Latest / The Diversity Career Podcast with Fexingo: Inclusion, Equity, and Underrepresented Professionals / How a Food Company Built a Career Ladder for Immigrant Workers
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, we talk a lot on this show about career ladders for specific groups — people returning from caregiving, formerly incarcerated individuals, veterans. But there's one group that makes up roughly seventeen percent of the US workforce and has one of the lowest rates of internal promotion: immigrant workers. Luna: I've seen the data. Foreign-born workers are overrepresented in entry-level roles in manufacturing, food service, hospitality, but they're dramatically underrepresented in supervisory and management positions. The question is why — and what one company actually did about it. Lucas: Right. So today I want to look at a company called Fresh Harvest Foods — it's a mid-sized food processing firm based in the Midwest, about two thousand employees. Roughly sixty percent of their entry-level workforce is foreign-born, mostly from Central America and Southeast Asia. And about three years ago, they realized their promotion rate for immigrant workers was under five percent — compared to about twenty percent for native-born workers. Luna: That's a four-to-one gap. And I'm guessing the obvious barrier wasn't work ethic or ability — it was language and credential recognition. Lucas: Exactly. The company partnered with a local nonprofit that provides adult education services, and they launched an on-site English language and job-skills program. The key design detail: it wasn't just ESL. It was contextualized — vocabulary around food safety, machinery operation, team communication. And it was tied directly to a certificate that qualified workers for team lead positions. Luna: So it wasn't 'learn English and maybe something will happen.' It was 'complete this two-hundred-hour program, get this certificate, and you are eligible to apply for team lead roles that start at twenty-two dollars an hour.' That's a huge jump from the fifteen-dollar entry wage. Lucas: Huge. And they paired it with a mentorship component — each participant was matched with a supervisor who met with them weekly for the first six months. The mentor wasn't just teaching technical skills; they were helping navigate the unwritten rules of the workplace — how to ask for time off, how to flag a safety issue, how to advocate for yourself in a performance review. Luna: That mentorship piece is often the invisible barrier. You can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you don't know how the promotion game is actually played, you're stuck. Lucas: Right. So the results after two years: the internal promotion rate among immigrant workers jumped from under five percent to forty-two percent. Turnover among participants dropped by sixty percent. The company calculated the cost at about twelve hundred dollars per worker per year — including the nonprofit partnership fee, the mentor training, and the classroom space. Luna: And the savings from reduced turnover alone probably more than covered that. The typical cost to replace an entry-level manufacturing worker is somewhere between three and five thousand dollars. Lucas: Yeah, they estimated they saved over a million dollars in replacement costs in the first year. And they had thirty-seven employees promoted into team lead roles — many of whom had been with the company for years without any upward movement. Luna: And speaking of what makes this show possible — it's actually because a small group of listeners chips in monthly at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That listener support is what funds the research and production for episodes like this. We don't run ads, and we want to keep it that way. Lucas: Yeah, it's pretty straightforward — if you find value in hearing about these real-world solutions, that's where you can help keep it going. No pressure, just a fact. And now back to Fresh Harvest: the really interesting part is what happened next. Luna: They expanded the program to include Spanish-language GED prep and a partnership with a local community college for credit-bearing certificates. So workers could stack credentials toward an associate degree. Lucas: That's the part I find most replicable. They didn't just create a one-off program — they built a pipeline. The program now has three tiers: the foundational english plus skills certificate, then an advanced certificate for lead roles, and then a direct path to an associate degree in food science or operations management. The company pays tuition upfront. Luna: So a worker who started on the line trimming vegetables can, over three to four years, become a production supervisor making sixty-five thousand a year. That's transformative for someone who may have been stuck at minimum wage. Lucas: And it's not just about wages. The company also reported that employee engagement scores among immigrant workers rose by thirty percentage points. And the number of workplace safety incidents in departments with program graduates dropped by forty percent — likely because those team leads were better able to communicate safety protocols in multiple languages. Luna: I want to push back a little, though. This sounds great for Fresh Harvest, but why hasn't this scaled more broadly? We've known for decades that immigrant workers are underpromoted. What's the barrier? Lucas: I think the biggest barrier is that most employers see language training as a cost, not an investment. They think 'if we teach them English, they'll leave for a better job.' But the data from Fresh Harvest shows the opposite — retention went up. The other barrier is that many companies don't have a clear career ladder to begin with. If there are no defined steps from entry-level to supervisor, then it doesn't matter what training you offer. Luna: So the prerequisite is actually job architecture — you have to map out the progression paths first. Then you can layer on the language and skills training. Lucas: Exactly. And Fresh Harvest had an advantage: they already had a fairly structured set of job levels. They just hadn't connected them to training for immigrant workers. The other thing that made this work is that the CEO was personally committed. He's an immigrant himself — came from Vietnam as a child. So he understood the barriers in a way that a lot of executives don't. Luna: That's an important point. Leadership buy-in that's personal, not just performative. But what about companies that don't have an immigrant CEO? Is there a playbook they can follow? Lucas: Yes, and it starts with data. The first step is to audit your internal promotion rates by nativity — just like you would by gender or race. Most companies don't track that. Fresh Harvest only discovered the gap because they were preparing a diversity report for a client. Once you see the gap, you can investigate the causes. In their case, the number one reason immigrant workers cited was language barriers. Number two was lack of knowledge about how to apply for promotions. Luna: So the solution was addressing both: language training and a transparent application process. That's not rocket science, but it requires intentionality. Lucas: Right. And the cost is actually quite low relative to the return. Twelve hundred dollars per worker per year — that's about the cost of a few recruitment ads. And the productivity gains from having a more skilled, stable workforce are substantial. The company now has a waitlist of other employers in the region who want to replicate the model. Luna: Are there any other companies doing something similar that you've seen? Lucas: A few. A hotel chain in the Southwest started a similar program for housekeeping staff — mostly Spanish-speaking women. They partnered with a community college to offer English classes on site and created a path to front desk and supervisory roles. Their promotion rate among participants is around thirty percent after two years. But the scale is much smaller — about a hundred workers. Fresh Harvest is one of the largest examples I've seen in a non-tech industry. Luna: I think the takeaway here is that the talent is already there. The problem is that companies don't see it because they haven't built the on-ramps. And the on-ramps don't have to be expensive — they just have to be intentional. Lucas: Absolutely. And the workforce is only going to become more foreign-born. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that immigrants will account for nearly all labor force growth over the next decade. Companies that figure out how to promote from within that population are going to have a huge competitive advantage. Luna: So the question for our listeners — whether you're an HR leader, a manager, or an employee — is: what's the promotion rate for immigrant workers at your company? And if you don't know, that's probably the first place to start. Lucas: Yeah. And if you want to dig deeper into the Fresh Harvest model, we'll link to the case study in the show notes. It includes the actual cost breakdown and the curriculum outline. Luna: I appreciate that this isn't a theoretical discussion. It's a real program with real numbers. That's what makes this show valuable. Lucas: Yeah. And we'll keep bringing you those real-world examples as long as listeners keep supporting the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Thanks for being part of it. Luna: Next episode, we're looking at how a tech company created a return to work program for parents who left the workforce during the pandemic. That's episode eighty-one. Lucas: See you then.