 education, publishing, health care, utility, and government organization. Tim understand how to harness learning and training for career advancement. Tim received his PhD at Stanford University and his BA at UT Austin. He has resided with his family in the Bay Area for over 30 years. Now without further ado, I'd like to pass it over to Tim. Tim, you may begin. Thank you, Lori. That was very kind introduction. I appreciate that. I also, I'm going to make sure I'm sharing. Can everyone see my screen? Not yet. I have to hit the share button. There it is. So hi, I just want to start by thanking Lori and Leah for all the hard work they're doing for career search, career development, and management events. This is truly incredible. It's a real gift to the world. I am thrilled that I can be a part of this effort. And I just want to say thank you before we get going. And the next thing I want to add is the presentation today, there's no way that I can cover all of the things that are relevant in this topic. So as part of your feedback at the end of the presentation today, if there are aspects of what I'm talking about that you think warrant more exploration, please put that in your comments. Leah and Lori will be more than happy to entertain that. And we will work together to find appropriate people to address those topics if we can, especially as I go through the presentation. I'll be talking about some careers that might be interesting to you that you may not quite understand what they are or what you want to learn more about. And I think it would be a great thing if you are helping us understand what your interests are so that we can be a service to you. I hope I didn't put too many words in your mouth, Lori and Lisa. Lori did a little bit of an introduction of my career. And I appreciate that. And the one thing I want to underline is I don't have a tech degree. My degree from Stanford is in German studies. My undergraduate degree was a liberal arts degree. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Moby Dick. So I'm a liberal arts nerd who has somehow managed to have a successful career mostly in tech because places like UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz Extension offer wonderful programs for people to pivot their careers. I am thankful to those institutions. I've been involved with them for over 10 years myself. And so I want everyone to feel like there are resources available to you. If you need to change your career, no matter where you are in your career or whatever your perceived lack of experience or skills might be, there are resources out there that can help you. And that's one of my main messages for today. When I was a younger person than I am today, we did not have some of the resources like online learning available to us. So I have not been able to leverage all of the options that I'm talking about today, but they're there and they're extraordinary and they're exciting. And I'll be pointing them out as we go along. One thing I want to say before we go anywhere with the presentation today, there are excellent training and education providers out there. And there are some that just want your money. And not every program that works for one person works for someone else. So you should take the time to understand what you're getting into and what you're able to handle before you start spending a lot of time and money on certificate programs or advanced degrees. And it can be a little bit tricky to do that, especially when you begin to take out financial aid. Some for-profit educators love to take your financial aid, but they don't always deliver on the promises they make. This has been something of some controversy in the news that you can look up. But I want to encourage you to think about that. The other thing is there are master's degree programs that will help you get financial aid. But if you don't have a reasonable path forward in salary increases after that degree, it might become a struggle for you to pay you back. And it might become more of a millstone around your neck than an enabler. So having just made a case a few minutes ago for the power of continuing education, there are some pitfalls that I would like everyone to think about before they get into what they're doing. The one thing that is a joy in my life and may not be a joy for everyone is the Bay Area truly is a knowledge-driven economy. And a lot of people like to talk about techies and tech. And I think that's a misnomer. I think every one of the industries that I've listed here and companies that are based here, there are companies that have presence here that aren't even mentioned here. All of these companies are tech-driven, okay? And even if not all of their employees are tech workers. So if you look at this and there are industry sectors that you work in or you might wanna work in, the good news is there are, you can develop skills and knowledge that are applicable and you don't have to work for Apple, Google or Facebook to have a tech career, okay? Those are elite companies, they're very hard to get employed by. And there are a lot of people who are unhappy working for those companies too, as well as people who get really rich in the process. But if you like tech and you don't feel like you wanna go work for one of those companies in the first line, all of these other companies have roles for people with tech skills or knowledge skills. Another thing I wanna make clear is if you don't already know and I'm sure you do, I don't wanna sound like I'm condescending. There are a lot of knowledge workers in what we call business operations, sales, marketing, human resources and management, IT services, people who administer IT systems. There are subject matter experts who don't necessarily work in IT, scientists, computer programmers, accountants, product managers, finance and healthcare providers. Those are all job categories that we encounter in our everyday life. But I also wanna emphasize that tech skills are now expected in what used to be considered non-tech jobs. This really be, I have this last year had more time at home just so you know my position was eliminated at Berkeley. So I'm going through the same process as some of you are. And I remember standing in front of a checker at Lucky trying to figure out how to use their app. And this 60 year old Asian woman who is not a native speaker of English was telling me how to use their app. Suddenly the checker at your grocery store is giving you tech support, their technical communicators and they have a different life than they did before. And I was very thankful for this. And I've understood this on some level but that really came clear to me that, oh my God, the checker at the grocery store now has a tech job, okay? So to me that means that no matter what your job is you should be asking yourself, what are the tech skills that I need? You should understand I think that you didn't start your life knowing everything and you will never have to stop learning throughout your career. And so I think we all have to understand that we need to be lifelong