 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see so many people here talking about a very very important subject I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the organizer creator and chief cat-herder of the forum And I'll be your guide today as we explore the future of the workforce and its impact on higher education We are delighted to host Michelle Weiss Michelle is at the Strata Foundation and she does a couple of things there that are really really important She works in their future of work project So she scans what's going on with the workplace and the workforce and she also works in their education network Where she helps keep an eye on the future of education? So what we'd like to do today is examine where she sees Will the workplace changing and how that's going to change higher education as we know it. Dr. Weiss welcome Hi everyone. Hi Brian. Can you hear me? Perfectly so good to hear and see you It's nice to be here. Thanks everyone for joining it seems like we've got a good crew We do we have a great amount of people and some fine folks here. So first of all if you can tell us, where are you today? I Know you're sad because my dog's not in the background, but I am I Am at home in and over Massachusetts right outside of Boston. Oh, okay Okay, so is it is it still summer there or has fall begun to bite? It's cooler today, but it's still beautiful Are leaves falling yet? No, but we have a We have a triple E mosquito here, which is like the Eastern equine encephalitis mosquito, which is very terrifying So it's kind of making us all want summer to end because it's sad because we don't get a whole long summer But now we have a deadly mosquito in the air, which is and the killing The killing frost will take care of that. I think yeah, hopefully well Michelle there's so many ways to introduce people and I find one of the best ways to introduce them on this program Is to ask you what you're going to be working on for the next year. So let me ask what's going to be taking up Most of your thoughts what's going to be taking most of your time what projects what ideas? Yeah, so as you mentioned I lead the strata Institute for the future of work And we are just constantly doing lots and lots of research. So The big pieces on our agenda are very much You know our mission is really to start thinking about designing a learning ecosystem of the future now That like as much as people talk about lifelong learning There really aren't a whole lot of systems and infrastructure in play to actually facilitate that lifelong learning process So all of our research is geared toward really trying to shine a light on the voids in the marketplace and Things that we need to see more of so we sort of scan the horizon just sort of just to assess Who's doing great work some of those seeds of innovation that we need to scale And then also where we need to just do more because it just isn't in those foundational elements there So a lot of our work is going to be on demystifying the voice of the adult learner I think we the concept of an adult learner is just really problematic right because it just stands anyone over the age of 21 pretty much and But we're not really Surfacing the voices of those learners We've started being a lot of that work at strata as a whole in our partnership with Gallup Where we've done a lot of consumer surveys of education consumer surveys, but this is really trying to get at More in-depth interviews around the pain points and the circumstances and the barriers that prevent progress in work and Just life So that's that's a big thing we're working on and then hopefully in the next few months You'll see a big piece that we're going to put out On the new geography of skills And that's a sort of our next collaboration. We're doing with our affiliate called MZ, which is a labor market data analytics group and we're trying to sort of Help people get more toward a Skill-based understanding of the world so that perhaps we may not have to rely as heavily on sort of more of the blunt Proxies of credentials but start to enable more learners who may not have those degrees and may not have the ability to return to College to get those degrees Advance in their lives, so we'll be doing a lot of work on this idea of skill shapes And and helping people understand what it means when we say that a labor market is local And how we think about the talent in that region and how we build pathways to promising careers You know in that sort of localized way So those are major projects we're working on in the near future and those are huge Friends I have a couple of follow-up questions, but The forum remember is about your questions in your comments So if you have it to begin with if you have any questions about Michelle's work and where this is headed This is a great time to ask and then we're going to start nudging towards the actual content too as well as how the Workplace is changing how education is changing. Let me just quickly ask a couple for those who don't know strata All of this research all these interviews all this horizon scanning Where does that appear in the world? I mean, do you do you do academic presentations? Do you publish a blog? Do you have papers coming out or what? yeah, so today it's kind of mostly come out in the form of a of white papers Written about four to five different white papers one on sort of the the problem of Under-employment for college graduates one robot ready human plus skills for the future of work And we talked about on ramps to good jobs Especially for working-class Americans. We're not thriving in the labor market today These things live on our website, which is at strata Institute org And as I mentioned, we're part of strata education network and what's neat about the network is that it really is a network So we have a whole slew of activities that we engage in We have a philanthropic arm that you know invest does a lot of grant giving grant making We have an investment Corporate development group where we do a lot of direct and minority investments in startups and entrepreneurs Who are trying to solve for some of these problems in this space? And we're also a limited partner with a bunch of other venture capital funds So we do, you know, some private equity work. We do that