 Vice President of Global Learning Initiatives for CGE. Thank you for joining us for today's Expert Connect, the future of business education and work. Before I introduce our speaker, I just want to do a few housekeeping chores. We will ask you if you're not speaking to keep yourself on mute and we also have a function you'll see on the bottom of your screen a little icon that says Q&A and if you have a question for our speaker, please put your question in the Q&A icon down there. You'll be able to click on that and my colleague Toby McCarroll will select your question and what we will do is elevate you to a panelist so you will be able to ask our speaker directly the question that you have entered online here. We are fortunate today to have Laurie Picard join us for this Expert Connect. I also want to mention that this is part of a series that we put on as a part of our Global Scholars Program which is a global learning community of over 200 business schools or universities across the world and in 93 different countries. So we're happy to have Laurie address our audience and talk about the topic today which is the future of business education and work as the screen tells you right now. Laurie has an interesting story progression for what brought her here to this discussion and what you see here is a no pay MBA. Back in 2013 Laurie discovered the world of online education. She fell into it actually because she wanted to get an MBA to advance her career and her job prospects but when she looked into actually going to obtain an MBA the cost was prohibitive and the time commitment was also a turn off but fortunately for Laurie and actually for us she happened to be talking about her dilemma with a friend who at that time happened to be taking a MOOC, a massively online course and he was enjoying it so he told Laurie about that online education and she started to investigate what it would take to get an MBA by looking up all these courses that are available for free or at minimal cost and all this is some of you know available from lots of schools and also including an organization like CGE. She chronicled that experience which really entailed getting the equivalent of an MBA for a fraction of the course and she created a blog with hundreds of followers called No Pay MBA and that blog really chronicled her experience, the experience of some of the people that she had discussed the programs with. Four years later Laurie has documented that experience and that of others in the book Don't Pay for your MBA. I'm going to hold it up here so everyone can see. Don't Pay for your MBA, the faster, cheaper, better way to get the business education unique. The book is really a fascinating read and I recommend it and not just because this is a way to get around paying for an MBA. That's not what I think Laurie is about or what the session is about but the book combines lessons that Laurie learned firsthand and is documented in her blog No Pay MBA with the personal anecdotes of people who have experienced this. So for people who are interested in pursuing a non-traditional MBA I think you'll find a lot of value in this guide because a lot of useful information and Laurie takes you through it step by step and I also as a prelude to the book hope you will enjoy this webinar with Laurie and please follow up with any questions for our speaker. Laurie go ahead. Well thank you for that introduction Ira. So I'm very excited to be here with you today and we're going to cover a lot of ground. As Ira said we're going to discuss business education and work and some of the important changes that are occurring that are affecting people business professionals in all kinds of industries and how you can take advantage of some of those changes. So I'll start by just giving a little bit more information about the No Pay MBA project, what it is, how it got started and we'll take a look at who can benefit from self-directed business education and then we will explore in some detail exactly what is involved in a traditional MBA and how you can repackage the MBA using free and low cost resources to create your own education program that exactly meets your needs and saves you a fortune. So first a little bit more about me. So I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri home of the arch. I got a bachelor's degree at a small liberal arts college called Oberlin. I was then a teacher in Philadelphia for two years and got my master's degree in geography from Temple University all in Philadelphia. Then I joined the Peace Corps and embarked on an international career so for those who don't know it the Peace Corps is a U.S. government program that promotes cross-cultural understanding and international development and through that program I was sent to Nicaragua. From there I got a job at the World Bank also in Nicaragua. Then I moved to Rwanda and worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development. So my career up to this point has been in both education and in the foreign aid industry so that's kind of the perspective that I'm coming from but you'll notice there's really not much of a business background there. So while I was working at the World Bank I started to feel that it would be very helpful to have more of an understanding about business both that I would be competitive for future jobs in international development but also that I would be more effective at the job that I was already doing working in poverty reduction programs if I knew more about business. But at that point I already had a master's degree and I really didn't want to go back to school and I really really didn't want to have any debt. So that's kind of where my frame of mind at that point. So as I said I found out about massive open online courses from a friend which we're still fairly new at that time and almost as soon as I heard about these courses I started wondering if anyone had already put together the equivalent of an MBA using them because that was really my first thought when I heard that these courses existed and I really thought that for sure somebody had already done that. So I googled around and tried to find a person who had put together the MOOC MBA