learners. So one of the questions that we read a lot about in the news and I've asked myself my entire adult life and you may be asking yourselves is how much knowledge do we really need? And generally speaking each level of academic accomplishment brings more salary to your life, more options to your careers. And if you can and you haven't reached one of these first three degree outcomes think about whether that would be useful for you. And we'll talk about options that are not degree driven later in the presentation. Once you get to graduate school you have to think a lot harder about this. My daughter for instance just got her undergraduate degree in neuroscience. She has a good job but she's already realizing that she may need to add skills for the length of her career but master's degrees are very expensive and PhDs not only PhDs are actually cheaper because your tuition and stipends usually come along with that but they take you out of the workforce for a while and you start to be seen as a rare bird and it may not pay back to you and salary what you're hoping to do. So when we think about what learning do we need in our adult lives? I suggest that we go through the steps that I have here understand that we need to be lifelong learners. I know a lot of people, a lot of my students oh, if I only have one more skill then I can go get a new job and I tell them you're good now go look for work now with what you got and then keep adding don't wait to seek what you need to see you'll also learn a lot in the process. I know that in interviewing for jobs that I might not have been ready for I learned in the process I've blown interviews in the past you learn how not to blow an interview I've gotten better at networking I've gotten better at writing my resume and cover letters all of that rehearsal is good so that when that one job does come along that is absolutely meant for you you'll be prepared so please don't wait. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves what our skills are this is very difficult it's painful to say we can't do something I've reached points in my career where I've had to sit down and say I'm not moving forward until I solve X in my skill inventory some of that even in how I communicate with people sometimes it's a hard skill like learning to be a project manager we have to be able to do that and we have to be able to then ask ourselves what's missing in our current jobs and I encourage people to think about their next job as soon as you have a job you should be planning for your next one and then do the research and I'll help you learn how to do today on how to close those gaps and create a plan and a budget not everyone has a lot of money there are low cost ways to do this some people have time and money and there are more expensive ways that might be benefit to you and we'll explore those topics as we go along there's a lot you can do that is embedded in your private life and people may not realize how many skills they exhibit in their private life that transfer well into the workplace and that there are opportunities to learn in our private lives that will help them in their workplace too so this list of things that I have here the better you can get it in this office or Google suite chat or web conferencing tools the better off you'll be able to function in a work environment and this long list of skills that I have they're setting up and administering a wifi network managing your finances with quick end programming Alexa like devices or internet of things devices these are all things that many of you are already doing some of you are probably doing all of these things if you can do these things in your private life you can be fully functional in the workplace today if you can't do something on this list it doesn't mean you can't be successful but I thought a long time about this what are the things that I do in my private life or my wife and that I know help me in the workplace so if you're not doing something on this list start doing it in your private life it will help you develop skills that are useful in the workplace and then keep getting better at it I know that I have for instance minimal photo and video editing skills that doesn't mean that my career isn't successful but I need some in order for instance to do presentations like this so it's something that next time I need to do there's an opportunity for me to do that I will just lean into it and add to those skills one major category of skills that people need to be able to invest in is their communication skills we all know people who are brilliant and can't communicate or get along with people and they fail as a result so I encourage you to invest in those communication skills the second bullet, writing effective English is not intended to make people feel bad if they're not native speakers of English I studied for three years in Germany I know how hard it is to live in a foreign language and function in a foreign language my wife is German, she's lived here for 30 years and her English is excellent but it's still hard for her so I don't want anyone to feel put down the other thing that happens is a very large portion of the people I work with are not native speakers of English and they're still very effective communicators so when I say that I'm talking more about learn to present your ideas in a way that makes sense in the business world rather than perfecting your grammar and your pronunciation the point I'm making here about managing diversity in the workplace in the Bay Area especially we are surrounded by people who are different than we are and we need to know how to relate to people who come from different places than we do or life is going to be challenging for us in the Bay Area and being different can mean many different things to many different people and I'm a white male in my 50s I'm different from a lot of the people at work they have to deal with me and I have to know how to communicate and get along with people who are different than I am there's a wide range of ways to improve your communication skills the last one, volunteer so you can practice if you're able to volunteer in any one of these organizations to practice your communication skills, do so I've been a member of professional organizations I've been involved in churches I've been involved with community service organizations and if you volunteer to do something it's a good way and a safe way for you to develop skills that you may not have today and sometimes the people you meet are the people who appreciate what you're doing and they come to you with opportunities that you might not have had before Excel I think is a differentiator in our skill set if the minute you're able to manage numbers you begin to open doors that may remain closed to you I've been teaching project costs and procurement management for over 10 years now and I noticed that the younger people in my classes come to me with better Excel skills than I have but that was not true 10 years ago and I suspect that some of us in the audience may not have the Excel skills