Skills and Jobs 2021
Lessons from ASU-GSV for the Future of Education and Workforce Development
I've spent the past decade at the intersection of education and technology, cofounding Canada's largest software development bootcamp and the UN Special Envoy for Education's Global Education Platform and more recently pioneering LinkedIn's online learning, labour market information, higher education and workforce development public private partnerships. My thinking, and that of many of the organizations with which I work - Microsoft, the US, Canadian federal, state, and local governments; think tanks, investment firms; and hundreds of post-secondary institutions - has progressed from a focus on degrees and credentials to skills and jobs. This is evident in a couple recent videos that I recorded at ASU-GSV this year (thanks to American Student Assistance and WorkingNation) on how to help Americans out of despair and the merit of a greater focus on skills in education.
Below I offer 6 recommendations for investing in education and workforce development preceded by a summary of the context for these recommendations.
Hope after the Great Resignation
Our labour markets likely face their greatest challenge in my lifetime, with an expected 40% of workers expected to change jobs this year (aptly named the “Great Resignation” or #GreatReshuffle) and a greater skills gap, particularly with employers unable to fill roles, than ever before. Yet there is also hope in technology being used to provide greater access to education and a more efficient allocation of labour or matching of individuals to jobs than ever before.
I remain hesitant to recommend technological solutions to a technology-enabled problem. While the increasingly rapid pace of change has not resulted in the mass unemployment regularly predicted during past industrial revolutions, I fear it has surpassed humans ability to adapt or learn fast enough to keep up. AI, in particularly, coupled with near instant global communication via the internet and the production of incomprehensible amounts of data, may already have surpassed our ability to keep up through either regulation or education. Similarly, I share the now widely discussed worry, famously popularized by the Center for Human Technology, that our phones and social networks, dark patterns and behavioural economics or nudging, could be irreparably harming our brains and bodies. Finally, I’ve recently been wrestling with the merits of the importance or meaning we find in work. Prioritizing other aspects of life and humanity might help address some of our personal and societal work-related challenges.
This only adds urgency to the need to examine how we, through our actions, laws or technology, can create a better society. Despite the bleak outlook above, I'm still also a believer in Steven Pinker. This is part of why I spent half a decade working on access to medicines and specifically on a global pharmaceutical pay-for-performance project called the Health Impact Fund. Life has gotten better for most humans over the past hundred years and has the potential to continue to do so with access to medicines having been amongst the greatest drivers of increased standards of living over the past century.
Narrowing in on the role of education and technology, I thought to describe both how these could be aggravating some of our foremost problems, such as inequality, and what glaring gaps and therefore (social impact) investment opportunities are presenting themselves in edTech and jobTech.
The democratization of asynchronous online learning began just as online learning, primarily in the form of MOOCs, first gained brief mainstream awareness a decade ago (think Coursera and edX, Open Education Resources and the Open Universities). Following in the tradition of public education and broadcasting, where innovation and access regularly came in surprising forms, such as Sesame Street, early asynchronous online education access was most impressively realized by free platforms such as Wikipedia and Khan Academy.
Accelerated by the pandemic, this movement has hit the mainstream in the US through the private sector. Platforms like Coursera and Guild are reaching a scale that could, eventually, be sustainable. They, Online Program Managers and unconventional universities (Phoenix, ASU, SNHU and WGU) are posing a significant challenge to established post-secondaries. The flip side of this incredible increase in access to learning, is, and could become permanently, a relative decrease in access to in-person learning for those with less privilege. In other words, as more of the world's population accesses online learning, less could have access to high quality teaching from other humans.
Lessons Learned
I've spent a lot of the pandemic advising governments, companies and educational institutions on how to adapt. From urban to rural schools and from the most dynamic to the most dysfunctional workforce development systems, I've been trying to help these institutions move online and use technology. Here are a few specific recent lessons from this work:
Technical v human skills: Many foundational, human or soft skills can only be learned through human interaction and these are the most universally in-demand and timeless or durable skills. Somewhat surprisingly, the result of increased online learning could be that less privileged populations have increasing access to technical skills but less access to skills like communication, collaboration and critical thinking. Instead, I believe we need to highlight, teach, learn to communicate and value human skills and interaction more generally. Assessment, particularly of human skills, is a missing link and remains very underrated, as do the remaining social determinants of employment and educational success. Take away: invest in human skills, assessment, and interactions like networking, coaching and mentorship.
Reputation and unbundling: While the most elite post-secondary institutions will continue to increase in influence and popularity due largely to the social and repetitional benefits that their full bundle of services and history convey, most post-secondaries will struggle to remain relevant, particularly online. Many post secondaries, second tier and below, are extremely vulnerable. Those open to change could become vehicles for transformation of the sector while most will decline. Take away: focus on career development, wrap-around social services or emphasize some other aspect of the bundle of services that make up a post-secondary because their core offering has been democratized online.