didn't find it and so in addition to creating my own MBA program I thought well why don't I just blog about this experience so that I can have a way to hold myself accountable and also to share whatever it is that I learn about constructing my own MBA with whoever's interested in this as I was interested in at that time. So my plan in kind of broad brushstrokes was to replicate the MBA course for course and internship for internship experience for experience taking three years of part-time study to complete the equivalent of a two year full-time MBA program. Fortunately for me so you know I set up a blog fortunately the project got some really good media coverage very early on. Oh sorry I kind of got lost in my slides so of course there being one of the websites that I used this being the website that I set up. All right so the project got some great media coverage very early on this article how to get an MBA education for less than a thousand dollars that was first in poets and quants and it went to Fortune and CNN Money and went viral on LinkedIn so it was kind of cool that the project got that much attention very early on this was one of the first article it wasn't this article actually but a previous one that went viral on LinkedIn within four months of the project starting so I started to get more people reaching out to me and I realized that there was a wider audience for this concept so that also kind of began to shape how I did the education knowing that there were people who were interested in this idea and then this other article appeared in the Financial Times I was actually asked to contribute to a special article or a special section on online learning which was very cool so ultimately the project led to me writing this book and the book really is a guide to how to use free resources that are out there free and low cost resources to create your own equivalent to an MBA and it is it does it is a complete guide so it doesn't just include I tried not to make just a checklist of take this course then take this course but it's more of a framework and and and it the book sort of acts as your personal MBA advisor so that you can tailor a a an education that works for you given whatever your goals might be so through the book and through a small coaching business I now serve as an advisor to independent business students around the world that's been a really fun thing to do so that's a bit about me and a bit about the no pay MBA project I want to turn now to some of the drawbacks of traditional business education for both for me and for other people that I've talked to and this is some of what convinces me that we may be looking at some big changes in how education is delivered so number one which everyone knows it's expensive second of all it's it's inaccessible to all but a few people so if you could if you consider everyone who needs or could benefit from a business education a traditional MBA program is really only available to a very few third it comes really at the wrong time in your career in my opinion so I put this picture here of young people because a lot of the education that you get in any kind of formal education program it comes very early on in your career and then you've got your 20 30 maybe more years left in your career during which the world is changing there are new skills that you probably need to adopt and you've got just this one kind of lump of education that you've gotten very early on so I think there's a need for more education throughout your career and then finally it's a bundled product meaning that everybody who goes to a particular MBA program gets roughly the same thing they get the same progression of courses or something very similar they're offered the same kind of internship opportunities the same career services they get kind of everything comes as a bundle and they've got to take all of it they're paying for all of it but maybe they don't need all of it they may not need the career services in the same way as someone else does maybe they don't need the same kind of travel or internship experiences so I think there's an opportunity to take apart the MBA and put that bundle back together in a way that works for you so really the the solution that I found to this to these problems these drawbacks of traditional business education was to put together my own MBA and just to give kind of a another kind of a little bit more explanation about why I think there's a need for people to continue to educate themselves throughout their careers so these are just a few of the jobs that didn't exist when I graduated from college and I'm really not that old the iphone facebook gmail none of these things existed when I graduated from college the cloud maybe existed but it not as with the name the cloud and then some of the career is blogger app developer social media manager search engine optimization was not really a thing so just to to put in perspective that these are things that are so ubiquitous now and are so ingrained in how we work and how we how we live that these things just didn't even exist when I graduated from college and that was after I got you know this training that was supposed to be something that would carry me throughout a career so just to really drive home from the point that our educations don't you know can't serve us for that many years and then I really like this title of unbundled reimagining higher education this of course being an article by Anand Agarwal who is the CEO of edX one of the big MOOC platforms to to make this point as well that education in a traditional institution is a bundled product but we can really reimagine how higher education works if we unbundle it so I want you to imagine a business education that is affordable that is accessible to anyone who wants it that can be acquired on demand and that is customized to the individuals basically solving all those problems that I identified in a traditional business education um okay so I want to turn now to talk about who are the kinds of people that might be able to best benefit from a self-directed business education so through my work with independent business students I've identified four types of