that they ought to have and I invite you to begin to develop those skills they're the kinds of things if you can make a numerical case for what you're doing if you're able to model information if you're able to express ideas that result from mathematical analysis this will open doors for you and more and more people manage even non-numerical information in Excel and I think that's just a skill that we need to develop there are a lot of resources to learn Excel including Lynda.com which we'll talk about in a minute that will teach you how to use the tool but using the tool requires understanding what you can do with it not just what buttons to push or what menu items to select here volunteering is a great way to be able to to learn how to use Excel I also mean Google Sheets when I say this by the way I should have made that more clear. So if you've done all these things and you should keep doing them if you already have to get better there's some things that I'd like to point out about career management and continuing learning one is if you only have the skills we've been talking about at some point you will reach a limit in your career that might be fine with you but if you wanna keep advancing and in the Bay Area the increases in the cost of living force many of us who don't want to keep advancing to advance because that's what we need to do to survive. Another painful thing for a lot of people is undergraduate degrees are not enough to sustain a career. So four years simply are not enough time to learn everything you need to know my daughter for instance has a neuroscience degree STEM major graduated with honors but she's already saying that there are some things that she wish she could have learned it as an undergraduate that would have been useful to her and that's just part of the nature of a bachelor's degree. The other thing that is true is scientific and technology have a very short half-life what you learn as a I looked at my daughter's freshman biology book and I remember my freshman biology book they had nothing to do with each other they were completely different. So if you are in a tech field or a scientific field you already know this but the skills that you have today will grow stale quickly and you need to keep adding to them. The other thing is that the world is constantly evolving and so the challenges that we need to know are different than what we learned earlier in our lives. For instance, when I started working most software applications were installed on a computer so I had to know a lot about how a computer works in order to help people manage using software on desktop computers but the shift to cloud computing means that we don't have to understand at a profound level how our laptops work but if we're gonna work in tech we have to have other skills that may help us with cloud computing. The other thing that I'd like to mention is whatever your degree is if you can add to your knowledge from something other than your degree that will help you advance and as you advance you will need more leadership and management skills so at some point if you're moving into management roles you may want to consider instead of adding to hard skills you might want to invest in some leadership and management skills. Management can also mean, you know I've had to get good at managing finances for programs I administer I'm not a finance person, okay? So I've had to add that skill to my life. So having said all that there are a lot of different ways that you can pursue knowledge that may work better for you and some may not and this most simple one is self-directed learning. I buy a lot of books if I could show you my bookshelf which I probably don't wanna do because my office is a mess. You can buy books and teach yourself a lot. Community colleges which will go into some more detail are a great way to add to your skill set LinkedIn learning which MOOCs university extensions, MOOC camps and graduate programs these are all ways that you can go pursue continuing education opportunities. This list is organized from the cheapest to the most expensive options and we'll go through them one by one. I think as adults especially after we get a bachelor's degree we forget that community colleges are still tremendous resources for us. Most people see community colleges as a way to get an associate's degree or to build a path to a four year university. A lot of people go to community colleges to be certified in automotive medical technology or medical assistance careers, criminal justice, cosmetology, real estate, taxes, there's a lot of things you can learn at a community college that are very career driven and we shouldn't forget that. I know that there are people who graduate from college with four years degree, four year degrees and they don't necessarily wanna go get a master's degree but they would like to pick up some tech skills. So they take some classes at a community college to fill in those gaps and I've taken courses at community colleges during my adult life. I tried several times to learn to be a computer programmer for instance and that's a place that you can go back to at any point. There's a lot of very good courses that you can take there. Community colleges are extremely affordable. A full time student spends less than $1,500 a year in tuition if they're a state resident in California and a single course is $46 for a unit. Most courses are three to five units and there are fees tacked on top. So for less than two or $300 you can take a very valuable semester length course as opposed to more expensive courses in other places. The quality of instruction is generally pretty high. The UC system recognizes work from community colleges. So if it's good enough for UC, you can trust that it's a good course. As we mentioned, you can get certificates that I mentioned on the previous slide and especially in the Bay Area there are a lot of people who are industry leaders or PhDs from local graduate schools like Stanford or Berkeley who teach at community colleges partially because they're like me they can't get it out of their system and partially because they stay in the Bay Area for other reasons and this is the career that they pursue in the context of the rest of their life. We have to be real about the challenges of community colleges. They don't always offer the kind of skills that someone who already has a bachelor degree is seeking. They focus primarily on introductory skills. I taught at Diablo Valley for a year and I had students there who would have succeeded at Stanford or any other university. So I don't wanna put down the quality of student at a community college but there's also a lot of students who flail. They have full-time jobs. They have families. There are other things going on in their lives. I had students walking into a nine o'clock class half asleep because they had to close the pizza parlor the night before and they couldn't get their homework done. So when you're at a community college not everyone in that classroom is going to succeed and you may bring some and this is not a put