kind of investment work At the same time we sponsor a lot of events We do a lot of national engagement and state engagement work And so we try to put a lot of that research into practice through that sort of engagement where it's a lot of speaking engagements and Talking with policymakers and then we also have a laboratory of solutions through our affiliates. So we have groups like road trip nation inside track Education at work MZ Kato the council on adult experiential learning So those are sort of our laboratory of solutions where we can also Get into more direct contact with learners themselves Wow, that's a really ambitious portfolio of research. It's very diversified. Yeah, we have a lot of tools in our toolbox I can see that Well, we have some more questions coming up, but let me just Quickly slide towards some of the content areas. We talked about some of the mismatches between higher education and the workforce Where do you see the workforce changing right now? In ways that higher education really needs to scramble in order to cover Yeah, I think one of the interesting things that we see emerging So we just did a scan for instance on just the first six months of 2018 last year of The most common or you know in-demand skills from employers and what we're seeing and it kind of It follows what a lot of the literature on the future of work is saying that there is this increased demand for what we might think of as Human skills human skills We just use as a way to think about the skills that maybe a computer or robot may not be able to do May not be able to automate and that might help us thrive in the future of work And so you have a lot of analysts talking about the need for emotional intelligence and empathy and judgment and you know use of leveraging values etc so And so we wanted to kind of see what was going on in the market and in fact that is the case You know are the top 10 skills in demand of the workforce the vast majority of them are these sorts of human Skills or what we often known as you know Soft skills or interpersonal skills or right workforce competencies the the challenges that How do you actually? What do you do with that information right? We kind of have this disconnect right now where employers and educators Believe that they are cultivating these like educators believe that they are cultivating these people with unique human skills That can communicate think critically collaborate all that good stuff and yet you have employers on the other hand saying You know these folks are not up to par There's that sort of mismatch and so what we tried to sort of Untangle is that even though educators and employers actually value the same outcomes they have totally different languages that they speak that aren't that don't right and Also when you use these sorts of really broad terms like communication or critical thinking or problem-solving They're just broad to To do any good and so what we tried to do with real-time labor market information is suss out How those skills actually manifest in the labor market? So if for instance, you know liberal arts faculty say that these are in you know Precisely the skill that they are cultivating. How do we actually help learners? Maybe translate those into the language of the labor market Is that potentially one of the problems that learners are facing as they as they make That transition and it was fascinating because we realized that human skills like as much as people love to kind of emphasis Emphasize this idea of human skills human skills alone aren't going to be enough. It's this sort of hybrid human plus So it's not hard or soft skills. It's not large arts or stem It's both and and so what we realized is even with terms like communication and problem-solving When you actually trace how they manifest in the labor market and say like the top 10 pathways that you know Maybe social science majors go into or liberal arts majors go into or STEM majors go into when you start to unpack those in you know Say communication in a field like PR or advertising or digital marketing It manifests as something very discreet like search engine optimization or lead gen or storytelling or Management right and have these very distinct And we don't we don't you know as learners or as educators We don't maybe know how these actually translate So part of that is to to illuminate some of the pathways for people and the skills that they might need to acquire along the way Because some of those skills also, you know, especially for journalists as an example It's really become like an IT field. So you have to have some engagement with CSS and JavaScript and Google Analytics and video and social media exactly and or tab below, right? So it's and these aren't skills that you can just kind of find in the last semester before you graduate Right, these are things that you have to kind of start to embed all along the way whether it's through internships or you know Miners or work-based learning opportunities or boot camps or MOOCs. You know something you have to start kind of acquiring these along the way So I think that's kind of like a fascinating thing that we see where there's this real Emphasis on human skills and then how do we actually truly cultivate those skills because at the same time that we know that those skills are important One of the chief cultivators of these skills, which is liberal arts majors is that they're actually on the decline? Well, I think a lot of students are seeing the better Opportunity and you know better financial ROI potentially around business healthcare STEM fields They're opting out of these sorts of majors and so we have to sort of wrestle with that disconnect as you know Especially within higher ed of what that means when we know that there's this growing emphasis on human skills and yet You know potentially the ways in which we think we are building those kinds of nimble adaptive thinkers of the future Might potentially be dwindling Michelle you just hit on a whole series of topics and I want to make sure that we get a chance to dive into this And first again friends There's a lot of ways to approach this and so we've just been talking about the Possible tension between STEM and liberal education for example the ways that a higher education can signal