staying relevant

Digital credentials’ appeal is strong, while corporate upskilling moves at a ‘snail’s pace’ [Ashburn]

On 02/20/2023, in business, career development, colleges, communities of practice, competency-based learning/education, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, IBM, learning ecosystem, Microsoft, skills, staying relevant, student-related, training / L&D, United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Digital credentials’ appeal is strong, while corporate upskilling moves at a ‘snail’s pace’ — from by Elyse Ashburn; with thanks to Paul Fain for this resource
Surveys out this week from IBM and LinkedIn take a closer look at the role of digital credentials and other forms upskilling in education and on the job.

Excerpt:

Interest in upskilling and short-term credentials, either as an alternative or an add-on to college, has grown steadily over the past few years. And a couple of surveys out this week take a closer look at the role digital credentials and other forms upskilling can play in bridging the gap between formal education and work.

A major IBM survey fielded in 13 countries, including the United States, found that almost half of students, job seekers, and career changers are interested in jobs in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)—but more than 61% think they aren’t qualified because they lack the right degrees.

75% of respondents thought that digital credentials were a good way to supplement traditional education, but only 47% were actually familiar with such credentialing programs.
Among those who’d earned a digital credential, 86% said that it helped them achieve their career goals.

Eight in 10 people surveyed said they planned to upgrade their skills in the next two years—but time, cost, or simply not knowing how to begin were major barriers. Among both students and job seekers, 40% said that they don’t know where to start in developing new professional or technical skills.

Why Are Students So Disengaged? [Alonso]

On 02/13/2023, in adjunct faculty, career development, colleges, community colleges, engagement / engaging students, faculty, higher education, ideas, instructional design, Learning Experience Design, real-world assignments, skills, staying relevant, student-related, teaching & learning, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Why Are Students So Disengaged? — from insidehighered.com by Johanna Alonso
A new survey by Wiley finds that one-fourth of students said they would be more invested in their courses if they learned in a way that emulated their future careers.

Excerpt:

Undergraduate students are struggling to stay engaged in class—and they believe that material more directly connected to real-life issues could help solve the problem.

That’s a key finding of the recent State of the Student 2022 survey by the academic publishing company Wiley, which noted that 55 percent of undergraduate and 38 percent of graduate students said they struggle to remain interested in their classes. The same proportion of undergraduates and 34 percent of graduate students also said they have trouble retaining the material they learn.

The survey of 5,258 students and 2,452 instructors in North America was conducted in August 2022 and sought to understand the factors that most impact student success, as well as what factors instructors perceive as the most impactful.

Brandon Busteed (emphasis DSC):

This is a Titanic moment. The iceberg is right in front of us and there just isn’t enough time to turn the massive U.S. education/higher education/employer training ship. Unless… We all go to work on work.

From DSC:
My comment on that string from Brandon was:

And I can’t help but think that part of that work involves Design Thinking…reinventing what lifelong learning looks/acts like.

What is college for? Gov. Shapiro raises the question. Higher ed leaders are listening. — from The Philadelphia Inquirer by Will Bunch; with thanks to Ray Schroeder out on LinkedIn for the resource
Pa.’s new governor Josh Shapiro’s first move was to question the need of a college diploma as a job credential. U.S. universities, pay attention.

Excerpt:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — What is college actually for?

No one expected this to be the initial question raised by Pennsylvania’s new governor, Josh Shapiro, in his first full day on the job. While he may not have stated it explicitly, this was the essence of the Democrat’s very first executive order, which opened up some 92% of job listings in state government — about 65,000 in all — to applicants who don’t have a four-year college degree.

In branding degree requirements for many jobs as “arbitrary” and declaring “there are many different pathways to success,” the Keystone State’s new chief executive was tugging at the shaky Jenga block that has undergirded the appalling rise of a $1.75 trillion student debt bomb in the U.S. and led, arguably, to a college/non-college divide driving our nation’s bitter politics. The notion is this: You can’t make it in 21st-century America without that most expensive piece of sheepskin: the college diploma.

So the $64,000 question (OK, $80,000 … for one year on some elite private campuses) is this: If you don’t need the credential, do you actually need college?

Something is clearly gained by giving America’s young people more career options that won’t contribute to that $1.75 trillion college debt bomb. But are we talking enough about what could be lost in a new system that not only devalues the university but also seems to ratify a dubious idea — that higher education is almost solely about careerism, and not the wider knowledge and critical-thinking skills that come from liberal arts learning?

From DSC:
To me — and to many other parents and families — it all boils down to the price tag of obtaining a liberal arts education. It’s one thing to get a liberal arts education at $5K per year. It’s another thing when the pricetag runs at $40K and above (per year)! Most people ARE FORCED to question the ROI of a liberal arts education. They simply have to.

