevelber, who’s the head of the Grow with Google program there. They offer certificates to educators and skills providers, alike, in all sorts of different areas. How do you find the Google program, and how have you found working with them and getting those certificates to add to the credential base of your BlueSky participants?

Hickey: They’ve been a great partner, very generous. For us it was an add-on. It wasn’t core to the curriculum. But if our students can build a portfolio of these certificates as they’re going through their core curriculum, that’s just a great added bonus.

Fuller: A concern a lot of employers have when we talk to them about creating programs like BlueSky is that they’ll end up paying to educate people who are going to go elsewhere and don’t want to be the fountain that everyone else drinks from, the “tragedy of the commons” story. What were your concerns about that? What have you done to combat it? And are you seeing other local employers casting covetous eyes at what you’ve created with BlueSky?

Hickey: So I should emphasize, we don’t have any hook built into the program today. If they take our job, great, they get a full salary. If they don’t work for us, that’s okay. We celebrate their success. I may have to revisit that this time next year. Hopefully, it’s not necessary. Our rationale, one is, again, we’re a mission-driven, not-for-profit. Part of the goal of this program was trying to create more job opportunities for students in our community. So it’s not a failure for us. If those students go get good jobs down the street at one of the other large employers here in Chattanooga or somewhere else in the state or elsewhere, we don’t view that as a huge loss. It is an issue for us as we think about scaling further. At some point, it becomes a real economic drain, if we’re training other folks’ IT staff. It has been an expensive program from a start-up perspective. Hopefully it won’t, from a run-rate perspective. So the other reason, I would say is, I think we’re just willing to roll the dice, that if the students come and have the experience up here, they make those connections, that they’re going to stay for some window of time and at least start their careers here, and we’ll see how that actually pans out. I would also say, when we designed the program, we were asking the students to take a leap of faith for us, too. A lot of these students had other opportunities. The idea is that they’re going to go to a start-up school. And when we were recruiting our first cohort, we didn’t even have the space built out. So we were sort of pointing to a blank area on our campus and saying, “Imagine what this could be.” And I just found somewhere, at a gut level, it felt like, if the students are taking a leap of faith on us, we ought to be willing to do the same. And we’ll see how that plays out. We’ve polled our students, both informally and formally, along the way. Pretty consistently, 70 percent tell us that they intend to stay with us for the first few years after graduation. That’s gone up and down a little bit, but not much. And it’s been pretty consistent across both cohorts.

Fuller: Research would confirm the idea that workers, particularly entry-level workers, when they find a comfortable home in an organization, really their first preference is to grow with that organization, stay with that organization. One of the attributes of the program that you mentioned earlier is that the students are largely on your campus. They’re coming to work as part of getting their bachelor’s degree. What kind of impact do you feel that has on them and their coworkers on legitimizing the program in the eyes of incumbent colleagues?

Hickey: We designed the program pre-Covid. And so, by the time we got the first cohort in the door, we were post-pandemic, and all of our employees were home. So 85 percent of our workforce is still working full-time from home. It doesn’t work if our BlueSky students are here on campus, and all of the IT folks that they’re supposed to be learning from are working from home. So we had a little friction on that point. What has frankly saved us was that we’ve got enough passionate IT workers who are so passionate about this program that they’re willing to change paradigms and come in and start working on a daily basis here on campus. We didn’t have to force them to come in. But, otherwise, listen, having the BlueSky students here on campus, it’s a great dynamic, in my opinion. We’ve got where our core headquarters can seat almost 4,000 employees on a given day. We’ve probably only got 400 here. But we’ve got these two cohorts of young, energetic students who are here every day, and it’s been a great element, frankly. Part of our support model is, we do daily meals free on campus for breakfast and for lunch. We were thinking financial support, nutrition support. But one of the things that it has done is, it has taken our BlueSky, and it puts them into daily contact with all of our other employees who happen to be on campus, including our exec team, who’s down there on a regular basis, as well. I think it would’ve been fairly easy for the BlueSky campus to become sort of walled off over there, a node unto itself. And, in fact, it puts them into general circulation. We do that purposefully in other ways, too. But what it does do is—not every day, but certainly with some regularity—if you come down and into our campus, you’ll see our BlueSky-ers sitting around with some of our exec team, and you better believe they’re talking about everything except the BlueSky curriculum, which has been beneficial from both sides, for sure.

