Brad Leon on the BlueSky Institute and Radical Pathways at the Intersection of Health and Technology

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In this episode, Shawnee Caruthers explores the innovative approach of the BlueSky Institute in redefining healthcare education through its partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee and East Tennessee State University. This initiative addresses workforce shortages by offering accelerated pathways that integrate technology with hands-on experience, preparing students for leadership roles in the healthcare industry. Brad Leon, Executive Director of the BlueSky Institute, shares how this model ensures students graduate debt-free and fully equipped to meet the demands of the modern workforce.

The conversation highlights the importance of experiential learning, with programs like the Game Design Challenge inspiring students to pursue careers in technology. Through the Accelerate ED initiative, BlueSky not only transforms educational practices but also impacts communities by providing long-term benefits through early access to higher education and work-connected learning. This partnership exemplifies how bridging education with industry needs can empower students and create a sustainable talent pipeline for the future.

Outline

• (01:10) Introduction to the BlueSky Institute
• (03:07) Challenges and Solutions in Healthcare Education
• (05:46) The BlueSky Institute’s Unique Approach
• (10:48) Student and Community Engagement
• (15:18) Future Prospects and Advice

Shawnee Caruthers: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Shawnee Caruthers

What if the future of healthcare isn’t just about technology, but about rethinking how we prepare the people behind it? Today, we’re diving into the BlueSky Institute, a bold initiative that’s not just reshaping healthcare education but redefining what’s possible in workforce development.

Faced with critical shortages and rapid industry shifts, BlueSky is tackling these challenges with an approach that’s as daring as it is effective. In partnering with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee and East Tennessee State University, they’re crafting cutting-edge pathways that combine technology, hands-on experience, and a vision for what’s next.

We’ll uncover how they’re transforming communities, preparing students for a rapidly changing industry, and addressing the big question: How do we train the healthcare heroes of tomorrow? This is a conversation you won’t forget. Let’s dive in. I’m joined by Brad Leon, Executive Director of the BlueSky Institute at Eastern Tennessee State University, which is a part of Tennessee’s Accelerate ED cohort supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Accelerate ED is built on the idea that high schools can provide early access to quality higher education in ways that incorporate work-connected learning and have long-term benefits for students. This initiative helps state-based groups plan and build accelerated pathways between K-12 education, post-secondary education, and careers.

Shawnee Caruthers: Hey, Brad.

Bradley Leon: Hey, Shawnee, how are you?

Shawnee Caruthers: Good, how are you? Thanks for joining us today.

Bradley Leon: I’m pleased to be with you today. Thank you.

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, no problem. We want to hear more about the BlueSky Institute. So, can you share the story behind the founding of the BlueSky Institute?

Bradley Leon: Yeah, I’ll discuss why Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee launched the initiative and why I also wanted to join the team because I don’t come from a healthcare background. I’m a K-12 educator by vocation.

Challenges and Solutions in Healthcare Education

Bradley Leon: So, BlueSky was started because we were facing a few different challenges with our IT team. The first was that we couldn’t find nearly enough people who had this particular skill set within the regional workforce. At any given time, we’d be at about a 20 percent vacancy rate—80 percent fully staffed. And that problem isn’t unique to Blue Cross. If you look across the state of Tennessee last year, there were about 4,500 jobs that required an IT background, specifically computing or computer science, and there were only about 1,100 graduates collectively between all Tennessee colleges and universities. If you scale that up to the United States, or even a global scale, you’d see that in cybersecurity alone, which is just one small part of the IT field, there were 750,000 open cybersecurity jobs in the United States alone.

So, there’s a demand problem. We’re just not graduating enough people with this skill set. The second big challenge we faced is that once people would work for us, even if they had the skill set, it would take us another 18 months to train them up because their college curricula had not fully prepared them for the world of work. And then the third challenge we were facing was more of a community-based challenge. In Chattanooga, their persistence rates weren’t very good. Basically, they’d go to college, but single digits would persist through college over a six-year period.