down to these people. It's real. They have to make a living but that can become an obstacle to successful learning and so that's something that you might wanna consider. The facilities at community colleges might not be as good at a university. My son considered going down to Foothill and one of the things that he was concerned about is the library was closed from 5 p.m. Friday until 10 a.m. or 9 a.m. Monday and he couldn't see going to school full-time if he couldn't go to the library. So as wonderful as they are and I encourage people to look at this there are some real challenges. LinkedIn learning is a great way for you to pick up what I call just-in-time hard skills things like learning Excel and it's not that expensive and you advance at your own pace. It's $29 a month when I look at it and the other thing that's interesting about LinkedIn learning is whatever your profile is they will suggest learning to support your profile. So if you are in a career that you are interested in it will serve up learning options that are appropriate for you. That's incredible. I think that's really good. So I listed some things here that my profile suggests to me it will look different for you. Can I interrupt you? San Francisco Public Library has the LinkedIn Learning Database if you have a library card and pin number you can use it for free. Oh, fabulous. That's even better. Thank you Leah for reminding me about that too. I didn't know that about the library and some employers offer LinkedIn learning as a job benefit. So if you're not sure go ask your boss or your human resources manager because I don't know what a license like that costs for an employer but savvy employers want people to learn and if they feel it's affordable this is an investment that some employers learn. I was able to do this at UC Berkeley for instance. Now the next category is something that's not even really 10 years old massive online courses are called MOOCs. So I put the word there so everyone knows what a MOOC is because it's a strange looking word and there are three big providers but there are others out there. Coursera is the biggest and because it's the biggest I will focus on that for several slides. Udemy and edX are two other very good MOOC providers and I've become a big fan of this learning strategy and I'm saying this at someone who ran programs at UC extension and I really love the extension and we'll talk about that but these massive online courses are relatively affordable. You can get smaller certifications called badges or micro masters there's all sorts of vocabulary out there for relatively little money and if what you're looking for is a just in time skill something that you need to acquire fast and you're not even necessarily interested in becoming an expert but it's an extra skill that will help you or if you just wanna explore whether you like something before committing to something more expensive these MOOCs are really good ways to add to your skills. One of the problems that I saw at extension and frustrated me at times is compared to this they're relatively expensive and they take several years sometimes to complete a program and not everyone wants the level of mastery that the programs I managed offer they're just trying to pick up some skills this is a very good way to go. One thing I would add is the MOOC providers understand every single click that you make in their learning programs and they know exactly where students fail and succeed and they are constantly reworking their product to get better. That's what I'm trying to say in this one bullet point MOOCs get better all the time. They are data driven they invest a lot of energy in their user experience and they're doing things that universities have not yet learned to do. So I encourage you to think about this this is not appropriate for everyone but experiment maybe it's good for you. There are some cons to MOOCs you don't generally get very much personalized attention if you take what they call the freemium model where you're doing it for free you will never get feedback from anyone. You might get some auto graded homework assignments which are not deep and don't require much for you or you might get some homework assignments that are a little more difficult and allow you to message the instructor or other students. So you're not gonna get this rich interactive experience that you do in the classroom or even in live online courses. So some people really thrive on that interaction. Some people are the same kind of people who can open a book and teach them something are more likely to succeed in a MOOC than they would otherwise. And again, until you try this you're not gonna know if this is the right thing for you if it's not right for you it doesn't mean that something's wrong with you it just means that your learning needs are different and you need to keep thinking about what is the learning experience that's right for you. The rate of people not finishing MOOC classes is very high we don't spend enough money that we feel bad if we don't complete it. Now that they've gone to a subscription model you can kill that subscription in a hurry and because you aren't obligated to other people you may not feel as motivated and you think you're gonna do it at night when the kids go to bed and you're tired or you'd rather watch the next episode of The Crown than do homework. So the failure rate is pretty high and it's okay if this doesn't work for you but just be aware before you go into that that that might be part of your experience. There's a lot about what's on course Sarah specifically I'm a huge fan of what Google and IBM are doing and when you get the slide deck you can link to these things it's in the slide deck if I hover over it it shows or you can just do a search IBM Coursera or Google Coursera they have very good programs that are not expensive and both IBM and Google have done something very intelligent. They know what they want their workers to use or to know and they have developed programings to create the workforce they need. So you can feel assured that if you complete a program in one of these areas you're going to have highly relevant skills universities have not yet learned to map what they teach to the job that you want in the same way that Coursera, Google and IBM are doing. I think I didn't have time to investigate this but I believe Amazon also has resources. I did not, so if you're interested in learning for Amazon web services, look that up. They may have similar training programs available. This is something that employers are getting a lot smarter about. They're creating learning either for their employees or for people who want to be their employees so that they create the pool of applicants they want. And if you complete one of these programs you're going to look more real to them than you would from other places. The other thing I like about Coursera is there are world-class universities that have put courses on there. This is how it got started originally. Swarton, Michigan, Georgia Tech, MIT, other universities have put a lot of