Fuller: So as you look at BlueSky, the program has evolved as you’ve learned a little bit. Do you see a potential to expand it in different directions, to add different types of career paths and go beyond tech?

Hickey: I would say, this is a precursor; we have room to scale within the existing program. We still have 280 outsourced IT jobs that we’d love to fully replace with internal staff. At any point, this is our No. 1 source of hiring. I think we’ve got 60, 70 open IT positions at any time; we’re struggling to hire. We can get bigger within the current design, probably on the order of magnitude of 50 students a year on that side. At some point, we really are training other employers’ IT teams. And, while we don’t have a philosophical bent against that, it is expensive and something that, at some point, it’s going to be difficult to justify. We have thought about adapting it to other disciplines. And, frankly, we need to stay focused on our existing program for now. We haven’t even gotten our first cohort through to graduation. We have lots of planned improvements. I mentioned one—about getting deeper into the local high school, middle school system. We’d love to crack housing, which we haven’t done yet. But the reasons it’s difficult to expand to other disciplines, other hiring areas in Blue Cross, I think, is twofold. One is the start-up costs on this program were higher than I think we realized, and I don’t just mean dollar expenses. In terms of time and energy, it took a lot of work to find an interested post-secondary partner who would engage with us and redesign the curriculum—probably three full years of work, a lot of time and energy from our senior team. And if we think about now cutting and pasting that and trying to duplicate that in some other area, well, the justification’s got to be really high. And we are fortunate in that Blue Cross tends to be the employer of choice for pretty much all the other disciplines that we hire.

Fuller: If we move a little bit beyond BlueSky, here we are talking in the late fall, almost Thanksgiving of 2023. The society has been transfixed by the launch of generative AI. Maybe we’re now a little bit after the original response of bewilderment and awe, but technology is changing fast. There is a cadence to technology development that is well beyond the historical capacity of traditional skills providers, like educators, to keep up. How are you thinking about reskilling, upskilling, incumbent employees and keeping your existing incumbent staff fresh and state-of-the-art in light of all these changes?

Hickey: If you think about our position in the health insurance marketplace, we’re up against competitors that are literally 20, 30 times our size. And so for us, GenAI has the potential to be a great leveler, if you would. There’s a line you hear, particularly, is leaders are talking to their employees around, “Don’t worry, this is only going to take away the dull aspects of your job.” I don’t believe that. I believe this is going to have a pretty profound impact on our workforce. The best thing we can do is embrace it, give them access, train them, and then try to involve them in as many use cases as we can build out responsibly. We do have an enterprise GenAI strategy. We do have a growing portfolio of use cases. We do have a steady stream of education and orientation curriculum that’s being made to all employees at every level in the company. When I apply it to BlueSky, I do worry, frankly, that some of the IT curriculum that we’re training them on may be out date as fast as we’re training. I think that’s just a general truism in the post-secondary space. But I also know that our company and our workforce is going to need all sorts of support, in terms of making this turn. And the best thing we can have is a whole pipeline of talent that’s trained on these tools and can help bring us along.

Fuller: So J.D., if we were back in touch with you in four or five years, what would you hope would be the steady state of BlueSky and your opportunities to create this new, what we’d call “talent pipeline” into the organization?

