How McDonald's is inspiring workers

Forbes

3 hours ago

In today's competitive job market, finding, engaging, and retaining top talent is one of the main challenges keeping CEOs and business leaders awake at night.
Ten years ago, recognizing that employees now look for jobs offering flexibility and personal growth along with competitive compensation, McDonald's and its independent franchisees (which own around 95% of McDonald's restaurants in the United States) introduced the Archways to Opportunity program.
Restaurant employees can earn a high school diploma, work toward a college degree, enroll in degree, training, and certificate programs at accredited schools, or improve their English skills — all while earning a paycheck. And they get academic and career guidance whenever they need it.
The program has been an unqualified success — both for McDonald's franchisees, which have used it to cultivate a skilled, loyal workforce, and for their employees, who appreciate the ability to earn and learn simultaneously.
Among the longtime McDonald's franchise employees profiled below, a common word used to explain their passion and loyalty to their local franchisee is 'family.' In the case of Scarlett Morris, all four of her family members work for McDonald's restaurants. For Michael Shackleford, McDonald's restaurants were a port in the storm during some of his darkest days. And for Jennifer Carter — who grew up in foster care — her McDonald's coworkers became her surrogate family.
In the second installment of a three-part series, here are the stories of how Archways to Opportunity helped these individuals unleash their full potential and inspired them to encourage their McDonald's teammates to do the same.
Turning Golden Arches into golden opportunities
For Scarlett Morris and her family, earning and learning with McDonald's has become a way of life.
Scarlett hopes she and her husband Chris, shown here with their Colorado Technical University diplomas, will be role models for their kids.
Living on her own since 17, Scarlett Morris started with her local McDonald's in 2003 as a crew member to support herself and her daughter, Emma. 'McDonald's is a good first job, because we tune into your strengths,' Scarlett said. In her case, those include strong people skills and an interest in empowering her fellow employees. She rapidly progressed into management roles, eventually becoming the people and development lead for 10 restaurants.
Along the way, Scarlett met an ambitious coworker, Chris, and they've now been married for over 20 years. Together, they had busy full-time jobs — Chris is director of operations for 10 franchises — while raising Emma, now 20, and their son, Jackson, 15, in College Station, Texas. Their goal is to own their own McDonald's franchise one day.
But because of their work and family demands, they had neither the time nor money to return to school and pursue their passions. For Scarlett, that was human resources. For Chris, it was technology.
When Emma was a high school junior in 2022, Scarlett decided to take advantage of McDonald's Archways to Opportunity program and pursue a bachelor's degree in business administration, with a focus in HR management — her courses were online and fully paid for by Archways — from Colorado Technical University.
For the Morris family (from left: Emma, Scarlett, Chris, and Jackson), working at their local McDonald's is more than just a job; it has become a way of life.
Two years later, her dream became a reality — times three. In a trio of Archways-inspired milestones, Scarlett and Chris both graduated from CTU in May 2024 (Chris also got a bachelor's in business administration, with a focus on information technology), just as Emma was completing her freshman year at nearby Texas A&M University. Thanks to tuition assistance, Emma — who is now the restaurant people department leader at her local McDonald's — can afford to work 30 hours a week instead of 40, so her grades don't suffer. 'Her work experience, paired with that degree — she's going to be leaps and bounds ahead of many of her classmates,' Scarlett said.
Scarlett immediately put the knowledge and skills developed while pursuing her degree to use. 'I was able to take what they were teaching me and turn it into a real-life scenario at work,' Scarlett said. 'We want to make this franchise the best it can be for as long as possible.'
Looking to the future, Scarlett and Chris dream of having their own franchise, or 'our own little 'McFamily,'' as they call it. 'We want to use Archways to help our people, encourage them, and propel them on their journey,' Scarlett said. 'The Archways program is a blessing, and I'm grateful for it.'
Finding hope at the end of the road
'Archways to Opportunity brought out the good in me I couldn't find for myself,' Michael Shackleford said.
Michael Shackleford (pictured with his wife Nicole) receiving his associate degree in Colorado. 'I was able to walk the stage for the first time in my life.'
At Michael Shackleford's lowest point in life, he was homeless, foraging through trash cans for food, and eating snow. 'I was at a bus stop and noticed the clean snow beneath dirty footprints,' said Shackleford, who was expelled from school in seventh grade and later struggled with addiction. 'It hit me at a moment in my dirty life that below the muck I will find a clean slate.'
Today, Shackleford is the safety and security manager in charge of loss prevention and risk management for the 22 McDonald's locations in South Carolina and Georgia that are owned and operated by his boss, John Ritchey Jr.
What led to such a remarkable transformation? McDonald's. It's been an incredible journey, starting with Shackleford's first job sweeping bathrooms and taking out trash 33 years ago. (His older brother Robert was the general manager of a local McDonald's franchise who hired him to keep him out of trouble.)
Fast-forward to July 2024, when — with financial and emotional support from McDonald's and its franchisees' Archways to Opportunity program and the skills he honed as a McDonald's employee — Shackleford, then 47, received an associate degree in business administration, with highest honors, from Colorado Technical University. 'I would tell my younger self, 'Thank you for not dying and for not giving up.''
