Readiness for Future of Work

A Reality: Everything and Everyone Online

My third-year college son Sky is back home after all school shutdown. Online streaming and courses becomes the new normal for college education. As an observing mother, I am very curious about how that feels. Born a netizen, Sky feels natural to learn online. Actually this generation seems living in it. Smart device screen is an integral part of their body and movement. They are digital. The sudden change of the gear offers even some comfort to him. Home, sweet home! Better meals, sleeping in his own bed with beloved pillows, taking classes anywhere preferred (even while in bed), and more flexibility of daily schedule because most courses are recorded so you can repeat it whenever you want.

Online courses are delivered mostly in two formats. One is lectures by professors. Two is research group interaction. Of course, you have to do your course work and research, share your written materials, and video conference with your group for discussion. After about 10 days of observation, I asked Sky how he feels and his view of the format of education. I learned some candid and interesting reflections.

Course Delivery - He does not like the online experience of the mathematics he is taking this semester. There is no interaction and group work, which he is more used to on campus. Other than that, he enjoys the freedom to review some courses anytime he wants, rather than limited only at the time when the coursework was delivered by the professor.

Costs - A few years ago, MIT decided to open all its math classes online, free. Sky asked then why we have to pay the tuition for the math class, which is now online and he could literally just take MIT's online math courses instead. A side note on costs is that his school has informed him that he will get some money to his account as rebate for the boarding expenses already paid by parents - dorms and food due to school shutdown.

Grading - for the first few days at home, Sky kept wondering how professors will grade their courseworks. For an undergraduate who has decided to pursue graduate studies, he does care about his GPA's. I remember when he got the email from school that all undersgraduate courses will be graded in pass or fail, Sky seemed delighted and relieved. Out of his four courses he has chosen for this semester, two are undergraduate and two are graduate.

According to UNESCO, more than 850 million students are at home today due to the pandemic, about half of global total. Remote and home learning is the alternative option to continue their education. It is challenging for many, especially teachers who are literally forced to quickly grasp the skills and get used to the new format of teaching.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, while threatening humanity's health and depressing the economy, is definitely accelerating such disruptions. Education and education industry is being unbundled. How can we grasp such an opportunity and ride such a wave of digital disruption for a bigger good?

Unbundling

Back in 2013, Author Clay Christenson predicted that "Fifteen years from now, more than half of the universities will be in bankruptcy” in America. Back in 2014, the Economist predicted that if higher education was affected like the newspaper industry has been, colleges’ revenue would be cut over half, there would be 30% fewer people employed, and over 700 colleges would close. “The rest,” the Economist says, “would need to reinvent themselves to survive.”

Well, it did not take 15 years, only half of it, for educators worldwide "forced" to teach online, literally in a blink.

Gary A. Bolles, Chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University has a framework of Unbundle to examine the impact of internet on industries. In Gary's definition, unbundle is the process by which the Internet and technology helps to split apart functional areas of traditional industries. Digital and connectivity is literally claiming its next target: the vertically-integrated business of higher education. Gary called it "educator's quandary" since innovation in higher education isn't just important today, it is critical for survival.

For a typical 4-year education institution, there are five layers: 1) a Campus; 2) Course Development; 3) Course Delivery; 4) Brand and Network; and 5) Accreditation. In an unbundled world, this is how Gary articulates the narrative of the future in his framework.