Hickey: We’d love to nearly double the size of that program just for our own internal hiring needs. We really are Hamilton County-specific right now, although we’re a statewide company. At some point, we need to start recruiting in from other similar priority schools around the rest of Tennessee. I’d love to be further ingrained in the school systems, even more so than we are, and I would love to crack housing. I think it’s one of the things that academic advisers, experts, guided us on when we designed the program. But it hasn’t been into two years in the program, where I’ve really understood just how important that cohort effect is in terms of creating that culture that pulls students through, keeps that retention where we want. It creates, frankly, just a better program and a better experience for our students. Unfortunately, it basically doubles the cost of the program, as probably you and others well know, and it wasn’t sustainable for us right out of the gate. And I’d like to believe that, once we actually prove that we can produce productive employees and retain them, that this will be a more interesting model. I also think that ETSU and others should be able to package this design process up so that it’s not a three-year, start-to-finish before you get your first student in the door program. And, listen, we’re one of 30-plus Blue plans across the United States. So I think we have the chance of encouraging some other Blue plans to do the same.

Fuller: It is interesting to hear you confirm something, J.D., which is providing what are called “surround services” to a learner who’s trying to make that education employment transition but comes from a modest background, where there’s a lot of urgency about creating income right away, is the dominance of these surround services, whether it’s housing, you mentioned free breakfast and lunch, transport’s also another issue. And until we somehow manage to get our arms around the disparities, in terms of what happens in local communities, that really inhibit the ability of people with talent and a lot of drive to succeed. But we’re going to always be wrestling with this challenge of people who are suffering from that ZIP-code-as-fate outcome that has been widely written about in recent years. J.D., I think we understand the basic principles that led you to found BlueSky, but maybe you could talk about a little bit through the experience of the student or the learner. What’s the day in the life of someone, and how does that build their experience such that they can prosper in one of these good-paying jobs that you have on offer for them?

Hickey: Sure. Well, listen, the core of that experience is here on campus. So students are typically on campus nine o’clock [AM]till late in the afternoon—if not five o’clock, then close to it. We do assist with transportation. We’ve got a dedicated campus. It’s embedded into our IT area, our IT floors, if you would. We’ve had to now expand it twice as we continue to bring on new students. And then they’re in a classroom for large portions of the day, and they’re being taught by primarily in-person ETSU professors. Matt Desjardins is our lead professor. A lot of that curriculum is led by our two or three ETSU professors who are here onsite every day. They do some of that coursework virtually with ETSU, particularly the gen-ed-type requirements. And then they’re interacting with our existing IT staff. A lot of problem-based, team-based problem solving is designed into the curriculum for day one, involves our existing IT staff. They do all have mentors within our IT department. Our first cohort all had mentors with our senior executive team, as well—although that was interesting... We phased that out for cohort two. We still give them access to our senior team, but we don’t do as much direct, one-on-one based on some student feedback on that basis. And then, they’re working in teams with their cohort of students with our Blue Cross IT professionals for much of the rest of the day. And when the day ends, there’s a surprising number of students who are still here, either working on their homework or, frankly, using our equipment for video games and the like. I mentioned that cohort effect earlier that’s worked really well for us. And then, throughout the day, they’re back and forth, using our gym, using our cafeteria on campus, interacting with the rest of our employee base. So that’s pretty typical. There are periodic visits up to the ETSU campus. ETSU wasn’t an obvious fit for us, given that they’re a few hours away from the main campus, but they’ve done an excellent job of bridging that and transporting the students up to campus as needed.

Fuller: So this has all the hallmarks of a classic, what we’d call “compensated work-based learning environment,” where they’re both physically at the employer, working with future colleagues, having a mentor, but also doing actual work, as opposed to just studying. You mentioned earlier, J.D., that you had some difficulty finding a partner, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about your experience, because our research has indicated that, while many educators are keen to work more closely with businesses, it’s awfully hard to get common ground, where both the educator and the business is getting the essence of what they’re looking for, and that a lot of educators are either hesitant to get in too deeply with an employer or find that what the employer wants is something that just is too far a reach for them. What was your experience, and what did you learn from it?