where? What achievements the students have as well as the language gap between how the soft skills are assessed by the corporate world as well It's a higher education So again, just go to the bottom of the screen and click the raised hand if you want to join us on stage Or click the question mark if you like typing a question. Let me just ask a real quick question Perhaps a clarifying question. Do you what's an example of the different? understanding of the same words between the business world and Academic world the did you find that say in problem-solving or in teamwork or creativity? Yeah, definitely, you know for problem-solving, you know for liberal arts I'll just say for you know a liberal arts grad may be going into HR which is actually one of the top 10 kind of pathways that that graduates tend to Ultimately pursue by their third job You know when you talk about problem-solving that might be around negotiation or you know succession planning or crisis management whereas in You know when you look at that in a behavioral health context, it looks very very different, right? It's it's maybe more about interventions and you know Finance it might be about forecasting and market research And so these are the ways in which these skills manifest differently and I think part of We kind of talk about it in terms of we need almost like a Rosetta stone between these two Don't speak we need this third language that kind of makes sense of this And I think that is where we're lucky in the sense that we're at us We're at this point in time where we don't necessarily have to rely on The same on it codes, you know We're looking at Bureau of Labor statistics data, which is often we're facing two years at least right? Those kinds of categories and occupation codes don't keep up with the way the labor market is changing daily And so when you are able to look at some of these real-time job postings data, you can start to get a glimpse of more of the dynamic Things that are that are happening in the market. So just as another quick example of sort of really interesting kind of skills that are emerging We know, you know, and this is I think going to speak to a lot of people who Probably follow you Brian who are kind of really actively thinking about change and reinventing higher ed is one of the one of the emerging skills that we see from these labor market postings is that Change management, you know business process improvement these sorts of business skills around change and innovation are really coming Coming starting to come out in interesting ways And so that's the kind of thing you can start to see that you can't maybe necessarily when you're looking at You know traditional BLS data or more structural data and BLS being a Bureau of Labor statistics, for example Thank you. That's a that's a really good answer. And maybe you should publish such a Rosetta stone As a dictionary we have a whole stack of questions coming in and we just put up a couple of these on screen to begin with Thanks to a Margita Blatner from Egypt Coast who asks Do you believe there is an opportunity to move towards more practical learning environments to gain these skills? Yeah, that's a really great question. I think it depends on the kind of learner we're trying to engage with right so for the traditional sort of 17 to 24 year old learner who might be kind of in that college going population I think there really are opportunities for for you know Disciplines and Universities to kind of rethink how they might be Inadvertently siloing their education because I think what we think what we know we need for any problem of the future is that All these problems will be transdisciplinary major It's not going to sort of fit solidly within some sort of discipline And so how do we actually effectively help our learners transfer from one domain to another? And take something that they've learned and you know in anthropology But like use it in mathematics or you know or bring these things together in the context of solving a larger problem I think we love to talk about project-based learning, right? We don't effectively Implemented at a college level, you know, we we tend to sort of still Comfortably work within our fiefdoms of academic departments, you know The incentives and promotion processes and tenure processes are not aligned to actually facilitate that kind of Cross-disciplinary problem-solving. So I think that's that's a real area for Reinventing within that sort of traditional context But then we have to think about learners who are adults and older who are not going to go back to a two or four year Degree to get some of this kind of really up, you know to practice maybe some of these human skills You know, maybe some of these learners went more of the bokeh tech or CTE route earlier on and are starting to see some of their Skills waning and the need for maybe some of these human skills to advance up the management chain There's no real opportunity for them to find a way to practice those sorts of skills Like how do you practice emotional intelligence or you know empathy or these sorts of problem-solving skills? And that's where I do think there's some interesting innovation going on around You know where something like virtual reality and simulations might have a place to play especially for adult learners because Going back to school, you know going is telling someone. Oh, you should maybe major in the liberal arts and that might that might help You gain some of these human skills. That's just not it's just too far afield and so You know, we see some really interesting work going on. You're probably familiar with immersion You know, it's these it's the different ways practice before they got Acquired by Instructure was doing these sorts of soft, you know, not soft skills assessments But low stakes assessments where you're in a simulated environment and you're confronted with a problem and you have to solve it Right. You have to you have to engage with the problem give feedback Calm someone down do the right procedure in the midst of something going on So there are ways in which we can start to think about the role of technology there in practicing some of these skills and Doing some of that far transfer work And I think you know, I think this is also what