programs in there. Sometimes they're leading instructors have developed the courses so you can feel that you're getting really good training out of them. And I just listed that list there, it reflects about 45 minutes worth of research on my part. It may not be what you're looking for. So I invite you just go to Coursera or Udemy or edX, type in the keywords you're interested in and see what's out there. Tim, can I just interrupt for a second? I'm sorry. We have Udemy, we subscribe to Udemy as well as a PL. So if you have a card you can just use it for free. Now that's really good to know. And I believe any Californian can have a library card at San Francisco Public Library, is that right? That's correct. While we're close to the public, they're only available to San Francisco residents but we are reopening to the public on Monday so you can get a library card then. So that's a real cool thing. I think that's extremely valuable and I'm glad that you do that and thank you for letting me know. I'm not as familiar with their program. Do you have anything to add about their program that is substantively different than Coursera or does it mirror the kind of things that I've been saying about Coursera, Leah? I haven't had it. We just acquired it over the last year and I haven't had a chance to explore it. When I have looked at it, it's incredibly thorough. It's a little bit hard to search but the subject coverage is pretty amazing. Yeah, it's mind boggling. Yeah, Lori, have you looked at it at any length? Because I just sort of gave it a, you know. No, not really. I'm not too familiar with Udemy. So for folks in the audience, for each of these platforms, especially Udemy since the library has this partnership, maybe someone from one of those companies or someone who is familiar with them might be willing to give a presentation. So if you're really interested in that, I would invite you to put that in the comments. I know people at edX, so I could probably help find a speaker for edX. I don't know anyone at Coursera and maybe Udemy would be interested in this. This is an extraordinarily powerful resource with the limits that I pointed out on the previous page. One thing that they've started doing, and I think in the last year, and again, I focused on Coursera largely because that's what I know the best and largely because of time constraints. I saw something I hadn't seen before in preparing for this presentation. You can now get master's degrees fully online from some very good universities in extremely valuable areas. You can get MBAs, master's of public health, master's degrees in computer science and engineering or data science. This is revolutionary, but I'm not yet sure how much I can recommend this. I haven't done enough price comparisons. I looked at a couple of degrees from Michigan. You're looking at $30,000 to $40,000 for a master's degree from Coursera. That's a lot of money to spend on something that is this much of an emerging product. The marketing that I was able to read, it's the same instructors and the same courses as if you were on campus. And if you live somewhere where you don't have access to a graduate degree program that makes sense for you, maybe that's what you want. And the other thing that's not clear to me is what is your interaction with a professor or your classmates gonna look for? Do you have access to library resources? How well do employers accept these degrees? Will your degree say something different than the person who does this when they enroll through the university? What does the admissions program look like? What's the cost-benefit ratio? There are a lot of unknowns, yet this is exciting, okay? And so some of you may wanna go look at this. And again, if this is a topic master's degree, MOOC-based master's degrees, I think we could probably find someone to give a presentation on this because I don't have a lot to say about it. It's exciting, but it's uncertain. And so I don't know what more to say than what I've said here. Here's where my sweet spot is for me in my life. We have three UC extensions in the Bay Area. Davis, if you count Davis, Berkeley and Santa Cruz. I've taken courses at Berkeley and Santa Cruz and they've helped my career tremendously. The extension programs primarily target post bachelor degree professional education. So this is a cut above the courses that you can take at a community college in general. They're ideal for career changers. People who are already established in a career are people looking to advance established careers. Right now they're 100% live online or online asynchronous and at least at Berkeley, they are not committing yet to returning to class in the fall at the extension. The campus will have live instruction, the extension will not. So if that matters to you, make sure you research what you're getting into. The extension programs are more expensive. Courses cost 750 to 1250. More and more the cost per course is reaching up to the 1250 range and certificate programs cost $5 to $8,000. That's a lot of money if you're funding it yourself. I feel confident if you finish one of these certificate programs, you're gonna get a lot of value for your money, okay? But that's hard to fund out of your own pocket. Employers will often reimburse you for the tuition. It's either a defined benefit for many of you or if you go to your boss, they may approve it on a course by course basis. For tax reasons, they stop reimbursing you at 5250 a year because the IRS considers anything beyond that taxable income. These are also ways to acquire skills more quickly than a four-year degree, but you don't go fast. It usually will take you one to two years to finish these degrees, depending on whether you have to take courses in a certain order and your ability to take more than one course at a time. One thing we can say about the extension and this is true of the MOOCs, the biggest programs they have exist because industry leaders and students tell us what programs need to exist, what programs are in demand in the marketplace. So when you go to their websites, you're gonna see a list of programs like this. These are all degrees that are in high demand in the marketplace. And so let's say you're someone like me, you're a liberal arts nerd with some math skills. Well, maybe you wanna go into a data science career and suddenly that can be transformative in your career. I went into project management. Data science didn't really exist to my knowledge after I finished college or maybe you wanna go get a marketing degree. Marketing people make good money. You may have had a degree that's not in marketing but I know speaking for UC Berkeley that they have a world-class marketing program. So depending on what your interests are, you can go to the extension, get a high level certificate out of them. Another program that I didn't call out specifically here at Berkeley is they have a very good HR management program, HR professionals who work for companies, make good money, advance quickly. It's not a career that anyone thinks about when they go into undergraduate education. And