So, we thought, is there a way for us to solve all of these problems at the same time? That was why the initiative was started. For my part as an educator, I had worked in K-12 education, and there’s an ongoing debate about whether all kids should or shouldn’t go to college. If it’s a binary, then I’m on the side of college because there’s no disputing the correlation between a degree and lifetime earnings.

But what I was seeing far too frequently was that there was a huge disconnect between getting a degree and the world of work. Students would accumulate tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Maybe they would major in something connected to the world of work; maybe they wouldn’t. Instead of building wealth for them and their families, they spend the first 15 years of their career paying back student loans. And I thought, man, there’s just gotta be a better way to do this. When I heard about the BlueSky idea, I was immediately attracted to it.

Shawnee Caruthers: So you talked about solving three problems at once. But as you think about that collaboration between the BlueSky Institute, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, and East Tennessee State University, walk us through how that came about, because those are three very different organizations, but all coming together for a common goal.

The BlueSky Institute’s Unique Approach

Bradley Leon: So, what BlueSky Tennessee Institute is, is a partnership between East Tennessee State University and the Hamilton County school system, which is the Chattanooga school system here.

The very first thing that it is, it’s an accelerated bachelor’s degree in computing. So what would usually take students four or five years with us takes a little more than two—27 months to get a full bachelor’s degree in computing. That was the reason we needed a university partner, because we not only see the Blu Sky students who do the program as entry-level IT workers but as the future workforce or future leadership of our company. And you can’t get leadership positions, you’re not even eligible for leadership positions in our company unless you have a degree. So, we wanted to make sure that we were equipping students with that degree. For that, we needed a university partner, and East Tennessee State has been a great partner.

The second thing that it is, is it’s all based at our corporate headquarters here in Chattanooga. So, I’m in the BlueSky space right now. Our students take classes here. The reason we wanted it on-site was so that they could get to know the people who worked in our company, get to know the work of our company before they came on-site. They take a full year of paid internships while they’re with us. So, in addition to taking their coursework, they get a year’s worth of work experience on our IT team. So, they’re fully prepared.

The third big component is that we expect 100 percent graduation rates. Persistence rates in the United States and in Tennessee specifically are not very good. They’re around 50 percent, and we wanted 100 percent of our students to graduate. So, we built in really robust student supports and a cohort model so that they would all go through it together.

Finally, and importantly for me as a K-12 educator and the reason I came on, is that not only are students graduating within 27 months with a year’s worth of work experience, but they’re getting a guaranteed job on our IT team if they successfully complete the program. And they’re all doing it at no cost. We’ve raised enough money through scholarship dollars to ensure that every student who goes through our program is debt-free when they walk out. Almost half of our students are coming from high-priority schools that our community really cares about, making sure we’re improving the graduation rates with. So, we’re very proud of where we are today, and that’s just a little bit about who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. East Tennessee State has been the partner we selected because we thought they were as committed to the vision as we were, and they’ve been an amazing partner along the way.

Shawnee Caruthers: About how many students are in each cohort?

Bradley Leon: There are 30 students per cohort. So, we have about 90 students right now with us—three separate cohorts are with us at different phases of their continuum.

Shawnee Caruthers: And so, going through that internship process for a year, it’s about 30 students going through having that year-long experience. That’s an amazing process. How do you prepare those employers or the mentors, I guess, who are working in the organization to help facilitate those internship experiences for learners?

Bradley Leon: Yeah. So, there’s actually a couple of different mentorship components we have in the program. One component, and this usually happens in the first 15 months that they’re with us, is an executive mentorship program between our C-level employees—our C-level leaders—and the BlueSky students. Those sessions are happening on a monthly basis. Topics include teamwork, leadership, maximizing your own efficiency, and those kinds of topics so that our students are coming in and hearing from our organization’s strongest leaders.

After their first 15 months with us, they start to get mentored specifically by IT folks who have a much greater understanding of the work that they’re going to be doing. The executive leaders hand them off to the IT leaders. Then, when they get into the internship itself, they’ve got a whole management chain that is really committed to making sure that they have a great experience and do work that they know will help prepare them for when they’re with us.

