The U.S. workforce landscape is changing as technologies advance and Artificial Intelligence continues to impact job and education territories. The education technology company, YouScience, is keeping up with the times, guiding students on how to prepare for college and advanced careers, while re-skilling and up-skilling a workforce for industries needing to fill jobs. On this episode, YouScience Co-founder Edson Barton and Joseph Watt, Vice President of ECMC Group, discuss how the two organizations are building on the education to workforce movement.

Edson Barton, Founder and CEO of YouScience and founder of Industry Certifications

As a 25-year EdTech veteran, he leads YouScience as it revolutionizes the personalization of career education—bridging the edtech and talent tech markets and solving critical education-to-workforce issues such as the skills gap and program equity and diversity. By providing students a more direct and tangible way to connect their education to their future careers, YouScience improves academic outcomes including high school graduation rates and postsecondary enrollment and completion rates.

As a leader in the education technology industry, Edson has been quoted in numerous reports and media articles, most notably in Forbes, US World & News Report, MSN, and eSchool News.

Prior to leading YouScience, Edson was the CEO and co-owner of ProCert Labs, a standards alignment and validation organization, and served as a senior director with Certiport where he oversaw client activities for Adobe, Autodesk, Intuit, and Microsoft, including worldwide publisher channels. Additionally, he was a sales vice president for Imergent and the executive director for Kids Voting Utah.

Joseph Watt, Vice President at ECMC Group and Managing Director of EIF

Joe grew up in the rural Midwest, where he was inspired daily by his mother’s commitment to educating others, going above and beyond to reach her students, especially those who came from difficult family circumstances. After graduating high school with a class of 40 students, then joining a student body of more than 40,000 at the University of Illinois, and finally completing graduate school at Duke University, he has experienced firsthand the wide variations, challenges and ultimately, the transformative impact of education across a multitude of learning environments.

Shortly after joining ECMC Group, Joe co-led the creation of the Education Impact Fund, driven by the opportunity to utilize patient, impact-aligned capital to propel transformative educational outcomes. By investing in scalable ventures that are addressing educational inequities and empowering underserved and overlooked groups, Joe aims to further demonstrate the strong correlation between long-term impact and outsized financial returns, thereby, inspiring increased investment in impactful educational change.

Before ECMC Group, Joe’s experience spans corporate strategy, M&A, private equity and investments within the technology and education sectors. He is a graduate of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he was an Impact Investing Fellow, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lives outside of Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, son and dog.

Utah is entering a new era of battery powered air travel with electric air taxis expected to take to the skies in the next few years. In this episode, we join the launch of Project Alta, known as Air Logistics Transportation Alliance, a partnership between Utah aerospace industry organization 47G and aircraft manufacturer Beta Technologies. Guests Emma Davis, a flight test engineer with Beta Technologies and Utah Senator Chris Wilson discuss the new aircraft and the future of electric aviation in Utah.

Emma Davis is a flight test engineer at Beta Technologies based in Burlington, Vermont. She is a Utah State University graduate in mechanical engineering and for fun she flies helicopters. Davis has loved planes since she was a child and says the coolest thing about flying in the new electric aircraft, Alia, is the view. Chris Wilson (Republican Party) is a member of the Utah State Senate representing District 2 since 2023. Sen. Wilson grew up in Logan and worked at his family car dealership, Wilson Motors, and purchased the dealership in 2009

Hydrogen energy systems can provide clean, efficient and reliable power with the potential to reshape the U.S. power generation structure. On this episode, guest Joseph Hartvigsen, founder of OxEon Energy, tells his story of how he got his start from driving a tractor on his family’s farm and flying a crop plane to becoming a leader in the hydrogen energy industry while also contributing to outer space missions.

1. Joseph Hartvigsen, founder and Chief Executive Officer of OxEon Energy, grew up in northern Utah and spent his summers working on a family heritage farm in Idaho. He earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University and his M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Iowa State University of Science and Technology.

He has produced hundreds of micro-hydro and small-hydro turbines which are currently generating megawatts of clean power for customers around the world.