the company Embellis is trying to do with their, you know attempt to I think they're trying to disrupt the SAT But really what they're doing is simulating an environment where they're trying with the best Psychometricians that they can they can they're trying to measure curiosity and Collaboration and these sorts of critical thinking by You move through the things that are thrown at you on the platform, right? when you're in a natural environment and Something's dead and you're trying to figure out why that is and you're looking at information You're clicking on all these different things. Everything is being noticed on the back end, right? everything is being tagged and and assessed and it tells It tells us kind of maybe new ways of thinking about the hidden skills that people might have and that's really To think about like this is something that Peter Smith talks about in his free-range learning, right? There's a lot of people have skills that are hidden That you know, maybe wrapped up in 20 years of work experience that are not codified in some sort of formal credential So I think we need new ways of trying to assess Those kinds of hidden skills and that's that's a real opportunity for the future That's a terrific answer and that brings up a great question that came from Matt Dupiro Matt need to unmute yourself Thank you. Can you hear me? Okay perfectly? Awesome So I work at Southern New Hampshire University in the program development department So my question is related to the job postings that Feed into the skills shaping that you're talking about. I'm kind of curious how much strata's research has kind of Validated some of the information that goes into these postings to what extent we can see correspondence between The information that's in those postings and what employers are really looking for Yeah, um, I recognize the mill as soon as you popped up on the screen So it is a good question. So one of the okay, so we talked about how structural data or data like from SOC and Onet coach from the Bureau of Labor Statistics basically what happens there is that they've They have figured out boxes to put the entire population into like every there's there's 974 Boxes or occupation codes that we all somehow fit into and if you think about that, right? It's just going to be messy It's just too many people to fit into some of these very kind of rigid wooden brittle boxes So the reason why we like looking at you know job postings data It's not the silver bullet here, but it's better than what we've got which is it does get at some of that real-time Demand and what we do through that is there's a lot, you know, you know with em Z with burning glass with Chamorro with LinkedIn one of the big sort of tasks on their plate is to De-duplicate right and make sure that they're not looking at a hundred postings of the same job And and you know, you know saying that that's a lot of demand for that skill So they're doing a lot of work in all of this natural language processing and they're trying to get better and better at that Is it perfect right now? No, but it's it's better than what we've got What's neat that we can do now, which is sort of a new piece of like a new development within this space is Not only can you look at the demand for? Skills you can actually now look at millions of social profile and resume data and Look at them longitudinally because all of us, you know have LinkedIn profiles or different sorts of profiles out there And over time you can actually see the changes that occur and the sorts of skills that we we say We have and then employers say they want and again There is an assumption that when an employer is saying that they want those skills They actually want those skills and we also know right that because we have no Standardization of how people post jobs. There's a whole range of how people, you know, list the skills that they want What's fascinating though is generally what you see from employers, right? Is that they'll do kind of a whole litany of hard skills? It's kind of easier to sort of say what you want in terms of hard skills It is fascinating to see this market increase in the demand for human skills, right? These sorts of things that they're they're seeing as As lacking and and you hear that from employers also, you know, even if you might have incredibly depth You know Technologists or folks who are engineers. They're still seeking those those uniquely human skills so so that is, you know, there is there are ways to kind of marry the data now to Just sort of say, okay Here's where there's clearly where the signal of demand is but then you can also tie it to How employers are actually validating that by the people that they hire So you can actually connect those social profiles to those job postings and look at how how they how they match up So that's kind of a neat New development you see going on Excellent. Great question Matt. Thank you very much and greetings to Southern New Hampshire And Michelle, thank you. That was a terrific deep answer Friends if you if you're new to the forum, this is how it works People who can turn their camera on join us appear on stage and ask our wonderful guests great questions and we also have the Text option so speaking of which let me bring up a related question that just came up from Peter Shea Which is how to reconcile the emerging core Competencies needed like negotiation risk assessment data literacy with what traditional faculty are trained to teach Yeah, I mean, I think this is this is sort of the the main battleground right between academics and employers or institutions and you know, workforce or economic developers is There's a reticence There's always been a reticence on the part of universities to train to the skills and that are needed now because the fear is that What if those skills go away and that's where I think again if we kind of return to this idea of real project-based learning real kind of Orientation around scenario-based learning or problem-based learning I can get at some of those near-term means as well as just sort of the baseline kind of skills that are needed to think Broadly across domains or concessually to get some of the the really important You know skills that we that we think of as so core to general education So I