The whole goal behind the mentorship and the internship was so that the students who went through it didn’t need an additional 18 months of training. They would finish their coursework at BlueSky and their internship with BlueSky and then hit the ground running as soon as they become employees. Our first cohort—every single one of them was given a job offer. They weren’t required to take it. There was no hook; they didn’t have to pay us back if they didn’t want to take a job with us. But 100 percent of the students in cohort one accepted our job offer. They’ll be working with us full-time in January. Almost half of these students are coming from high-priority, low-income schools in Chattanooga. Not only are they going to be making $60,000 a year plus with no debt, but they’re also in a field where they’re going to have an amazing career where they’re going to be in demand.

Shawnee Caruthers: Wow, that’s amazing.

Student and Community Engagement

Shawnee Caruthers: So, Brad, how did you then get involved with the Accelerate ED initiative, and what does that work look like?

Bradley Leon: So, I got contacted by Education Strategies Group about a year and a half ago. When I heard about the work they were doing—specifically around workforce development initiatives—I was really excited to learn more and then be a part of it for a couple of reasons.

One, when you’re doing this kind of work, it can feel like you’re doing it alone. The more I heard about what Accelerate ED was doing, the more I realized we were definitely not alone. There were people that we could learn from, and there were people that we could also help along the way with whatever lessons we’ve learned. I mean, not all our lessons learned are lessons of success. Some are lessons of failure, and we wanted to share both—our successes and our failures—with others and hear from them so we could get better for our students.

That was the primary reason—I wanted to learn more from other people, and I wanted them to learn from us. There was also a huge upside in that along the way, one of the things we took on was thinking about what our future was going to look like in BlueSky. Before we joined the Accelerate ED program, we hadn’t been thinking a whole lot about that. We were really heads-down trying to make sure we were delivering for our students. But it was good to zoom out to a 30,000-foot level and think, okay, what do we want to do as we move forward into the future?

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, so what are the educational programs that you all offer?

Bradley Leon: The only educational program that we offer is a bachelor’s degree in computing. That’s also, I think, an interesting story. When we do our whole admissions process for BlueSky, one of the things we’re looking for is enthusiasm for the field of technology. If you want to change majors, you can’t be a part of this program anymore.

I think that when students really know this is about getting a degree in computing and there are no clear off-ramps because you could lose your scholarship dollars or you’d have to relocate to the main campus at ETSU, which is 3.5 hours away, it really gets students focused on that particular content. We’ve had a really good retention rate so far. We’ve had one or two students decide to pursue something else, but that’s been the rare minority so far.

Shawnee Caruthers: There’s a lot of conversation about what you just said—when you said “when students really know.” There’s been conversation about how do students really know? What is the process of cultivating that understanding for students? From your perspective, how do you all get students to really know?

Bradley Leon: Yeah. I will admit the difference between knowing something and experiencing something and knowing it are two completely different things. The approach we take to recruitment is to be as experiential as possible. One of the primary ways we do that is through what’s called a Game Design Challenge with one of our key partners, the Public Education Foundation here in Chattanooga.

What they do is every local high school will nominate 10 to 15 students to be a part of the Game Design Challenge. At the beginning of the day, they’re building a video game from scratch. They’re getting to see what it would look like to potentially code, to build something through computing, and to get that experiential, hands-on learning to see if this is something that resonates with them or doesn’t. Then they come up to our campus, show off the games they’ve created, learn more about BlueSky, and really get immersed in just one whole day of what it would look like.

What’s been so interesting to me about BlueSky and the experience we’ve had is that most students who join us have had no prior exposure to computing. They were just inspired by the experiential offerings that we did. They said, “Hey, I loved the Game Design Challenge. I love technology generally. I’ve never had the opportunity to have a coding class, but here’s why I’m enthusiastic about taking this on.” I would say 85 to 90 percent of our students have never had that prior exposure. As a result, we’re not only bringing people into Blue Cross; we’re bringing people into the field who wouldn’t otherwise have considered this as a career field that they would pursue, which is something that we’re all very proud of.