On a relevant tangent here…many inside the academy have traditionally looked with disdain at the corporate world. The thinking went something like this:

Business! Ha! We are not a business! Students are not customers. Don’t ever compare us to the corporate world.

Having spent half of my career in the corporate world, I do not subscribe to that perspective. In fact, I’d like to ask those who still hold this point of view:

Where else can you pay tens of thousands of dollars for something and not be treated as a customer?! Don’t you typically expect value on your own purchases and positive returns on your investments?
How will you collaborate with the corporate world if you look upon them with disdain?!

But now that colleges and universities enrollments are not doing so well, perhaps there will be more openness to change and towards developing more impactful collaborations.

From DSC:
Below is another example of the need for Design Thinking as we rethink a cradle-to-grave learning ecosystem.

The United States Needs a Comprehensive Approach to Youth Policy — from cew.georgetown.edu

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

On the education front, federal legislation serves as an umbrella for many state and local policies and programs. Education policy is further fragmented into K–12 and postsecondary silos.

An all-one-system approach to youth policy would support young people along the entire continuum of their journey from school to work. It would help them attain both postsecondary education and quality work experience to support their transitions from education to good jobs. In this modernized approach, preschools, elementary and secondary schools, community colleges, four-year universities, employers, and governments would all follow an integrated playbook, helping to smooth out young people’s path from pre-K–12 to college and work. To transform youth policy, systemic reforms should incorporate the following:

How Skills Are Disrupting Work: The Transformational Power of Fast-Growing, In-Demand Skills — from burningglassinstitute.org by Nik Dawson, Alexandra Martin, Matt Sigelman, Gad Levanon, Stephanie Blochinger, Jennifer Thornton, and Janet Chen
A “State of Skills” Report from the Burning Glass Institute, the Business-Higher Education Forum, and Wiley

On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.

Excerpt:
By analyzing hundreds of millions of recent U.S. job postings, the Burning Glass Institute and the Business–Higher Education Forum (BHEF) identified four of the fastest-growing, highest-demand emerging skill sets:

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Cloud Computing
Product Management
Social Media

These four skill sets serve as a laboratory for understanding what business and education leaders can do to prepare workers and students for skills disruption. To illustrate how programs can help learners and workers acquire essential skills, this report includes profiles of recent innovations from the BHEF network.

The future belongs to those who seek to understand, anticipate, and harness the power of emerging skills, rather than maintain a posture of reaction/response.
…
The prospect of helping all those who are challenged by skill disruption hinges on the readiness of business and higher education to engage in understanding and planning for skill disruption over the long term.

From DSC:
“On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.” That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about the exponential pace of change. It’s hard to deal with. Our institutions of education are not used to this pace of change. Our legal system isn’t used to this pace of change. And there are other industries struggling to keep up.

Should the pace of change be an element of our design when we think about using Design Thinking to create a new lifelong learning ecosystem?

Teachers and faculty members must sell the students on how the topics they are teaching are relevant [Christian]

On 12/15/2022, in adjunct faculty, career development, education, faculty, motivation, participation, real-world assignments, staying relevant, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, by Daniel Christian

DC: If students perceive the topics/class that you are teaching as *irrelevant*, you can talk about motivation and plans to motivate your students all that you want to. But I doubt it will help much.

— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) December 15, 2022

—

From DSC:
Unless students see how the topics that you are introducing are relevant to *their futures*, it just develops a mindset of “how do I play the game/system?” and “what’s the least I can do to get an A?”

On a somewhat-related tangent:

Student Disengagement Has Soared Since the Pandemic. Here’s What Lectures Look Like Now — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young

Skills, Skills, Skills Now is the time. Skills matter more than ever. [ Donnelly & Lavin]

On 12/15/2022, in accreditation, Alternatives, business, career development, changing business models, credentialing, new business models, reinvent, skills, staying relevant, surviving, training / L&D, vendors, vocational / trades, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Skills, Skills, Skills Now is the time. — from by Katelyn Donnelly and Eric Scott Lavin
Skills matter more than ever.

Excerpt:

For years, the importance of building demonstrable skills has been growing. The research is clear: skills acquired through work experience increase lifetime earnings. Yet, a massive shift in how learners, educators, and employers think about skills is just beginning.

Three subtrends set the stage for a massive inflection point in how we think about skills…

Learning will be the only constant throughout a career. Success in the modern workforce is learning experiences to build skills, and the best way to build skills is to do real-world projects.

Below is a sampling of organizations and companies pushing the boundaries. Some of these are established players with mature businesses and tested business models.