another option that they have for yourselves or perhaps your children, they have a program if someone has graduated and decided after they've graduated that they wanna have a go to medical school or nursing school. They have programs to help you fill in whatever gaps you've had and they will assist you in your application program. So this is really powerful. It's been transformative in my career and I hope you notice I'm being even-handed with all of the other options out there and what's real and what isn't real in all of them. So even though I love this, I think there are other viable options out there. Something that didn't exist when I graduated were boot camps. We read about them in the newspaper. This is a really interesting thing to go in. Again, the existence of a boot camp usually will mean that students and employers are telling them that this is a skill that is in demand in the workplace. You should still do your research but if there isn't a boot camp for what you're interested in, that might be a signal, hey, maybe this isn't what I wanna do, okay? Boot camps are very intense, fast-paced and have a short duration. I may have been redundant in what I just said. And the differentiator between a boot camp and an extension program is, boot camps are ideal for career changers just like extension, but this next part is what differentiates it from an extension. Career changers who can commit to intense programs and need rapid results. So if you're in a hurry, the boot camp might be more interesting to you. If you have time and you just wanna nibble away at it in your private life, the extension programs might be better for you. You can go full-time, in which case some of these are three months. There are a lot of people who on top of their family lives and their full-time jobs do this in six months, committing to weekends and evenings. These are workhorses. These are high-performing people and many of you might wanna pursue this path. I just warn you, you're gonna be worn out by the time you're done. Boot camps are expensive. They cost $12,000 and up. If they're not costing that, take a look, they may be using a term that doesn't fit what most people call a boot camp and you may be signing up for something that isn't what you think you're gonna get. Boot camps are usually very high-value. They often partner with universities. Trilogy is a commercial provider. They manage the program, but you see Berkeley developed the curriculum. So I know that trilogy has data science, project management, UT project management, or excuse me, IT project management. So there are these partnerships that exist out there in the world. If you have a university named behind it, it usually means that the university has developed the curriculum and you can trust the quality of the curriculum. There are some purely commercial enterprises out there. Many of you have probably heard of General Assembly. Many of you have heard of the product school if you're interested in product management, check them out. Universities have not caught up to the idea of product management as a field that you can pursue. I worked hard to develop a program and it's not where I wanted to be. So boot camps are another option that you can look at. There are a lot of people who want a boot camp to be a substitute for their undergraduate degree. I am a big fan of the statement that every bit of education matters. So and $12,000 is a lot cheaper than the $100 to $250,000 at an undergraduate degree costs. But I also believe that there are a lot of things that you learn over the four years of college that you are not going to be able to accomplish in a boot camp. So everyone has to decide for themselves what's right for them. If you have $12,000 and you want to become a coder in six months, and that makes the most sense for you, I would not want to stop you from doing that. But I don't want people to think that this is a substitute for an undergraduate degree. I also truly believe that you can be very successful in this world without the undergraduate degree, but I want everyone to be real about what they're trying to do if they choose this path. The last slide on this is graduate school. Graduate schools are expensive. The tuition rates for most graduate programs are much higher than for undergraduate degrees because universities believe that people are willing to pay it, especially in professional schools like MBAs or data science or computer science. So it's very expensive. I think people should think hard about doing this, especially if they're young and still have a passion for deeper level learning. I was not done when I got my undergraduate degree and I really wanted my PhD and I did it, okay? So this shouldn't stop people but we need to be real about that. The other thing to think about is consider the variables about how hard is it to apply? What's salary, ROI going to be? What does a career look like after you finish one of these degrees? And one thing people forget is you still need money when you're going to graduate school and what is the loss of earning going to be while you're studying it? And if you look on the web, there are an increasing number of programs overseas that are taught in English and Europe. And so European universities are much cheaper than American universities. They can be great options. If we want to talk about studying overseas, put that in the comments. I don't know anyone who's an expert necessarily on this but I could help find one. I know people who could help us explore that but consider doing that in international experience is something that people really appreciate anyway. One thing about master's degree, some of us may want to pursue them. I think they can be very helpful in technical and scientific fields. You still have to understand the relationship between cost and benefit. With MBAs, someone I know just got an MBA in IT management at Golden Gate and she got a great job at Facebook at the director level. So that's fantastic, okay? Oftentimes, some of these MBAs don't map to the career success that they're looking for. So do some research to figure out the cost-benefit analysis for the degree that you're searching for. The other thing about a master's degree is if you can get a certificate in accounting for $8,000, you may not want to spend $30,000 in an MBA program if what you want to do is be an accountant, okay? The MBA program costs more, it takes more energy. You take courses that are outside of that tightly focused thing that a certificate offers you. So way for yourself, how much time and money do you have and what is it you're really trying to accomplish? Doctoral programs have the benefit that they give you a stipend. It's not much, but they give you one and they pay for your tuition because you're working for the university in some capacity along the way. So there's less out-of-pocket expense, but because of the duration, the loss of earnings over the course of a doctoral degree is very expensive. In scientific fields, if you're doing groundbreaking science for a life science company or for a