Future Prospects and Advice

Shawnee Caruthers: In thinking about Blue Cross, how do you integrate healthcare into your bachelor’s of computing program or into the BlueSky initiative in general to prepare students for that evolving industry?

Bradley Leon: I think the primary way we do that—and there are courses that ETSU takes them through that deal specifically with the healthcare system—but the immersion with our workforce is the experience we’re trying to give them. The year of internships is all hands-on. They’re working for Blue Cross; they are Blue Cross employees at that point. They are learning deeply about the healthcare system when they’re part of that internship.

But I also think through the relationships they’re building with senior leaders and IT staff, they’re better understanding the day-to-day of what that looks like. They’re also getting immersed in our values, which are very member-centric. Our mission is to deliver peace of mind through better health. Because they have exposure to so many people here who really live that ethos, they’re being immersed in it. The fact that they’re all going to work for us, I think, suggests that all of that is working.

Shawnee Caruthers: What are you hearing from students as a result of their experience?

Bradley Leon: Well, our first cohort has, in general, loved their experience. They’re going to work for us. They’re excited about the program, committed to it, and have made it better. We’ve made mistakes along the way, and that first cohort has been instrumental in helping us correct course when we’ve made those mistakes.

But most students don’t think this is real. I speak with every single one of our students one-on-one. I was having coffee with someone who was telling me that he has a job outside of BlueSky, and his boss doesn’t think this is real. Like, this is kind of a made-up thing because you’re completing college in half the time, getting paid, getting a full scholarship to do this program, and getting a guaranteed job. There’s really nothing like that I’ve heard of. Most students are really appreciative of the opportunity and kind of pinch themselves that they get to be a part of it.

Shawnee Caruthers: And are you hearing any feedback from parents?

Bradley Leon: One of the shifts we made in recruitment is we realized it was as important to recruit parents as it was students. Once they get into the BlueSky program, because of FERPA, there’s not a whole lot of communication allowed by law with parents. But we knew on the front end that parents would inherently have a better understanding of this opportunity.

Like the students who get in, they were like, “Are you kidding me? This is a real thing.” So, we made a pivot a couple of years ago to really focus our recruitment as much on the parents as on the students. We’ve seen just a huge increase in applications since we started doing that. In fact, we’re more than 33 percent up from our previous high at our first deadline, which was just last Friday. We’re up 25 percent at the priority schools we really focus on for recruitment. I think that’s because we’ve shifted towards pitching as much to parents as to students. Parents have really appreciated the opportunity and know exactly what this could mean for their son or daughter if they get through this program successfully.

Shawnee Caruthers: Students are happy. Parents are happy. Let’s talk workforce. In what ways are you all at the BlueSky Institute addressing the current workforce strategies in the healthcare sector?

Bradley Leon: That’s the reason we launched. There was insufficient talent supply coming into at least the areas that make us a healthcare company. What our CEO would say is, yes, we are delivering healthcare and delivering peace of mind through better health for our members, but we do that through technology. We don’t do anything as a company that isn’t enabled significantly by technology. We’re not processing claims by hand anymore. If we don’t have a great IT infrastructure, we simply cannot do the business that we’re in.

By building something like BlueSky and building our own talent pipeline, we’re hoping to help solve that problem. It’s the kind of approach that I think more employers are going to need to consider as the demographics of the workforce change and as IT and technology in general become much more central to any kind of work—not just healthcare. That’s why the institute was started—because we needed to maintain that strength as a business, and we saw our IT workforce as key to that.

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, and you’re solving these workforce needs. On the other side of that, you’re truly changing the trajectory for these families and these students, which in turn has a really great impact on the community. How do you all engage with the local community? What does that look like?