Also relevant/see:

The Job Skills of 2023 — from Coursera

Excerpt from the Executive Summary Section

The fastest-growing skills are digital skills
The top ten overall fastest-growing skills are digital skills. The ongoing evolution of technology means employers are regularly seeking new digital competencies from potential hires while also reskilling existing workers.
The fastest-growing digital skills are changing more significantly than the fastest-growing human skills
The top ten digital skills vary significantly from last year—only two have carried over year-on-year: data visualization and user experience. The human skills in demand remain steadier, suggesting an evergreen demand for skills like change management and communication.

2023 Higher Education Trend Watch [Educause]

On 12/07/2022, in adjunct faculty, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), blended learning, Blockchain, business side of he, colleges, community colleges, copyright/ownership/NFTs, cost of getting a degree, credentialing, cryptocurrencies, data related items, faculty, future of higher education, game-changing environment, health, higher education, hybrid learning, Hyflex learning, IT in HE, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning preferences, learning spaces, legislatures / government / legal, online learning, privacy, reinvent, society, staying relevant, student-related, surviving, teaching & learning, teaching online, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

2023 Higher Education Trend Watch — from educause.edu

Also see:

2023 Strategic Trends Glossary — from educause.edu

Excerpts:

Closer alignment of higher education with workforce needs and skills-based learning
Continuation and normalization of hybrid and online learning
Continued adoption and normalization of hybrid and remote work arrangements
Continued resignation and migration of leaders and staff from higher education institutions
Declining public funding for higher education
…and more

Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation [Walton & Pollock]

On 11/29/2022, in career development, Design Thinking, education, education reform, K-12 related, staying relevant, student-related, teachers, UK, United States, youth, by Daniel Christian

Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation— from nytimes.com; video by Agnes Walton and Nic Pollock

Excerpt:

A survey of National Education Association members at the beginning of the year revealed an unsettling truth: More than half of the respondents said they were looking for a way out. That’s an astounding number of unhappy teachers. If they all quit, it would leave millions of students in the lurch.

But were these just empty threats? At the start of this school year, we spoke to over 50 educators in almost 20 states to find out. The picture they painted was far bleaker than we could have imagined: Empty classrooms, kids in crisis, and teachers who can’t survive another day on the job — that’s the reality of American education today.

And from the UK, see the following:
The word OUCH! comes to my mind here — for this item from the UK and from the above item from the US. The politicians are going to need to back off and let the teachers do their jobs. Or we may not have many people who want to go into teaching anymore. The current situation is not only bad for the teachers, it’s bad for the youth/students.

Can a Group of MIT Professors Turn a White Paper Into a New Kind of College? — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young

Excerpt:

A group of professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropped a provocative white paper in September that proposed a new kind of college that would address some of the growing public skepticism of higher education. This week, they took the next step toward bringing their vision from idea to reality.

That next step was holding a virtual forum that brought together a who’s who of college innovation leaders, including presidents of experimental colleges, professors known for novel teaching practices and critical observers of the higher education space.

The MIT professors who authored the white paper tried to make clear that even though they’re from an elite university, they do not have all the answers. Their white paper takes pains to describe itself as a draft framework and to invite input from players across the education ecosystem so they can revise and improve the plan.

IDEAS FOR DESIGNING An Affordable New Educational Institution

The goal of this document is simply to propose some principles and ideas that we hope will lay the groundwork for the future, for an education that will be both more affordable and more effective.
…
Promotions and titles will be much more closely tied to educational performance—quality, commitment, outcomes, and innovation—than to research outcomes.

An obituary for education—or not? — from brookings.edu by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Jennifer M. Zosh, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Elias Blinkoff, and Molly Scott

Excerpt:

MAKING SCHOOLS WORK
The science of learning offers a blueprint of how children in our future can and will succeed. For the last three decades, researchers made enormous progress in understanding how human brains learn. If we can teach in a way that capitalizes on these findings—if we can apply the science to the classrooms—we will have evidence-based ways of helping children grow the suite of skills that will make them successful in today’s classrooms and the workplaces of tomorrow. Our Brookings report, A New Path to Educational Reform and our book Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Joyful Classroom Practice, detail how this research in the science of learning can offer a scalable, evidenced based path to re-invigorating and re-imagining education for our time.

Children learn when they are active, not passive observers of what is taught. Children learn when they are engaged in the material and not distracted, when the information is meaningfully connected to their knowledge in ways that are culturally responsive. They learn best in social contexts, when there are strong teacher-student and peer relationships, when the information is iteratively presented multiple times in slightly different ways, and when the learning is joyful. Yes, it is possible to have joyful teaching that affords deeper learning. When we teach in ways that the brain learns, the learning “sticks” and generalizes to new problems and new solutions.

The Shrinking of Higher Ed — A Special Report from The Chronicle of Higher Education
A special report on the implications of the enrollment contraction.