self-directed business student and I've seen people succeed coming from all of these four types and it's kind of a different use case and a different value proposition for each of these people in looking at a self-directed business education so first the executive so the executive is a person who is has moved or plans to move from a technical working level role to a management role and who has a technical background but needs to be using more management skills and needs to be taking a wider view of the business or organization that they're part of so this is a person who is in an organization where they are poised to move up or perhaps they already have and they're going to be a manager this is not a person who really needs to go get an MBA in order to get there to move their career forward but they do need the knowledge so this is one person one type of person who can really benefit from a self-directed education the second type is a type that I call the accelerator so this is a person who is ready to take on new responsibility in a more technical role who by learning new technical skills can expand their repertoire can move into some more interesting projects can maybe switch functional roles within an organization and who really sees a lot of potential by adding to their skill set so that is the accelerator and I've seen people who fit this role who have been very successful in fields like marketing data analysis you know people who are ready to take on especially with relationship to fields and skill sets that that maybe nobody has a data analysis is a perfect example that it wasn't being taught in universities until very recently that somebody can really get into a role like that by educating themselves third type is the entrepreneur so we all know what an entrepreneur is and this is a perfect use case for a self-directed business education if you're putting together a business you need the knowledge you need the skills but you've got to move fast and you don't need anyone to certify your skills you're you're directing your skills right into your own business I've also seen people so I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs use this education to serve their own business their own business goals but I've also seen people who are what I would consider intrapreneurs who are people who have a lot of great ideas that they would like to propose at their current place of work and who kind of need to take a business perspective in order to do that effectively so I've seen that as well and finally the last type is the explorer so this is another use case that I think a self-directed business education is really great for and this is the person who isn't really sure what they want to do post MBA and for whom a very costly education could be a very costly mistake especially if they don't know what they're going to use it for so it becomes very difficult to value that education and therefore to know whether the price makes it worth it given their particular goals so if you fit one of these types or even if you don't but you could benefit from a debt-free business education there is a great opportunity for you to design your own MBA using the free and low-cost tools that are available so sorry I didn't know that one was going to animate right there so we talked about the MBA as a bundle product that comes with a set of courses and extracurricular experiences travel career services etc so for the rest of our time together what I'll do is share what I believe are the main elements of that bundle and how you can effectively put that MBA bundle back together at a fraction of the cost of an MBA degree and so that's the premise of my book so what you'll get today is kind of an overview of what I then explore in great depth in the pages of the book so first thing that anybody studying business ought to know and that can really take you very far in your career is business language and concepts this is really kind of the foundation so many MBA programs have sort of like a fundamental set of courses that everybody takes or at least they have a list of courses from which all freshmen or first-year business students draw from and so that kind of establishes this common foundation that that anyone with a business education can communicate using the same language and the same concepts and this I found was very powerful for me so being able to use vocabulary you know terms like net present value or minimum viable product or things like that that seem to like you know words that before I had a business education felt very impenetrable and people who use them I felt intimidated at work if I heard some of these words that I didn't know having taking just a few courses really felt like it just unlocked a whole new way of communicating with people that that gave me a lot of confidence and I've seen that happen with other people too that for a lot of people who feel intimidated or feel like they maybe they don't belong in the world of business learning business as a second language can really expand the way that you're able to communicate with people and can open up a whole new set of opportunities in your in your career so those kinds of those concepts are a great place to start where I think you get a ton of value from a business education of course having the concepts is great but having the skills is the other area that is extremely transformational and so what I did to to write this book so so as I was creating the education for myself I did kind of I went course by course and tried to replicate what I saw in business in MBA programs as being a course progression but to write this book I went back and read I looked at everything again through the lens of skills so not just what are you learning to talk about what concepts are you familiar with but what can you actually sit down and do and so as I wrote the book I actually put together and I'll show it to you where it is on the page I put together this business skills framework so that as your I don't know if you can see this I think you can so and I put these skills into different categories so financial and quantitative analysis management and leadership big picture thinking communication