Byron G. Auguste

Co-Founder/CEO, Opportunity@Work

Byron G. Auguste is the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social enterprise that seeks to expand access to career opportunities so all Americans can work, learn, and earn to their full potential. His insights and thought leadership on talent, equitable economic growth, and the future of work have been featured at events for the Federal Reserve, the Brookings Institute, the Fortune CEO Initiative, and profiled in the New York Times, Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg, Wired, The Guardian, and more. In 2020, he co-authored an NBER working paper that explores the extent to which tens of millions of workers who are skilled through alternative routes, or STARs, can fill much of US industry’s “skills gap.” STARs are routinely blocked from many higher-wage jobs - for which they may have appropriate skills - by bachelors degree screens and other exclusionary hiring practices, which thwart upward mobility, undermine racial equity, and widen regional disparities.

Previously, Dr. Auguste served in 2013-15 as Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council in the Obama Administration, served on the Biden Policy Institute’s policy advisory board and, in 2020, co-chaired the Biden-Harris Economic Policy Committee. In 2005, Byron was elected Director at McKinsey & Company, the first African-American in that role. He has served on the boards of trustees of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Yale University, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and Hope Street Group, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Since 2015, he has served as a board member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Board of Directors and recently joined its academic research Steering Committee.