1. Campus: Unbundled campuses have the opportunity to become hotbeds of activity — not just for young full-time students, but for anyone looking for ongoing learning and working activities. True, an online education can’t provide that sense of place, nor can it create the kinds of connections between students that come from the structured and random interactions that occur on a regular basis. As a result, unbundling in the near term could mean a significant loss of the campus experience.
2. Course Development: Quality control becomes key. When courses begin to move online, it’s also critical that there remains a broad diversity of thought in many subjects, providing a healthy ecosystem of information and perspective — avoiding the “Amazonification” of higher education, which would consolidate learning into the hands of a few dominant players, as has already happened for various layer of the unbundled media industry.
3. Course Delivery: The reality will be like this - once you are able to locate the course online from different sources, you will choose the format and price that works best for your situation and your perception of value. Great teachers will have substantial groups of students from around the world. For online course purveyors, they will inevitably continue to update their offerings to the point where they will provide high-quality educational experiences that can rival in-person lecture halls. And they will be able to continually update their offerings far faster than today’s tenured professor usually updates his courses.
4. Brand and Network: The Law of the Lost Middle says that those at the high end — well-known brands such as the Ivy League schools — will be able to maintain a “quality” student body in perpetuity, because they can charge a premium price for a scarce commodity. But ultimately the value of the Brand lies in the eye of the employer. If hiring managers begin seeing the value of training from digital and hybrid education alternatives, the future value of any individual school may erode.
5. Accreditation: In an unbundled world, Accreditation as a currency for the education business will experience some of the greatest challenges. Yet today, few existing accrediting bodies are equipped to keep up with such a rapidly-changing landscape. The future of accreditation will probably look like a true marketplace, where certain employers will reward certain accrediting bodies, by the employees they hire. Workers will more easily be able to gain credit for their work experience and learning outside of a traditional classroom — and employers will change the dynamics of the higher education market by changing how they exercise their purchasing/hiring power.

Expertise Economy

What's the view from the other side of the aisle then? Here is an interesting perspective that I have come across in my reading, the view of an employer. "A degree is not really a great proxy for meaningful skills. When you look at a transcript, it has a list of courses, but those don’t necessarily show skills or competencies. That said, degrees are a recognized credential; employers use them as a signal. Plus, there’s a yearning for them. Let’s not throw out everything that we have, but find more flexible ways of providing recognizable value of competency more quickly, in smaller units that build to degrees."

The Expertise Economy, co-authored by Kelly Palmer and David Blake, offers an up-to-date overview of how leading corporations are leading the response to an unbundled world in education and learning. Based on interviews with those who are driving the conversation about how to create experts and align learning innovation with business strategy, the authors note that the workplace is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation, and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce.

The book offers seven guiding principles to help build the skills that are critical to an organization’s success, now and in the future:

1. Make learning a competitive advantage: Companies that build a culture where learning is part of the overall strategy—and something that people love and want to do—will have a clear advantage;
2. Embrace personalized learning: Technology enables personalized learning, a key factor in helping people integrate learning with their own work;
3. Combat content overload: Curate the abundance of learning resources available to help employees learn what they need, when they need it;
4. Understand the power of peers: Implement strategies to learn from each other and tap into the knowledge and experience of those around you;
5. Succeed with the right technology: Determine which new innovative approaches to learning are right, and create learning ecosystems to help employees succeed;
6. Analyze your employees’ skills with data and insights: Using data analytics when creating strategies around reskilling and upskilling your workforce is critical; and
7. Make skills and expertise count: Use the Skills Quotient, or SQ, to measure and understand what skills your employees have and what skills they need and apply it to recruiting, mentoring, and promotions, and how to close the gap and find the next internal opportunity.

Accreditation

After gaining the perspective from both supply and demand aisles of education, we realize that accreditation as the “virtual currency” defines the value of a degree. According to Gary, accreditation is the difference between a learning activity that’s simply valuable to the student, and one that creates a coin. Each class at an accredited school taken by a student is essentially like putting a coin in the student’s pocket. Adding up enough of those coins, and the student will have a two- or a four-year degree. It can be used as a "calling card" to employers. Employers in turn believe themselves to have a greater certainty of the quality of a prospective employee’s training than if the student had received training from an unaccredited school — or if they’d never gone to college in the first place.

Singularity University operates in an innovative and dynamic model that constantly updates their curricula to reflect changing times. When many others follow, it poses a realistic challenge to accreditation. On one side, their students would get world-class knowledge that is relentlessly up to date, but on the other, without proper accreditation, they would never be able to aggregate their learnings into a degree, nor to gain credit at other colleges. In Gary's view, that’s like giving students Monopoly money instead of real currency. Yet today, few existing accrediting bodies are equipped to keep up with such a rapidly-changing landscape.

One of Gary's cases of innovation is "the NanoDegree", a credentialing program by Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, launched in mid-2014. Designed in conjunction with AT&T, the program offers a 6 months’ training for high school graduates. When successfully completed, he or she would qualify for an entry-level data analyst or application designer job at AT&T. Just imagine if more employers hire large number of workers with such kinds of degrees or credentials, a new currency comes on to the market. A student's learning experiences with collected "coins" will eventually earn him or her the equivalent of a 2-yr or 4-yr degree and a future value in the marketplace.