and storytelling and technology the technology list is kind of a partial list it's just sort of a demonstration but so that as you're completing your courses and as you're thinking about you know what is a fund the fundamental business education that I want to have this is my list of what I think are the business skills that everyone in business ought to have and it includes things like reading and interpreting financial statements organizing and managing a team determining product market fit giving a good presentation and then the technologies you know it's things like email and shared calendars and video conferencing and project management and spreadsheets and things like that so I think that again as with the foundational language that there's also a foundational kind of business toolkit that everyone in business should have a basic understanding of all of these different skills and be able to perform them at a pretty high level the third thing and this was a little bit surprising to me was how much energy is devoted in a traditional MBA program to career planning so MBA programs have career services type offices and they are really tracking students from the very beginning in order to make them successful they're helping students get into internship programs you know just to know where they're going so that when they plan their their coursework and their internships and their networking that they know what they're heading towards and that they get some experience seeing what that career is like in the real world so that if they've made a mistake they can kind of redirect so this is something that was like I said it was a little bit surprising to me that that people came in that so many people come into MBA programs without knowing where they're going but again this is this is one of the things that for the explorer type this is a real source of value and it is a source of value that can very easily be had without going to an MBA like you do not need to plunk down $100,000 to find out where you ought to be in the world of work and in my view of a strategically spent $500 to $1,500 with some career coaching can really take you a long long way okay so next piece of the MBA and this is one that I get a lot of questions about is networking so this is probably the there are two questions that I always get when I say I did my own you know replication of the MBA and people say well did you get the MBA degree well the answer is no and we'll explore that a little bit as well but the second question out of people's mouths is well what about the MBA network and so this is another big source of value beyond what happens in the classroom in an MBA program it is one of the tougher aspects to replicate I recognize that but it can be done and I think what you get when you put targeted effort towards networking is just as in your course progression you can get a course progression that's tailored to your needs and interests when you focus on your networking you get a network that's more tailored to your particular interests so in the book I offer some suggestions on what are the actual techniques that you can use to network and I've seen people be very successful networking especially when they've got a geographic location in which they're working and then when they've got kind of a particular focus I've seen people who've gotten very involved for example in the startup community where they live and startups in particular tend to be pretty open types of cultures where there are people who are kind of fostering a startup ecosystem and I've seen people get very involved in that and have a high level of success with that I've also seen people use informational interviews to great effect I've also seen people use tools like LinkedIn, Twitter and social media in general to develop kind of a narrow area of expertise and to be able to have to make great connections in their area of expertise and so that's really cool to see people do that so that's networking and then next kind of element of the MBA bundle is experience this is one of the things that when we when you talk about oh well do you have the degree is this really valuable if you don't have a degree well in my view this is by having a gaining experience that's how you can kind of circumvent the traditional credentialing system because what does a credential really tell you it tells you that somebody is prepared to do a job what and so it gives you some information about how prepared someone is to do that job if somebody has experience doing very similar work that gives you even more information excuse me so one of the things I emphasize in the book is that if you are trying to move into a new role or you're trying to switch jobs and you need to take your your education and make it work for you as you're getting a new job the very best way to do that is to plow that the education that you've gotten directly into an experience that very closely replicates what it is that you want to have as your next job experience and to do that even with no pay even to do it for an organization that isn't your target organization but to just build up that line on your resume that that shows or that section on your resume that shows what you're able to do and that that gets you some references who have seen it firsthand and that helps build your portfolio of work and with that experience then you can walk into your next job interview and be able to talk concretely about what you've done with your education not just to say oh I hold this degree or the certificate or this whatever from whatever institution that actually having the experience gives much more information and gives an employer much more confidence that you're able to do the job and then finally and this is of course related to what we were just talking about is job searching so I do understand of course the anxiety that people have and there's almost a sense of kind of a security or it's like I say people like it to have that traditional degree and many types of jobs do ask for it but I think there's a huge potential for self-directed learners to showcase how unique and special they are so if you're not kind of just the typical candidate