Bradley Leon: We engage the community primarily through our interactions with parents during the recruitment process and also directly with schools. We have really great school-level relationships with college advisors, teachers, and administrators. They’re really the reason why we’ve had such success at the beginning of our program and even to today.

Because we wouldn’t otherwise have access to students—even though we’re providing them a great opportunity, those relationships have enabled us to get the word out and cultivate the right students we’re looking for. Those are the primary ways we’re engaging with the community through BlueSky.

Shawnee Caruthers: Yeah, we talk a lot also about client-connected projects and helping teachers connect with local industry to create these kinds of experiences for students. How do you maintain that relationship with teachers to keep them engaged so that students can continue to be acclimated to the programs that you all are offering?

Bradley Leon: I think it’s inherent in our recruitment process. It relies on relationships with school-level staff, and that includes teachers, college advisors, and guidance counselors. We’re literally asking schools to nominate people who they think would be a good fit, which on our end requires us to go in and build those relationships. We do a lot of one-on-one recruiting. Without the nominations of teachers and college advisors, we wouldn’t even have access to students to begin with.

For us, we’re not a 30,000-foot marketing recruitment operation. It’s very labor-intensive and focused on building those relationships at the school level. We couldn’t recruit the way we do or be as smart about recruitment without those school-level relationships. For us, it’s inherent in how we approach the whole thing.

Shawnee Caruthers: Are there credentials that students are also earning as part of this program?

Bradley Leon: Yeah. The ETSU curriculum—part of the reason we chose ETSU—is because they have an internationally accredited curriculum for computing. It’s an incredible curriculum. They also have a partnership with Google, where students are earning Google certifications as they go through the program. We’re taking advantage of that, and they are getting certifications as they go along while earning credits toward their degree.

Shawnee Caruthers: I know that any great program does not come without its challenges. What are some challenges that you all have faced since the inception of BlueSky, and how have you navigated those?

Bradley Leon: I would say the first challenge we faced was finding a university partner. Believe it or not, it was really difficult for us to find an institution that was excited about the idea and willing to take on a risky and innovative approach. We spent a lot of time with a lot of universities who ultimately decided they didn’t want to go on this journey with us.

In some ways, I think that was fortuitous because it led us to ETSU, who has been the ideal partner. But for a long time, we had the idea of BlueSky but no way to make it real because we didn’t have a university partner who wanted to do it with us. So there were some very tough times around that and lessons learned for sure.

The second challenge was there’s a complete dearth of students who have access to these kinds of classes in high school or who have exposure to computing in any way during high school. We’re trying to increase the overall number of people who go into this field, and it can be difficult for students who have never taken a computing class to step foot into a program that’s all about computing and take on very rigorous coursework.

There’s a lot of academic support, emotional support, and psychological support needed every step of the way. We’ve tried to build a great infrastructure—specifically, our student success manager, Melissa Graham, who has an amazing background in counseling and advising for students. The ETSU faculty on-site have also gone above and beyond to make sure students get every chance they can to demonstrate mastery of a particular subject.

It’s a different approach here than what would happen on a main campus because, one, we’re a lot smaller, and you can give a lot more personal attention. We all share goals around what we want for students. Helping students develop their own mastery is an ongoing challenge.

Those challenges around student support are never-ending. The initial challenge of finding a university partner was really tough, and that’s something I would leave with folks who are trying to build something like this. The partner aspect requires a lot of time, attention, and patience on both sides.

What immediately struck me about ETSU compared to other partners was that everyone we interacted with as part of BlueSky was enthusiastic about the project. It started with the office of the president. We initially engaged President Brian Noland, who has been at ETSU for quite some time, and he was really enthusiastic about the idea. He facilitated a handoff to the department chair of the College of Computing, Dr. Tony Pittarese, who was equally enthusiastic.

Then we had to put together lots of different working groups with admissions, recruitment, student support, housing, and so on. Every one of those conversations, the people on the other side were as enthusiastic about the idea as we were. That enthusiasm up and down the management chain at ETSU was the reason they stood out as a partner. In other cases, you might have an excited president but a department chair who wasn’t interested, or an excited department chair but roadblocks from the admissions office. ETSU was the one institution where everyone was aligned and excited about the project, which made the partnership work.