What's worth to further examine is the more than one million credentials today awarded each year, outside of the college accreditation process, in order to think deeper and more systemically how to structure a future of work strategy for nations, companies, communities and individuals.

Unbundling for Mastery Learning

Today, there are more than one billion students world-wide whose schools have closed to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In Sal Khan's view, in the coming year, students and teachers may need to break down barriers between in-person and at-home schooling, and be ready to shift from one to the other with little notice. As the CEO of the Khan Academy, he has the first-hand knowledge and insight of how the existing education system works. He points out that  “seat time,” a term to measure the duration of classroom instruction, won’t seem sufficient when seats may be in different places and times. The idea of individual pacing and mastery of subjects may become mainstream, because they’ll be a necessity.

Historically, it has been a struggle to personalize learning for each student. Over the past decade, online tools have started to be leveraged in classrooms to address this need. They’ve allowed students to work on what they are ready for and to have as many chances as needed to master concepts. Decades of research on such “mastery learning” shows that it works. If it becomes mainstream inside and outside classrooms because of school closures, it has a chance to accelerate student learning, according to Khan.

In his recent WSJ essay, Khan agrees that the school closure situation is tough on many levels and clearly disruptive for students and teachers in the near term. But he also sees it as a given opportunity for reform how we educate our future generation. He holds that it may be the catalyst for making personalized learning more common, even after students graduate from school or during summers. The transition won’t be easy, but the development of student agency to learn and gain mastery at their own pace—even when schools are closed—may be the most important skill of all in the decades to come.

Finland Leads Future of Work

The future of work is one of the hottest topics in 2017. It's around what impact a suite of technological development - automation, AI, IoT, the fusion of genetic science with biotech, and always-on access to data - will have on jobs, skills, and wages, and how to best prepare Human Resources and talents to weather the disruption.

The Worldwide Educating for the Future Index (WEFFI), developed to assess the effectiveness of education systems in preparing students for the demands of work and life in a rapidly changing landscape, focuses on young people aged 15-24 in 50 economies. It measures three pillars of education systems–policy approaches, teaching conditions and broader gauges of societal freedom and openness–as a means of readying young people to meet the challenges of work and society in future.

Finland is the top global leader in 2018 and 2019. It excels in the policy environment category, and specifically in terms of formulation of future skills strategy, the periodic review of strategy and the assessment frameworks to support future skills training. 

In Finland, after basic education, a child can choose to continue to upper-secondary education, which is split into two main paths, general and vocational. While 90 percent of students usually start upper-secondary studies immediately after basic, about 40 percent of students start vocational education after basic, which is more job focused and incorporates apprenticeships as well as school learning. This path ends with competence-based qualifications after the student completes an individual study plan.

It also comes as no surprise that Finland supports robust adult education to promote social equity and a competent labor force. Companies can purchase in for staff development, and labor training is provided for the unemployed. While not free, adult education is highly subsidized with costs dependent on personal circumstances.

The 2019 Index draws two important trends. First, the need to develop critical thinking has never been so vital; and Two, future skills are vital to advancing global values. Continuing advances in artificial intelligence (AI) make it ever more important to cultivate the skills required to work with and complement it.This includes the ability to analyse, reason and question decisions, including those made by algorithms. Critical thinking and related skills are also needed to make sense of the volumes of data that businesses and other organisations are collecting.

In contrast to the index’s average policy and teaching environment scores, that of the socioeconomic environment category has barely budged from 2018. This suggests a lack of progress in advancing values like respect for civil liberties and tolerance of religious diversity. With nativism, populism and similar forces on the march, students must be able to apply critical thinking and other future-oriented skills to fight back.

In the current duel health and economic crises, emergency response on the part of governments, corporations, communities and individuals is required for strong resilience and in the meanwhile, proactive strategy from all walks of life shall be put in place to use this opportunity to jump-start for the future of work. Today we are equipped with some useful academic frameworks and instruments to analyze the disrupted education and future of work, and knowledge and insights of what leadership governments, corporations and others have been practicing and how they have achieved leadership. The unbundled education system and industry, in the current pandemic crisis, offers us a biggest-ever opportunity to advance actions and partnerships to weather the storm of future of work.