Skills based hiring and blind interviews: Social and soft skills are often how we distinguish ourselves. This could be based on the more formal class-structures that continue to pervade India and the UK or the more informal structures that have developed around education in the US and Canada. The combination of elites having greater access to in person education and this education having a greater impact on their human skills could result in greater inequality despite online education democratizing access to technical skills. Removing bias through the removal of names, pictures, better interviewing tech and techniques, such as structured and blind interviewing, could help. Internal skills mapping and automated job matching could also be used to actively combat such bias by focusing on skills not associated with class or privilege and rather on other transferable skills. Focusing on verifiable credentials like open badges, micro-credentials and portfolios that demonstrate skills could help too. All of these could result in greater labour market efficiency and economic productivity as well as inclusivity and equity. Take away: find systems like skills-based hiring and blind interviews to decrease bias such as towards credentials.
Verticalization and staffing, integration and WIL: recognizing recruiting, staffing and job placement or career services as essential to the education to employment pipeline. Models include Futuro Health: an employer (Kaiser Permanente) partnered with a union (SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West) "to grow the largest network of credentialed allied healthcare workers." By recruiting students into a pathway to employment, an employer was able to access a larger pool of candidates while training them more specifically for the skills necessary for its jobs. Borrowing the best from staffing companies' approaches to recruitment and placement is also a new leading practice for workforce development. Take away: Running up against despair at lifeboat jobs, an increasing recognition that degrees are a poor investment, and online education and job matching, community college and workforce development systems will increasingly need to actively collaborate and recruit candidates online. They also need to work more closely with employers making work integrated learning in all its forms (apprenticeship, internship, etc.) as important as its national emphasis would suggest.
Labour Market Information (LMI) and competition: In the past, a lack of data on education and employment outcomes meant that schools could regularly get away with a negative ROI. Now students are asking why they should take a course online at your local university when you could instead take it from Cambridge, Sciences-Po, Harvard or their Chinese or Indian equivalents for the same cost (or free)? 10-week software and sales bootcamps offer jobs with better pay (or labour market outcomes) than most 4 year degrees. Post-secondaries will increasingly need to demonstrate the value of other aspects of their bundle of services from work integrated learning opportunities to community partnerships.
Career development: A related and common recommendation for workforce development and higher education system reform is to fund career development. Further career development could begin in K12 and run through community colleges and universities through employers and the workforce development system. Career developers (also called Career Advisors, Coaches, Consultants, Counsellors, Practitioners) need to be paid more, be better trained and have more digital capacity including access to the latest labour market information and infrastructure to deliver their services digitally. Take away: human career developers are the most important and underrated actors in workforce development systems
Next Steps
Further themes that I plan on continuing to develop include:
using technology and change management to convert education and workforce systems that are calcified and offline to being impactful and deliver and function in a hybrid or exclusively digital manner
how to extract the benefits of the private and public sector through workforce end education public private partnerships
Higher ed and workforce development collaboration: schools teaching training and pedagogy and workforce teaching career development and employer relations
I’d be extremely grateful for any comments or feedback on the above. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.
Jake
Hi, Jake, great post. I too share many of your concerns, particularly the potential for higher education to split between high-cost, high-prestige campus institutions for the wealthy, and low cost, low prestige online providers for the poor. I also agree that many community colleges and smaller universities, especially in the USA, are at risk from private providers, who will compete not only on price but also on quality. My main concern though is that over-emphasis will be given to short-term competencies, through microcredentialling, etc., and less to the development of 21st century soft skills such as communication and critical thinking, which are the 'transversal' skills the Royal Bank of Canada sees as being essential for job mobility. We need both short-term competency education and the longer term soft skills development. We are though notoriously bad at both teaching explicitly and assessing such skills in a progressive way. This is (one of) the challenges I am working on when consulting with HE institutions. I think you and I are on the same page on many of these issues.
Hi Jake, I really enjoyed this article, with the historical context, the transformation of how people acquire skills beyond old-style bachelors degrees, and and the recognition of the growing gap between technical skills and human skills. Your article is focused on upskilling people with technical skills, which certainly comes from your terrific experience with both LinkedIn Learning and Lighthouse Labs. I note your social concern about both the good and the dark of our technology-enabled, nay obsessed, culture. But there is a missing piece about workforce development in your article, in my opinion.
We are on the brink of a sea change in workforce development, not just from a credentialing perspective, but from a content and pathways perspective. As you know, I have been working on building capacity to deal with climate change for the past few years. "Building capacity" means education, training , expert networks, communications strategies, and all manner of workforce development tactics. Every job, every vocation requires elements of "what can I do through my work to avert this existential disaster called climate change?" Whether one works in professions (engineers, planners, accountants, lawyers, etc.) or organizational management, or front-line work in every sector (healthcare, retail, energy, communications, agriculture, and yes, even technology) there is a new kind of upskilling on the table. What can I do in my workplace and/or my profession to contribute to dealing with the heating of the planet.
I will send you a link to a forthcoming webinar I am organizing at Royal Roads University, "The Future of Work in a Changing Climate" and I invite your participation in this domain of workforce development. Your networks and influence would be greatly appreciated in this important work!