think, you know, you see some of these kind of Movements where the Stanford D. School says, you know, what if we had like a school of hunger or a school of poverty? And you wanted to solve the problem around poverty and in the context of really being mission focused around poverty You learn why it's so, you know fundamental that you need to know this stuff around Anthropology or this about statistics and right So it's in that in the context of that learning that you learn these skills and then you also learn some of what employers might be Seeing as core to the to that work going on in the current moment, and then it doesn't maybe feel so It doesn't chafe so much to sort of think about kind of this sacred college education versus workforce training And it's it's fascinating to see that, you know, I think people can sexually agree with this idea of Project-based learning and It you know and even at the K-12 level you see it, but most of the schools that implement it are anomalies, right? You have high-tech high in Diego doing incredible work in this field, right? You have Olin College who doesn't have any academic departments and Sometimes teaches three disciplines at the same time because that's how you learn to solve some of these problems But you know those kinds of examples are few and far between And I feel like this is where if you know if we can get to You know some of those sorts of de siloing of how we Each and rethinking what really like as we think about who would be that kind of nimble adaptive thinker We need to kind of build towards that I don't know if anyone is kind of reading this really great new book by David Epstein called range, but it kind of It's it's a phenomenal book and it gets at this idea that some of the greatest Innovation and thinking has come from people who know a lot know sort of They're not as deep in a certain expertise But they have a lot of knowledge across domains and some of the best problem-solving occurs is because they're able to do Is kind of analogical thinking of taking one idea from a different domain and applying it to solve a problem over here So like it isn't in schools are like Innocentive where most of the people who won these innocent challenges are people who have nothing to do with chemistry or Science, you know, it's someone who looked at a pastry show and watch someone You know, you know making chocolate mousse and that's kind of how they might have solved How to fix an oil cell, right? And so these are the kinds of I see the holiday on express So I do think There is a case to be made for how we might do this You know, it's it is within the realm of possibility to do within an institution versus saying hey Go try to do this disruptive tactic most most If you follow the theories of destructive innovation, it would tell you that it's really hard to affect change from within But there are different kinds of things we can do to transform how we teach Well along those lines first. Thank you. That's an incredibly rich answer and you've given us you've expanded our reading list That's a range colon wide generalists triumph in a specialized world which just came out so we should be looking at that. Thank you We had a quick a quick note from the awesome Steve Ehrman We just put this up here To in regards to the Rosetta Stone. He recommends a 1982 book called the competent manager Richard Boyatsis So that gives us a good place for having a shared language. Oh, thank you Steve We also have another question that came up which I which followed pressed on this a bit more from Charles Findlay So we just put this up on the screen From Northeastern Charles not too far from you Charles asked are there any initiatives for upskilling faculty? So they're equipped to educate for the future. So we mentioned chafing. I thought this is a way of easing the chafing Yeah, it's it's a great question. I was actually just this morning at Boston University Wheelock College and a similar question came up from the faculty where it's sort of this idea that what got you Here won't get you there, you know, we're trying to teach But we all went to kind of the traditional Institution, how do we get out of those kinds of habits of mind and and the things that we're comfortable with? I Think you know the the challenge that we have and and here's like a real opportunity to rethink How we prepare our Doctoral students in particular, you know, if we are going to continue to require the PhD to teach at the college level What is it that we are really doing in terms of Teaching teachers how to teach and I say this from my own personal experience of going through one of these programs You know teaching at a small liberal arts college in Skidmore at Skidmore. Yeah, and I just I I Took maybe two classes on pedagogy, you know, and and and I don't think I am Anomalous like I think this is kind of you know, generally for most people who kind of go into PHP programs You kind of learn some theory around pedagogy You do some TA right right instructor You take over some instructor roles, but mostly you're emulating what you have seen. This is this is something that Eric Bazzore talks a lot about when he talks about peer instruction, right? We we just sort of emulate what we've seen but we we learn very little about learning science and how the brain works and How to create assessments without bias. I never learned any of those things, you know, and so As we think about, you know, the PhD Sort of way in which we prepare our teachers. It is very much still geared towards that dissertation mode Produce this thing because you are going to maybe be a world cut a world-class researcher Right, which most people don't necessarily go into that tracking And most people kind of start off because they've had a moment in their lives where they were affected by an amazing teacher And they want to to be that kind of teacher to someone else But we're really not taught a lot and it's it's amazing to see also just within again talking about silos how schools of education are often Separate from these sorts of graduate programs absolutely totally distinct endeavors and There's also a little bit of tension, right? There's like a little bit of condescension, you know across these these different schools and so I Think that is where we'll have to