tech company that's into material science, you can gain traction, but it may be overkill for the amount of time that you have available to invest in a doctoral degree. I'm someone, and I tell my kids this too, you're young, you don't have responsibilities of kids and mortgages yet. So a doctoral degree might be just what someone needs. If they're not done learning and they're passionate about it, I wouldn't want to stop somebody, but I think someone should understand this. I know a lot of people who are later in their careers and they're spending $50,000, $60,000 for a doctoral degree from a private for-profit university. I would caution people whether or not that's a good investment, but if it's a passion for them and that's what they want, great, but think hard about that as someone who's gone down that road myself. So to summarize, in the Bay Area, we live in a knowledge-driven economy and as a result, we must all be lifelong learners. In some dimension, almost every one of our jobs out there requires communication, business and tech skills. We are all knowledge workers, even in careers that were not considered knowledge work in the past. Make a development plan before you leap, okay? You can experiment in a course just to figure out whether you like it, but make a development plan when you get serious about what you think you need to do to acquire the knowledge and skills that you want for your career and figure out which of these learning experiences is right for you. There's a wide variety of them. I didn't list self-learning. By the way, if you've invested a lot to learn about something, but you have no courses to prove it, you can put that on your resume. That's okay. It's a skill that you've acquired. And then the final thing is because so many people have invested their time and energy in helping me, I would like to invite all of you or any of you to connect with me on LinkedIn and to the degree that I'm able to be of assistance. I will do that. So, and sometimes I get busy if it takes a while for me to reply to you, it's not that I'm blowing you off. Send me another message. I'll eventually get back to you. So I just wanna apologize in advance if you're not getting an instant reply. It's not because what I'm saying is insincere. It's just life sometimes happens and I don't get to my LinkedIn as quickly as I would like to. So at that, that's what I had to say. I hope we have time left for question and answer. Oh, wow. We're right at the top of the hour. Leah, I leave this up to you. How you'd like to handle this. Yeah, we've got just a few questions, Tim. The first one is, where can one find professional communication courses? So I listed some in the chat that are available for free if you have a library card with SFPL. But you may know of some other options as well. I would look on LinkedIn. I think there are some things there. There's a lot you can do that's tool-driven like how to use PowerPoint or how to use Word. So it's not going to make you a better communicator but it will allow you to have the tool skills you need. I know that there's a professional communications program at UC Berkeley. And I'm almost certain that there are things on the MOOCs. I don't know how much feedback you're going to get but they'll give you good knowledge at least. So those are the things that top of mind happen. I would invite you to join the board of whatever professional organization you're in so that you're giving reports. I would invite you to join Toastmasters. Those will give you practice as well. Thank you. The next question is, I've been looking into master's in, public health, MPH directly from big universities and it's similar in costs. Maybe go straight to the source for now. I'm a big fan of the master of public health. It means that you would be able to work in hospital systems, hospitals pay well. They are businesses and they need business leaders not just nurses and doctors and technicians. So I would look into the programs. I would see if this is not a field that I work in. There may be some professional organizations related to public health and healthcare management and start poking around on LinkedIn and find people who are in hospital administration and just ask for informational interviews because you're interested in that. I know Berkeley has an online MPH. There are MPHs on Coursera. Maybe you wanna call up Berkeley and learn more and you may be able to get some information from them. Thank you, Kim. The next question is this inquiry, this person is asking wants to know why the cost of UC Berkeley extension is so much more expensive than it used to be 20 years ago? Because it's a lot more expensive to pay people and operate in the Bay Area. I don't mean that to sound flip, but that's the truth of it all. It's expensive. And I will be truthful. A large percentage of the students are reimbursed by their employers and there's an equity question of if the employers are paying for a lot of this, there's an equity question involved there too. This is controversial, okay? And a lot of people don't like the pricing that they see and I understand that, but that's kind of what the reality of it is. Thank you, Tim. The next comment is I'd be interested in your point of view on skill areas that are in high demand due to lack of supply of skilled professionals and are skills forecasted to being continued in high demand over the next couple of years? So the categories of jobs that I listed, I know are in high demand from research that I've done myself or extension has done. Extension is able to look at every job announcement in the country and they can go deep into who's hiring and what the salary ranges are and what the skill expectations are. Extension has become much more careful to map its course, its program design to what the demand is in industry. I know that the MOOCs are doing this as well. So you've seen several lists in the slide deck so those are ways to go. I don't see this problem going away in the near future. And the other thing that's gonna happen is the workplace will evolve over time. I'm doing things today that did not exist when I went to college and any of these paths will be ways for you to add those skills as you go along. I cannot predict any individual's outcome because there's so many factors but the programs that are out there are proven and successful and I would trust that the extensions and the MOOCs are doing the kind of research that needs to be done because the marketplace is demanding it. That's the beauty of these programs. Universities have a different mission but continuing education is really driven by what is needed in the marketplace and they keep evolving their product offerings to meet that. I hope that answers that student's question. It's a subtle question. Thank you, Tim. The next question is, you wrote that graduate school is great for young people who want to explore deep level learning. If a person can afford the time and expenses, there's some reason why graduate school is less appropriate for older people. And I think you already answered this question when