Welcome to Chikeaguh.com focused on the work Chike Aguh as well as his mission of creating a future of work for all.

Chike Aguh’s career built on a strong educational foundation. Aguh holds a B.A in Political Science from Tufts University, where he acted as Student Body President and as the co-founder of the Emerging Black Leaders Symposium. Later, he attended Harvard Graduate School of Education, earning an Ed.M in Education Policy and Management. Chike also holds an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and MBA from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. The education and insights that Chike Aguh earned through his collegiate career and extra-curricular activities put him in the position to hone his potential in the fields of education, politics, and workforce development.  

Previously, Chike was an education policy official working under the Mayor of New York, a Fulbright Scholar in Thailand, Director of Corporate Strategy at Education Advisory Board, CEO of a national social enterprise, and Senior Principal and Future of Work Lead a the McCrystal Group. Chike Aguh has also held council and advisory positions, working as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Future of Work Taskforce, expert advisor for the AI Education Project, and inaugural Future of Work Fellow at the International Society for Technology in Education. In his varied work history, Chike Aguh has developed a holistic understanding of multiple sectors as well as the intersects between policy, education, and workforce development. To this point, Chike has worked to emphasize the importance of making high paying jobs accessible to individuals impacted by the modernization of the workforce and implementation of new technologies and automation.

In addition to his work experience, Chike holds several distinctions earned over the course of his career. He is a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar and a 40 under 40 honoree from both the Wharton School and Washington Business Journal. In the past, Chike Aguh was a member of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Alumni Board of Directors and Advisory Board Chair of the Prince of George’s County Social Innovation Fund.

Currently, Chike Aguh is a 2020-2021 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights. There he is writing a book on what the future of work will look like and the impact it will have on racial equity. Aguh is also the inaugural Head of Economic Mobility Pathways at the Education Design Lab. In this position, he is responsible for leading the Community College Growth Engine Fund, an effort working to bring the diverse network of community college graduates to high growth fields. Chike Aguh notes that the organization was the brainchild of Kathleen deLaski, who saw the importance of the Education Design Lab while working on the board of trustees at George Mason University. There she saw that there was a difficultly bridging the gap between higher education and employment for students that did not come from means. Since its foundation, the Education Design Lab has utilized human centered design principles on learners to bring learners from where they are to where they imagine themselves in terms of employment. In his role as the Head of Economic Mobility Pathways is to discover how we can use community colleges to rectify some of the obstacles that exist in the current system for gaining employment. One notable way to do so is to make the process accessible to the diverse range of learners and workers that exist within community college settings.

The Community College Growth Engine Fund is working with six colleges across the country: CUNY, Prince George’s Community College, Austin Community College, Ivy Tech, Pima Community College, and Seattle Community College. The goal of the program is to build micro pathways that will lead individuals to jobs in less than a year, with the idea that the six affiliated colleges will serve over 4,000 new majority learners by the end 2022 by creating 18 micro pathways for 18 high-worth jobs. From there, The Community College Growth Engine Fund hopes to bring these micro pathways across the country to serve over a million learners and get them employment by 2025. 

The work that Chike Aguh is doing with the Community College Growth Engine Fund comes at a pivotal time in our nation where we are facing both rampant unemployment and the potential redundancy of certain positions. He posits that we should evaluate the problem of joblessness in the US by defining the problem in two ways. One is that new technologies will eliminate the need for certain jobs. For example, the development of autonomous vehicles will contribute to economic growth in the transportation sector but may simultaneously eliminate the need for certain trucking jobs in the future. Other jobs will undergo many changes because of the influence of technology and automation, making them almost unrecognizable when compared to their previous state. The individuals effected by these changes will need to undergo training to learn skills that empower them to keep pace with the developments in their space. Together, these groups that will be impacted by automation and technological innovation in the workforce make up as much as 60% of American jobs.

Chike Aguh acknowledges that there are a lot of factors in today’s landscape that emphasize the importance of controlling the job market’s trajectory. The continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in addition to record high unemployment rates and the growing understanding of racial inequities point to the need for the country to invest in the future of its citizens. To this point, Chike Aguh hopes that this site will act as a resource for those hoping to learn more about how automation and globalization will further impact the job market across sectors and what we can do to ensure individuals find jobs that match with their potential. Posts discuss topics such as employment opportunities that are changing in the face of technological innovation and automation, critical aspects of the job market that must be addressed under the new president’s leadership, and how individuals that hold high distinctions within their company’s infrastructure can assist with fighting the inequities that plague our current system.