Shawnee Caruthers: And this is an innovative program. It’s really outside-of-the-box thinking to fill the workforce gaps you’ve talked about. Does that innovation also transfer into the curriculum? Are you incorporating innovation into the curriculum and training methods as well?

Bradley Leon: Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that makes any curriculum around technology challenging to begin with. By its very nature, technology is constantly evolving. We thought ETSU’s curriculum was as advanced as it could possibly be—it’s one of the few institutions in the country that are internationally accredited by ABET.

But technology today and technology five years ago are completely different. Five years from now, I’m very confident there will be something we don’t know about that isn’t part of the curriculum now. ETSU is constantly looking at it and evolving, as is our workforce. We’re moving as fast as we can to ensure the learning students get is as relevant as possible. But the field is advancing so rapidly that it’s an ongoing challenge. That’s another area of challenge—technology is just moving so quickly.

Shawnee Caruthers: As you think about the aspiring healthcare professionals who are coming up and who are hearing about this program and getting really excited about it, what advice would you give to individuals considering a career in healthcare, especially in the context of technological advancements?

Bradley Leon: This is going to be a field where you’ll have plenty of opportunities and plenty of opportunities for advancement. It’s a field that will constantly challenge you to be new and better every single day.

This is what a college education, in my opinion, should be about. Yes, there are other aspects outside of finding a job at the end of the day. But if you’re pursuing something that will eventually lead you to a job and a meaningful career, you’re on the right track. Now, it doesn’t need to be in technology—not everyone is going to focus on that. But for those who are interested in making an impact in healthcare, having a strong foundation in technology is essential.

The very first conversation I had with our CEO, he said, “I’m a doctor and a lawyer by training. The CEO 10 years from now is going to have a steep foundation in computing and computer science because that’s where the business is going.” That’s what I would say to people who are interested.

Shawnee Caruthers: For students who are able to be a part of this program, how can students best prepare themselves to succeed in programs like what you’re offering at Blue Sky or any sort of program that might be similar?

Bradley Leon: I’d go back to enthusiasm for the field. If you’ve never had exposure, there are ways for you to go online and get credentialing yourself. You can learn different coding languages or understand how things work behind the scenes. It’s usually the most impressive to us as an admissions group when someone hasn’t had the opportunity to take computing courses because their high school doesn’t offer them, but they say, “I’ve loved this since I was five years old. I’ve loved video games to start with, and I wanted to know how they work. So, I went on YouTube and learned Python.”

You can learn a lot of this without access to courses because of the aid of technology. If you can demonstrate your enthusiasm for the field of technology by going out and doing things on your own—even if they’re not credentialed or through a class—you’ll stand out. If you come in with examples of that enthusiasm and show how you’ve applied it in your life, it’s going to shine through. That counts for a lot, especially with our admissions committee, who’s looking for enthusiasm for the field as one of the top criteria.

Shawnee Caruthers: This is definitely a timely program, and lots of great partnerships exist as a result of these organizations coming together to solve this huge crisis. When you said there were 750,000 open cybersecurity jobs, or when you mentioned the 20 percent vacancies, all the data supports the necessity of these programs. It seems like the theme for this is enthusiasm.

Just a quick shoutout to Melissa Graham, Brian Noland, and Dr. Tony Pittarese for being on board with you. I also wanted to make sure they got their flowers as you highlighted them throughout our time together. Thank you for this work. I will continue to find ways to support students and help fulfill these workforce gaps. We appreciate the work these organizations are doing to fill the gap. Thank you for this conversation today, Brad.

Bradley Leon: Thank you, Shawnee, for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to share our story.

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Bradley Leon

Bradley Leon is the Executive Director of the BlueSky Institute at Eastern Tennessee State University.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• Brad Leon LinkedIn
• AccelerateED
• Article on BlueSky Institute
• Bluesky / ETSU