Earlier this year Julie Cayo was named president and CEO of Employ Milwaukee, after 13 years with the organization. Cayo served as Employ Milwaukee’s interim president and CEO for a year beginning in June 2024. BizTimes reporter Samantha Dietel spoke with Cayo about her vision for Milwaukee County’s workforce development board, the role of AI in workforce accessibility and more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BizTimes: What interested you about leading Employ Milwaukee?
Cayo: “Well, I have been here since 2012 and my roots with Employ Milwaukee are really the fund development planning, grant writing and designing programs. What interested me is Employ Milwaukee is an employer-led nonprofit organization, and it’s the largest in Wisconsin, after the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. That’s in terms of funding, number of programs and individuals served, and employers served. It’s the largest workforce development agency, so the opportunity to use my planning background and my operational knowledge of the system to help connect job seekers to good jobs with advancement opportunities, and to connect employers to the talent they need to grow was very appealing.”
Now that you are officially president and CEO, what is your vision going forward?
“My vision going forward is to be a collaborative partner with our business, government, community and faith-based partners. More and more funding is changing and sometimes reducing, so my goal is not to duplicate services. Although we at Employ Milwaukee need to ensure that we are doing outreach and we’re communicating our services to job seekers (and) employers, we can also be a foundational partner for other initiatives so that collectively, all of the stakeholders in Milwaukee are improving the economy for residents and businesses.
“My style is very collaborative. I want to be a part of something with other stakeholders, so that we can play to each other’s strengths and fill in gaps that others might have. I strongly feel collective impact – and the way you’re able to do things together – is really what will move the dial on getting employers the workers they need, but also helping job seekers get the education and skills they need to compete in the job market.”
As part of that vision, what workforce issues are you hoping to address?
“I think big issues right now that we’re focused on are really understanding, keeping pace with and pivoting in response to advancements in artificial intelligence – which will impact our workforce on many levels and accelerate the digital divide that already exists – identifying and harnessing the potential opportunities in manufacturing and production that may be available through new federal policies, and then ensuring we reach our youth early and often with career exploration and development.
“We really should capitalize upon the fact that Milwaukee is the future of the workforce, and census data shows that it has a younger population that will be entering the workforce in future years, and really that generation has a built-in understanding of the digital landscape, so there’s a lot of assets there that we can capture.”
AI has arrived in the workplace. How do you see that impacting the ability of people to access jobs?
“It’s going to be important for our youth and job seekers to be trained on how to harness the power of AI to be a relevant worker. In future years, there will certainly be jobs that will be replaced by AI, and a lot of that information is coming out now, but there will also be new jobs created by AI. Understanding what those emerging occupations are – and the skills, knowledge and credentials needed to be in that occupation – is really what we need to be thinking of. I think with my planning background, that is an advantage for us, because we’re not looking at today or tomorrow. We’re looking at next year, five years, 10 years. We’ve been offering AI programming to our youth since last year. We offered it to our Camp RISE participants who are 10 to 13 years old, also to our high school youth participants and we’re going to be announcing some new investments in AI in the manufacturing sector very soon, in partnership with Mayor (Cavalier) Johnson.”
To what extent have federal funding changes affected Employ Milwaukee?
“To date, we have not been impacted at all. However, there has been the potential for it, so we track it very closely. We have an approximately $18 million budget. Ninety-eight percent of our funding is rooted in federal money. That’s (Community Development Block Grant) money, Department of Labor, American Rescue Plan Act. It is a concern of ours, and we’re tracking it closely. But so far, all of our grants remain intact. We have eight federal grants, and we have WIOA, which is the Workforce and Innovation Opportunity Act. We have funding in that annually for youth, adults and individuals that were laid off from employment. We are receiving our allocations as we have.
“I have to say that we understand our funding here really well, so we’re able to pivot. We have our eyes on what’s happening, but we also understand what we might need to do if there is less funding.”
How can businesses support or engage with Employ Milwaukee?
“There are multiple ways. We have a business solutions team, and they have the toolkit and the resources to assist employers. A lot of the things they can assist with are offsetting the cost of labor when businesses are either deciding if they want to hire somebody. So maybe they want to have a temporary employment situation to see if it’s a fit or if they want to make a hire, but someone needs to take time away from their day to train the new worker. We actually have resources for both of those things that directly help employers offset the cost of bringing on new workers. The way they can engage with us is to go to our website, and we have all of the contact information for our business solutions specialists there, and they can reach out. But we also have been able to provide opportunities for talent sourcing in all sectors.
“We can host hiring events, we can do pre-screening. There’s a lot of things we can do relative to the HR aspect of companies hiring that, at no cost to them, can help. We can also help with things that can assist companies with layoff aversion. If a company thinks – and this might become more and more relevant with AI – that they might need to lay off a portion of their workforce because the skills needs are changing, we actually have funding to provide that skills training to current workers. That’s called our Incumbent Worker Training program, so we can help employers make sure that their current team is skilled up and pacing with the changes that are happening.”
What’s new at Employ Milwaukee?
“We’ll be doing more investments in manufacturing, so more to come on that. But that is one of our prime focuses right now. Camp RISE has been around for a few years, but it is growing and it is expanding, and we have a lot of employers that have asked to be involved with it. That is something we’re very focused on now too, is our youth programming, to ensure we have as many employers as possible participating in it, and so that’s Camp RISE and Earn & Learn.
“We will be starting a campaign targeting employers to fundraise for Earn & Learn this fall. Our hope is that any employer that would like to host a youth participant at their work site in the summer for a seven-week, 20-hour-per-week type of work experience, that we can provide that to them, and they just fund the cost of the wages per worker. We’ve had great feedback from some employers that this is a great model, because it kind of takes the back of house things in HR of bringing on temp staff off of the company, and they can just focus on providing a great work experience and oversight to the youth. So that’s coming, too.”