who has the regular old degree and the regular old past you've got a special path and you have some elements in your background that show that you're self-directed that you're independent that you don't need to be closely supervised that you're curious that you're a problem solver you know all of these things can make you if you market them correctly can make you a really a standout applicant and then the last thing oh I don't have a slide for it but the last thing that I'll say about this is that pursuing a self-directed education relatively early on in your career prepares you to be able to add skills throughout your career and really boost your confidence and I'll give you an example there's one person in my network who actually I'm I love kind of following along with him in his career because it's just so inspiring so he was a medical device engineer that's how he started out his career he was very successful very good at that job he was asked to move into a management role and he actually pushed back and said I want and was asked to get an MBA by going to school at night and the company was going to pay for it and he pushed back and said you know I have two young daughters I don't really want to be spending all my nights and weekends away from them but I'd like to he was a follower of my blog and he said he'd like to pursue the kind of education that I was proposing on my blog which he did very successfully through that education he got very interested in in data science and he then he moved into this management role was there and successful for a couple of years and during that time he was educating himself about data science he proposed some additional kind of entrepreneurial projects within his work that were accepted and he was able to do those things and also became really interested in kind of the emerging field of people analytics and the uses of data analysis for HR purposes they created the company created a new position for him so he became the first ever people manager using data science to do some advanced HR functions in his organization and I caught up with him recently and he said to me you know one of the best things about having pursued my own education on my own is that I feel really confident to be able to go out and acquire new skills so if there's whatever the next thing is you know right now it's data science but it's going to be something else and I'll feel ready because I have this ability didn't I know it's demo it's a demonstrated ability I have a demonstrated ability to pick up new skills so I'll feel really confident whatever that next thing is to go out and seek seek out the training that I need and use that in my job as it's necessary so in conclusion I I guess I would say that I don't really think it's up for debate whether the MBA education is available to anyone it absolutely is it's out there that education is really accessible to anyone with an internet connection one of the things that was really surprising to me as I went through this is that I could have easily done 10 complete business education programs with all the content that is out there and never have have repeated a single course so this is a tremendous opportunity that we have so what I what I want you to ask yourself I leave I leave you a few questions so number one could I or my employees if you're a person who employs people could I benefit from additional business education number two am I capable of learning on my own number three do I believe in and support self-directed learning and finally am I willing to put a little bit of extra effort and creativity to reap the full benefits of a self-directed education and if you answered yes to any of these questions then you are poised to take advantage of the exciting changes in business education and work and final slide so to leave learn more or get in touch my website is nopandba.com and there's a contact form on my website that goes directly to my inbox and I answer all my mail if you'd like to read the first chapter of my book it's available with that link and then down at the bottom a link to the book on amazon excellent thank you lauri and we're remind you if anyone has a question for lauri please post in the q&a section and we will get around to those questions meanwhile I'm going to take the privilege and ask a few questions of lauri first of all I think people are going to want to know how much money did you actually wind up spending for your MBA or the equivalent of an MBA and I also is a follow-on question I'm curious you know there's a powerful story you told about the self-learner and the changes in the career but I'm curious how do you convince the HR person or the interviewer that you've assembled this degree and it is indeed worthwhile and what what are the what are the talking points that you recommend I know you referenced experience as a guide here but I think it would be useful to have people hear a little bit more detail about how you would approach perhaps an interview sure so for your first question how much did I actually spend so I tried I did an accounting of this at one point so I didn't really you know pinch pennies throughout this I was willing to spend money on courses as I felt that I needed them but at first MOOCs were completely free you could get certificates even without paying for them so I estimated that at the end of everything through for just courses and books and things of that nature you just the content I spent about 800 dollars over three years and then I spent probably I think 1500 dollars is what I came up with for those first three years of how much I spent on my website and then of course when I converted this project into more of a business I started spending more money on the business side of it which was kind of a cool experience too because it was it was almost like it was the kind of the practical project that I did at the end of the education was to start a business and so I learned a lot from that as well and in the process you know got my website turned into a money-making venture and so I spent much more on that but then a lot of that money has come back so it's hard for me to answer the question with a single