Hickey: So this, by far and away, has been the biggest disappointment of the program since inception. I would say we were probably pretty naive on this front. After we designed the program, the first thing we did was run a competitive RFI [request for information] and then a competitive RFP [request for proposal] for procurement. And almost, I think we had a single post-secondary institution in Tennessee that actually responded to us. And even then we, frankly, wasted a lot of time with a potential partner who we just couldn’t see eye to eye with on the fundamental design aspects for the program. The No. 1 thing we heard for the first year or two of this program was, “Hey, just give me all that money you want to invest in BlueSky, and we’ll ramp up the production of our existing computer science programs and send those students your way.” And, frankly, it was a real breakthrough when we got connected with ETSU and Brian Nolan, and we, finally, we were able to find a peer who understood that that’s not what we were trying to do, that the existing program graduates were not performing well in our jobs, and that we were trying to fundamentally redesign the program. I also would just say, personally, I did not anticipate how little insight these chancellors of the post-secondary schools have into what happens to their graduates when they leave. So when we’d start those conversations, they didn’t really have any sense for how many of their students we were hiring today, and they certainly didn’t have any sense for how those students were performing in our school. Now, that’s a gap we’re partially responsible for, as well, but just a big chasm between large employers and the local schools, particularly given the huge proportion of students that we hire out of these schools, particularly the ones that, as I mentioned earlier, tend to be within a 60-, 90-minute drive. One thing I will say is, for the chancellors of some of those institutions who are currently graduating less than a third of their incoming student body, they’re just not credible partners. And if you think about [how] some of those institutions have to figure out a way to work with their local large employer base, the first thing they’ve got to do is address their current graduation numbers before they start knocking on those doors.

Fuller: Well, I must admit, I’m not surprised to hear that. I’m sorry to hear it, but we did the largest survey ever undertaken at community colleges, asking them about their relationships with businesses, and over 60 percent of our respondents from the community college system didn’t know what percentage of their current rural students were working while studying—so-called “working learners”—and the numbers well over 55 percent in most campuses. And a lot of campuses, it’s 80 percent. And often those students are working 30, 40 hours a week in addition to going to school. Very hard to plan curriculum, schedule classes at the right time, if you don’t even know what your students’ lives are.

Hickey: I’ll just add one other point of frustration. I say it in the context of we have been very pleased with ETSU and Dr. Nolan’s team. We would not be here today without them. But I’ll still say, we still have some ongoing tension around student retention, student attrition. One of our ongoing goals on this program was 100 percent success, 100 percent graduation, and then 100 percent placement into successful high-paying jobs. We’ve done really well on that front. But when we have students at risk, we still react differently. I think we’re still trying to make sure we’re still on the same page. From our perspective as Blue Cross, when we have a student that’s threatening to leave or is on the fence, that’s a stop the train, that’s a pull in the family. “Let’s talk about what we’re doing. It’s not working. What else can we serve you?” And I think this is not specific to any one school, I think this is a general truism about a lot of post-secondary schools in America. That’s just how they bake the cake. And we are trying to set a fundamentally different expectation. And then what goes with that—this is aspirational, I don’t want to pretend we’ve cracked it—but even when we do lose those students, we’ve got some obligation there to those students who fall out of the system. So how else can we serve those students if it’s not in the BlueSky program?

Fuller: A couple of insights there that also speak to our research here at Harvard, that first is that, thankfully, there are those points of light out there, like Eastern Tennessee State University, that you’re working with. There are a number of exemplary four-year programs and two-year community college programs. But the exception proves the rule. They are programs that have a long history of very close collaboration with employers. So they almost have the reflexes now as to how to work with employers. And, of course, once they built that credibility, employers bring their next need and their next need and their next need, and that creates a virtuous cycle of building curriculum and a good reputation with learners. So all of a sudden your enrollment bucks the trend of enrollment shrinking. Also, you mentioned families, and certainly for any type of work-based learning environment—whether it’s an apprenticeship program in high school, like the Career-Wise program, which is getting a lot of attention, or a program like BlueSky that surround a family and the commitment of parents, caregivers, siblings to the success of that learner has a very, very big impact. And engaging that family unit in a dialogue about what the program’s about and why it’s going to yield a good outcome for a learner is as important as any career choice as it is in any family. Well, J.D. Hickey, President and CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, thank you for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Hickey: Thank you, sir.

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