do differently for the future And I think, you know, there are there are, you know, even within teacher prep for a k-12 level I think there's a lot of alternative providers kind of coming out rethinking Teacher prep we don't have as much of that when it comes to, you know, college level teaching And I think that's that's a real pain point for a lot of faculty members is that they don't have those up-skilling opportunities to think about You know innovation fatigue and innovation and change management and how do you how do you, you know Start to kind of try to affect change from within too. I think those are really important skills to start building We have um, thank you again That's a very very rich answer. You cover a lot of ground and I can see how you managed to run two different enterprises within strata We had a quick note that fits into that Which is from Fritz van Dover who says a lot of what you're saying about human soft skill demands That's a tacit description of the skills and values of liberal arts disciplines foster And I would add to that liberal arts institutions college and universities That's exactly that it is it is a it is sort of this implicit understanding that that is what is the value of these sorts of programs I think the the the challenge ahead is for you, especially as liberal arts majors are on the decline if if Institutions want to stab off that decline. I think that tacit and implicit dimension has to become much more explicit And I know there's this kind of aversion to thinking about what they what, you know Academics do as a line to the labor market But that is what learners are looking for right as we think about we are just in a different moment in which a college Education is so costly and it's such an investment that people are the number one reason They are pursuing higher ed is to get a good job or to get a better job and we cannot ignore Those motivations from our learners and so we do have to be a little bit more explicit about how we help people make That tacit dimension become more Understandable and I think just another piece of this sort of tacit dimension is you know, this is something that MIT economist, I don't know why I'm pointing there. I says because he's in Massachusetts I He this is what David Otter talks about. Oh sure. Yeah, and he talks about Polanyi's the tacit dimension, which is again going back to that original thing We were talking about which is the human and these sort of tacit things that we can't explain how we do them Are going to be the things that remain You know resistant to automation. So how we persuade How we Even just like, you know, there's even physical things of you know, how do you ride a horse? You know these kinds of little adjustments you have to make it's very hard to describe some of these activities So that is that's another piece of this kind of human skill how we think about You know, you know, you know the the human side of work is that sort of tacit dimension? let me You've added to a reading list yet again, which is terrific I want to bring up on stage a long-term friend of the program Tom Hames from Houston Tom is really keen on this issue of How to express Individual skills and backgrounds in the in the workforce Tom is also if you haven't met him Tom is a very very deep and broad thinker about education and how it can change Tom do you want to do you want to take this a little further? Yeah, so I'm shell So You're very much speaking to me. I mean I tell this to my students. I teach my 101 level government courses as design studios and so That very much mixes things up and and it's the best the closest I've been able to come to Authentic project-based learning and in years of practice But I have you know and I tell my students the same things you're telling me are telling us now You know about these soft skills and about all these other things, but the concern I have is that the employers We all say you know the liberal arts major is the best way to go that gives you a broad sense of Tools and skills and then when you go to the job application It goes must have accounting degree or must have this degree or that degree and it seems to this is this has been This is not a new thing. This is something. I mean, I've been told and I'm I'm highly over-educated as a liberal arts major And But you know I've been told you know I thought this I believe this for most of my career and and I find myself in situation now where you know I've got a lot of experience and things like that But I don't have the right degree for this or that from the perspective of the employers and I see these postings and I go I can do this job. I've done this job And telling my students hey, you need these soft skills and this is really going to get you further They're gonna run up against the same sort of thing and the industrial world is all about specialization You must be you must be a not only a size 5 hammer operator type of thing Right, but how do you bridge that gap? Do you you know to what extent do you have to talk to the employers and say um if you want to be Google dot dot dot? You need to start thinking about your hiring in this way because I'm not seeing a lot Yeah, no, I mean what you're touching on is um is Is is is core to just the problem here as we are a Credential based world right we live in a credential based world We prioritize a degree above all right and we use that as a great sorting mechanism The the good news is that employers are slowly starting to realize how ineffective that proxy may be Granted it's still always you're still always going to see it but what's fascinating is we've done some surveys with employers and You see this this openness to hiring based on skills And hiring based on work experience over the credential and you see this great openness actually We don't see it necessarily manifesting in the labor market yet But we do see a kind of change in the way in which HR managers, especially are thinking about these sorts of These sorts of issues I think one of the good news The one of the good pieces of news might be that in a very very tight labor market Which we do have now right where unemployment is very low and it's basically like the tightest since the 1990s What's interesting is as that labor market gets tighter and