He came close to doing both. In a quest to figure out where he belonged, Shackleford spent most of the 1990s traveling from state to state on a Greyhound bus. At each stop — Delaware, Virginia, New York — he'd get a job at a McDonald's restaurant, just to be able to eat.
He hit bottom in March 1999, after eight months of sleeping in a church every night. On April 1, the date he'll always remember as his turning point, he decided it was time to go home. What happened after is the stuff of made-for-TV movies.
At a family gathering the week after his return to Andrews, South Carolina, Shackleford met and fell for a woman named Nicole, who was visiting from Delaware. It turned out she lived in one of the towns he'd stopped at during his Greyhound days. A three-day trip to Delaware in June sealed the deal.
'I remember sitting on the bus crying all the way back home,' Shackleford said. 'In that moment, it felt like a new beginning.' By August, he had moved to Delaware, and by November, he and Nicole were married. (They celebrated 25 years of marriage last year.)
Because of his prior experience, Shackleford was hired as a swing manager at a local McDonald's franchise and has been working his way through the ranks ever since. After graduating at the top of his class from Hamburger University — McDonald's' training program for high-potential managers and owner-operators — Shackleford contemplated going to college.
He did so in 2021 after learning about Archways to Opportunity, which allowed him to attend CTU online, while still working, and earn his degree — for free.
According to Ritchey, his organization's investment in Shackleford has paid off many times. 'His confidence went up tenfold, and his determination towards a result has also increased,' Ritchey said. 'He's a man on a mission now, and it shows in his results. He is having a great time positively impacting our whole company.'
Shackleford doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He's now just 40 credits shy of earning a bachelor's degree in business administration from CTU, with a current GPA of 3.71. He devotes equal energy to inspiring his coworkers to fully develop their potential.
That mindset benefits everybody. 'Not only does he lead by example,' Ritchey said, 'he is the most fantastic cheerleader we have for everyone who wants to achieve anything in the organization.'
'It's hard to beat someone who won't give up.'
The odds of success are stacked against former foster youth like Jennifer Carter. But she found the secret to beating the odds.
Jennifer Carter uses her master's degree training in social work to help her colleagues thrive.
At just 19 years old, Jennifer Carter aged out of the foster care system she'd grown up in since age 3 and was awarded temporary custody of her two younger siblings. In her words, Carter described that transition to adulthood as 'challenging.' She didn't have the support or guidance she needed to accomplish basic tasks like filling out her taxes or paying the bills, much less continuing her education.
So, after a semester of community college, Carter took a break to focus on work — she'd been a crew member at a local McDonald's restaurant since she was 16 — and complete the steps necessary to care for her brother and sister. 'I had to move and buy all kinds of furniture to show they had a place to stay,' Carter said. 'And since it was a boy and a girl, they had to have separate rooms.'
The silver lining through all the rough times? Her innate tenacity — and her work family at her local McDonald's. 'They helped me when I was struggling,' Carter said. 'Even if my problem wasn't work related, they'd say, 'This is what you need to do.'' That came in handy when Carter — who'd become a restaurant manager before she turned 20 — decided to continue her lifelong learning journey after finding out about Archways to Opportunity.
Hopeful that the skills she'd learned at work would equip her to do better at college the second time around, Carter started by taking a couple classes to get her feet wet. As it turned out, Carter said, 'All the things I learned at McDonald's — how to be organized, how to take great notes, how to deal with people — had prepared me better than all the high school I'd attended and workshops I'd had in foster care.'
Archways to Opportunity enabled Carter to complete college with associate and bachelor's degrees in sociology at Cal State Fullerton and a master's degree in social work, with a focus on social change and innovation, at the University of Southern California.
She achieved this, with honors, while juggling her job and taking care of her growing family: In 2023, she got married (her husband, Nathan, is an independent McDonald's franchisee with seven restaurants) and the couple now has three young children: Jayden, Jaxtyn, and Juliana.
Nathan and Jennifer Carter brought sons Jayden (left) and Jaxtyn to a work event in Spain, before daughter Juliana was born.
Now, she wants to put all that learning back into the Southern California community where she lives and works. For instance, she's trying to develop a program that helps connect foster care youth with job opportunities at her restaurants.
'The thing I love about McDonald's versus social work is that I can walk in a community and offer people a job,' Carter explained. 'A lot of people come in with challenges I had when I was younger. And I get to say, 'Hey, it's OK to get help. Here are some places you can go that have programs.' I assist firsthand with those resources.'
This is why, after all her education, Carter — who is now an operations supervisor — has chosen to stay at her local McDonald's, rather than become a social worker. 'I don't hand off cases to different people and move on,' she said. 'I try to reflect on the challenges I had when I first started, and what kind of support I can provide. I love that I can be part of somebody's story and make a difference.'
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