you said that usually when people are older they have more responsibilities like children and mortgage and that kind of thing. I think that's the problem. If I were 40 years old, it would be difficult for me to step out of my economic life and go to graduate school. Now, that's me, I have a family, I have a mortgage, okay? There are people who will not have those obligations in life. If you are able to go to school and you can afford it and it fits your plans, I would never tell someone not to do it because I think there's value in learning. If you take joy in that or if you think there's utility in it for you I wouldn't want to stop you. But the reality is until people get their kids through college it's very hard to turn down the cash flow that graduate school usually requires from people. Thank you, Tim. The next question is, I used to see a lot of advertisements for a University of Phoenix programs. What happened to them and did they get a bad rap with the other for-profit schools? I don't know University of Phoenix specifically but I'm very skeptical about for-profit universities that will let you take out student loans. And that doesn't mean that Tim is trying to badmouth them but I would have a healthy level of skepticism about that. The same is true of DeVry. I would do some research in the news during the Obama administration. There were sanctions levied against many well-known for-profit institutions. Betsy DeVos who had a stake in that industry reversed some of those things. So I would do some research in the news and ask yourself, are you willing to acquire $50,000 in debt if the school cannot live up to the promises it makes for your post completion careers? So I would just be careful. And I don't know enough specifically about the University of Phoenix to comment on that. Okay, and that there is one person with their hand up, Lisa L, would you like to ask your question? Yes, thank you very much. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, San Francisco Public Library for this presentation. So I have over 10 years, I'm in a pharma industry and quality and compliance. Due to my, where I came from, I don't have a bachelor degree. The field is quite competitive. I do have associate and currently attending the ASQ certification program for the auditor certification and green belt certification. Excellent, I'll just say, that's where you should go with the skill set you have. Okay. The certification is a very powerful skill and quality management demands a lot of skills. So I think that's a great idea. So I'm also taking classes towards my bachelor. I'm still working on the requirement courses for the major. Am I doing good service for myself or should I just focus on certification? The certification will give you a faster path. Pharma is very elite in the skills that it demands from people. I look at job descriptions and they want degrees in the scientific or technical field. You might wanna go talk to your HR manager and ask them what options are there. Are you getting funded by your employer for any of this? Yes, the certifications, but not the degree for now. So I mean, everything I'm saying is hard to be absolutely on target for an individual and I'd be willing to talk more offline about this. But it feels to me like you're going in the right direction. A six sigma certification will not only help you in pharma, but if you ever wanna leave pharma, that's a good thing. And what kind of degree are you pursuing? So I am trying to get the engineering management degree from Arizona State University. Oh, good. And it's an online program. Good. But it does require a lot of... Your program, is it working for you? To be honest, I applied, I got accepted, but then there's some misalignments with the Somatio district. Okay. So I have to take more classes in order to meet the minimum requirements. Oh dear, that's one of the obstacles. I'm glad you brought that up. That's very real that happens to people. The other thing you might wanna look at, Lisa, is both UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz have life science management programs. You're strong in quality management, so you may not need the whole certificate, but they offer courses in clinical trials development and clinical trials management, and they offer courses in regulatory affairs. That might be... I took some of those classes. I frankly at the time thought that Santa Cruz was better than Berkeley. That's where I took my classes. If that's of interest to you, I would look at that. You might be able to move out of quality management into other parts of the business. The other thing that you could consider is getting a project management, a little bit of project management under your belt. There's lots of projects in life science. And so with your quality management skills, there are a lot of projects that relate to quality management. So there are tactical steps that you can take. I would really be open with your HR manager about this. Good HR people don't just administer your medical benefits. They also are responsible for developing their workforce strategy. How are they gonna hire all the people that they need? And if you're lucky enough that someone sits down with you and has that mindset, they may say in the next five years, these are the skills that we're gonna need in this company. And we would rather invest in you, who we like, and groom you to advance in this company than take a flyer on somebody we've never met. So you might wanna talk to your manager and your HR manager to see if there are opportunities for that. It has happened to some friends of mine that they did this and they did all the things and the company still did not advance them. That can be very frustrating. But one of the facts of life in the Bay Area is sometimes you have to change companies to move up. And so I don't think you're wasting your time if in your company, you're not advancing at the rate that you would like to, but give yourself permission to go look at other companies because they may be thrilled to have someone like you come into their company. If you go look at my LinkedIn, you'll see I've changed industries and employers that was driven at times by just the need for what I needed at that time in my life. But sometimes I've just had to leave where I was in order to advance my career. And that's a common behavior in the Bay Area. Okay. Thank you so much for your advice. I will connect with you in LinkedIn. I appreciate your time. Thanks for asking that. That conversation probably resonated with a lot of people and we got to cover some stuff that wasn't in the presentation. So I'm glad we had a chance to talk about that. Likewise, thank you. Well, thank you so much, Tim, for your presentation today. It was pathos information. We really appreciate your expertise and time and look forward to working with you in the future. And at this point, we're really past our time. So we will have to say goodbye to everyone. Thank you for attending and we'll see you at the next program. Bye-bye. Thanks everyone. Have a good day. Thank you, Tim.