tighter It becomes a whole lot more difficult for employers just to sort of spot talent and just poach It's just the competition is just going to be too fierce And so what employers are going to have to start to do is look also at just the people around them Like the people in their regions and this is one of the reasons why we're doing this work on the on the new geography of skills is Employers policy makers. They all want to get to this world of a skills-based hiring Marketplace where you don't have to rely on the degree, but they don't know how to do it, right? And so if we can start to show that you know We have millions and billions of dollars going into workforce development training programs But they're often very broad They're not specific on the kinds of pathways that people need in terms of the skills They need to develop But if we can start to use some of this data where we understand that you know, this region in Seattle When they're looking for a cybersecurity specialist or when they're looking for Someone in a production role in a manufacturing in the manufacturing sector The skill shape actually looks different From someone posting those same roles in DC or St. Louis or Kansas City like the the skill shape of that Role looks very different because of the regional pushes and polls between the interactions of the employers And just sort of the supply chain there So what's needed you can actually start to see oh, you know what when we say cybersecurity specialist It actually means this here and as we start to look at the talent pool around us We can start to see how we might build in and fill in some of those gaps for people who may not have those precise skills And those may not necessarily necessitate a degree And that's what we're seeing is really interesting is that by looking at the data of you know People who are already in the labor market and seeing the kinds of pathways they have taken We can see that certain people who start off as office admin Roles actually do end up moving into really high management positions by acquiring certain skills along the way So how do we do more of that? And how do we then to your point? How do we get people? Demonstrating that they actually have this experience and I think right now in this kind of in between period before we get to this sort of Utopia our ideal of skills-based hiring We're in this kind of in-between phase where we need to demonstrate it by at least some pieces of kind of work-based learning opportunities Whether it's through sort of apprenticeship or internship programs You know, there are companies out there like Parker Dewey that are trying to build in these sorts of Micro internships for people to demonstrate that they can actually do these jobs By doing these small pieces of work and slowly, you know employers try to do they can do it There's all these kinds of platforms emerging where they're also trying to blind the higher process right and make it about performance So an employer puts a problem out there and then anyone can try to solve it and from that the person who solves it You know in a really good way suddenly, you know surfaces to an employer who might not have ever considered Recruiting from that particular college or that, you know, someone without a degree So I think there we're just in this uncomfortable in-between stage But you do see an openness much more of an openness towards skills-based hiring Well, thank you. That's a huge question Michelle since you have so much free time, I think what you have to do is you have to write a book on this Just to encourage people To follow these paths in order to succeed. I'm this is hugely striking But Tom, thank you for the really really good question. We're closing in the end of the hour I need to and we have more questions piling up. Michelle. You've just really Activated the community like nobody's business Let me bring up Sergio costo Costa and Sergio if I mispronounce your name my apologies My Spanish is very bad. No, I just wanted to ask about what mechanisms you have Observes in higher education institutions and have been taking adapting to these new skills What mechanisms are in place that have worked well in your community? Thank you, Sergio So is the question to you? What mechanisms are working well for universities to adapt to adapt? You know, I think some of them are structural. So, you know if you talk to folks at You know places like ASU, WGU, SNHU, there's this kind of deliberate attempt to kind of Foster these sort of skunk works projects so that they're not necessarily having to Meet the same standards of the incumbent Processes and all the things that happen in the in the sort of more traditional institution So you see this kind of attempt to do different sorts of skunk works projects I think it's interesting to see the development of More roles around innovation within universities. You see more of these kinds of chief innovation officer roles Emerging and I think I think that's one attempt It is, you know, I think it is it's the mechanisms. It's it's really hard. I think anyone who does this work will tell you it is really hard work because It's it's just In our brains to resist these sorts of trains It's just like the way our amygdala works right is to like resist anything new as if it's dangerous and so it's it's inordinately difficult for people to Just sort of do do this transformative work from within but I think when when it is as protected as possible away from The current activities and given some time to work in stealth mode so that, you know People can't come in and squash the idea before its form I think that that's probably the kind of recurring theme you see of institutions to do this work And you also see some new kind of people trying to set up different sorts of innovation and R&D Centers right and so they're trying to figure out how do they how do they start doing some of this research and then applying it from Within so I think there is this kind of new mechanism emerging through these innovation roles Well, thank you Sergio, that's a really good question a very practical one that we need to be bearing in mind and Thank you Michelle for mentioning skunkworks. Well, I'm always always glad to see those And we need to have actually a special session. I think