Excerpt:

Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges since the Covid-19 pandemic began. That enrollment contraction comes at a precarious moment for the sector. Inflation is driving up costs and straining budgets, stock-market volatility is putting downward pressure on endowment returns, and federal stimulus funds are running out. Why is the enrollment crunch happening now? How are colleges responding? What might turn things around? Those are the questions fueling this special report.

A Public Regional on the Edge — from chronicle.com by Eric Kelderman
New Jersey City University’s plan to grow its way out of financial trouble backfired. What went wrong?

Excerpts:

NJCU’s story is a cautionary tale for similar institutions — small public regional colleges with ambitions to expand in a crowded higher-education market. While its real-estate dealings have drawn unfavorable scrutiny, the university was responding to challenges that face its peers, in northern New Jersey and around the country: increased competition for a declining number of high-school graduates.
…
Public regional universities, like NJCU, enroll about 40 percent of all college students nationally, and a far larger percentage of minority, low-income, and first-generation students than better-known flagships and top research universities do.
…
But a lack of state support, limited ability to attract students from outside the region, and sparse fund raising have made the university vulnerable to economic downturns and demographic shifts that have led to fewer high-school graduates, especially in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Linked to in the above article was this article:

Declining enrollment has Western Michigan University on budgetary tightrope — from mlive.com by Julie Mack

Excerpts:

KALAMAZOO, MI — Western Michigan University has 17,835 students this fall, its lowest enrollment since the 1960s.

The number is down 6% from last fall. Down 27% from a decade ago, when the fall headcount was 24,598. Down 41% from 20 years ago, when WMU’s fall count peaked at 29,732.

And thanks to a declining birthrate and a shrinking percentage of new high school graduates enrolling in college, that downward enrollment trend is likely to continue indefinitely.

Rather, “what COVID did was force our hand after years of pressure created by declining enrollment and demographic trends that suggest declines will continue for the next decade,” she said. “So while COVID brought our financial situation into sharp relief, the budget cut was a measure taken to relieve pressure created over many, many years.”

A relevant addendum here:

Avoiding the Trap of Too Little Too Late — from tytonpartners.com by Trace Urdan; with thanks to Ryan Craig for this resource

Excerpt:

The challenges facing higher education are well understood: a demographic cliff of traditional-aged applicants, a declining proportion of full-pay families, and a growing skepticism of the value of (ever-more) expensive post-secondary degrees with resulting student consumerism. Add to this rapidly rising technological complexity, deferred maintenance on deteriorating physical assets, escalating administrative costs associated with student services and supports, and a burgeoning array of college substitutes, and the challenges are clear. The combination of lower tuition revenue and higher costs points toward an inevitable sector consolidation. And while many college administrators will readily acknowledge this point in the abstract, few will consider that it might apply to them.

To future-proof a workforce, kill the perpetual hiring machine and embrace lifelong learning [Dillow]

On 11/10/2022, in adult learning, business, career development, change, changing business models, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, leadership, lifelong learning, new business models, reinvent, skills, staying relevant, strategy, surviving, training / L&D, workplace, by Daniel Christian

To future-proof a workforce, kill the perpetual hiring machine and embrace lifelong learning — from fortune.com by Clay Dillow

Excerpt:

A looming economic slowdown, the Great Resignation, a relentlessly expanding skills gap, and employees that would simply rather work from home. This week at Fortune’s CEO Initiative forum, a panel of company executives discussed the litany of challenges they face in developing and maintaining their workforces over the next several years.

25 Transferable Skills Employers Look For in 2022 [Dale]

On 11/05/2022, in analytics, career development, communications, leadership, reinvent, skills, staying relevant, UK, vocational / trades, workplace, by Daniel Christian

25 Transferable Skills Employers Look For in 2022 — from wikijob.co.uk by Nikki Dalea; with thanks to Ryan Mein for this resource

Excerpt:

Transferable skills combine competencies, knowledge and skills that you have gained from the workplace during your career path, from school, internships or elsewhere and take with you to your next employment or career change.

General skills that can be used in different employment roles come under the transferable skills banner; they can be used in various industries and in roles at other seniority levels.

These can be hard skills – technical knowledge like using specific software – and soft skills, the competencies and abilities that are harder to be taught, like active listening and communication.

Communication, problem solving and teamwork are all examples of transferable job skills because they can be used in any employed role, your education or vocational training.

Learning Ecosystems

Reflections on “What is college for? Gov. Shapiro raises the question. Higher ed leaders are listening.” [Bunch]

Skills, Skills, Skills Now is the time. Skills matter more than ever. [ Donnelly & Lavin]

Can a Group of MIT Professors Turn a White Paper Into a New Kind of College? [Young]

To future-proof a workforce, kill the perpetual hiring machine and embrace lifelong learning [Dillow]

25 Transferable Skills Employers Look For in 2022 [Dale]

Categories

Tags