just on those We're almost at the hour, but we have time for one last question from the awesome Peter Shay the question was This is a broader question. Do you see much hope for reform in colleges? Or is there a need for a new type of post-secondary educational institution to emerge? I mean, you've mentioned boot camps you've mentioned MOOCs for example I mean, do you think the sector is flexible enough to do this or we're gonna see something brand new come up? I Think it's gonna be both I think it's gonna be reform from within and then there's also going to be sort of new Alternative learning providers are merging at the same time. We already see that occurring today I think there's it's really fascinating to see just in the last three years Over 250 companies have been funded in this space of trying to better match sort of supply to demand and so You see a lot of this innovation going on and what people are calling workforce tech But I think the important thing to remember about trying to think about transformation or reinvention from within is that You have to understand the limits of what might be possible to do from within a university So trying to set yourselves up to to be disruptive is is probably a very difficult hurdle to do from within an institution It's just like even within businesses. There are very few examples of businesses that have been able to Sort of disrupt themselves and sort of think about new innovations that might You know bring them into the next into the next sort of wave of innovation and so but the important thing is that I think what people misunderstand about You know disruption and innovation in higher ed is that they seem to sort of uphold disruptive innovations as a good thing and sustaining innovations which is sort of Continuing to make better products and products and services for your best customers as a bad thing And it's not and I think that's the thing that we have to remember and in sustaining innovation Sure, we're not interested in small tweaks here and there But there is a way in which you can do dramatic staining innovation work where you are doing new things I think the thing to remember is that as much academic inertia is there is in higher ed and there just is there is a lot And as much as we think that higher ed is steeped in tradition What's fascinating is it's not really if you actually like look at the history of the development of universities and this is something that Chad Wellman has written about and If you actually kind of look at the origins of it where it starts a startup starts off as you know Modeling itself on the Humboldt model out of Germany and then kind of evolving over time the There are so many things that have happened over time that are pretty dramatic and we kind of forget And then we sort of reify them as though they're part of tradition Exactly the way in which we think about like the moral formation of a person has really changed over time Right and the the way in which we think about canonical texts and all these sorts of things There's been dramatic shifts and there's there's been a lot of resilience within a university setting that I think we can't downplay either So, you know, I don't I think a lot of people start to despair that there's sort of no hope I think it's gonna happen in both cases where we are gonna see a contraction in the market It will be inevitable in terms of just too many highly tuition dependent schools That are geared toward a population that is plateauing and in like mid 2035 or something It's gonna really drop So there will be a contraction in the market but there is a real opportunity to do great work in trying to think about how to attend to a new learner and I think the forward institution forward thinking institutions are gonna orient around this new adult learner and how to think about services differently All that good stuff and then there's also going to be a whole wave of innovation going on on the margins of Startups and entrepreneurs and for-profits doing also this kind of work So it'll be kind of you know, and it's gonna take time. It's just these things take time. So I just wanted to You know affirm that sustaining animations are not bad Well, I'm glad you affirm that but unfortunately I have to affirm the end of the session Michelle we saw a balloon blown right past the end of the hour Let me thank you so much for such so many ideas such great engagement with all of our questions Let me ask two great questions first Can we bring you back? Excellent, so we want to do that and we still need to see your puppy But the the other question is what's the best way to keep up with you and your work? So I think the best way is just to go to strata Institute.org that will route you to where all of our latest research is and Yeah, and we will start to also build out kind of the newsletter from there very good very good Well, again, thank you Michelle. That was absolutely terrific I'm so delighted to have had you for an hour here on the program And we're really looking forward to following up with you both in your work And when you return as another guest, thank you so much Friends don't go yet because we have to tell you what's happening next And Also, let me just thank you all for really terrific thoughtful questions And I see more and more of you still have questions left next week We're going to bring back a return guest michael horn Consultant and author is going to be here for his brand new book choosing college Which has a lot of really great practical and also provocative ideas about that process We are continuing to publish more and more recordings to youtube So please head to the archive to pull down recordings of sessions like today's If you want to keep talking about these issues We have groups on slack on linkedin and on facebook So on slack just You know me and I'll send you an invite if you want to join our linkedin or facebook group Just search for future transform and they should come up and of course we're on twitter as people have been tweeting for the past hour So let me thank you all very much. It's been an exciting exciting hour And I look forward to seeing you next time I'm gonna stick around here for a couple of minutes. If you just want to chat But in the meantime, we'll see you next time Bye