number but those are kind of my my best estimates 800 dollars for courses and then another 1500 to 2000 on just running a website during that time but yeah fraction of the cost of a traditional MBA and then to your second question about how you know how do you actually convince someone that this is an education that that's worth something I think you know the first thing is part of it just depends on your audience so there are some industries and some jobs for which you will never be considered if you don't have a master's degree and in particular an MBA degree or a finance degree or something like that and so there are some people who just need that however I don't think that's most of us I think most of us most careers most career pathways do not require an MBA even in business and I and I really think that having strong experience and strong references is how you how you make that case so my hope I guess would be that you're not typically making that case to a skeptical HR person but that rather your pathway to rise if this is your the this is the way that you're going is probably more through your personal connections and through people who know you who know your work who are intrigued by this concept at the outset so you're getting a more receptive audience you know like the story that I told where this these were internal moves but I've seen people do this with external moves as well by working through their networks and having some kind of professional contact that demonstrates how skilled they are as professionals and inspires respect so so that then that enables a move. Very good. I want to ask another question and then we'll start going to some of the questions in the Q&A. One thing I'm curious about you know in talking about online education and MOOCs we kind of think of the traditional education you're taking a course on marketing you're taking one on finance but I'm wondering and and under full disclosure Laurie does write a little bit about CGE and Global Scholars Program but I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the unusual experiences that you found out there that really can broaden someone's skill level. Well so I I kind of pursued this as with each course I was always seeking well what's the way that I can do this thing so that it moves out of the classroom space or out of just you know my laptop screen and moves into the real world that I get a chance to actually use these skills in a in a situation that is not just a you know a question on a test or a classroom exercise but is a real-world problem-solving activity. So some of the things that I did and I would imagine you know just as each course progression is going to be different each set of interests is going to be different each person will find different kinds of experiences that can help them build those skills so for me one thing I did I studied finance fairly early on in my MBA and there was I was working in Rwanda at the time and there was an employee a small employee association where I was working that had a small treasury that needed they needed a board they were having board elections they needed a finance person and so I said okay you know this is kind of a low stakes environment I'll I'll sign up for this and I ended up I took what I learned in finance class and went so much farther with it because what they needed a full overhaul of their books so I ended up becoming basically their accountant for for a little while and it was a really small organizations that made it easy it was approachable their books were in shambles so it wasn't as though the person before me had done a great job so the stakes seemed low but you know that was a really unique experience non replicable of course but I'm sure many people are part of organizations and networks that have a need for this kind of for this kind of thing so you know you can find ways to put those skills into practice other things I did I was part of a digital internship so there was a company I don't think they're operating anymore unfortunately because I loved this company but they were a startup that that didn't end up having a big enough market for their product but they ran digital internships it was called core solve and I did an internship doing a strategic analysis as an intern and it took directly from what I was learning in my strategic analysis class and I was able to do that analysis through the internship the alpha course is one through the cge that I'm a big fan of I have not done one myself but when I've heard about how this is how the what it looks like what the alpha what the alpha team looks like when I've talked to people who have participated it's an incredible I mean it's you're getting basically what you get in a business school environment and it's free which is amazing I've also seen people do you know through volunteer experiences through nonprofit organizations that they are connected to or with startups or small businesses or family businesses where they say you know hey I think we could I think we could do better on for example our operations management if they're part of a family business or a small business you know could I just take you on this little project to improve how we do whatever this process is that we do day in and day out and I've seen people do that as well so those are some of the examples of ways to put the education into practice great thank you and just to clarify or to add a little explainer Laurie mentioned the alpha alpha teams at cge puts on and those are companies sponsored six-week intensive programs where you work with a team of 20 other individuals 21 other individuals from around the world to solve a problem for a company and as Laurie mentioned is really a wonderful in-depth jumping right into a real real-world experience now let's have Toby call up a questioner to present sure so our first question actually comes from an anonymous viewer who we're not able to promote to a panelist but I'll ask a question on their behalf the question is Laurie does someone who has an undergraduate degree in another field such as humanities or social sciences but are interested in business business can they now be considered an explorer in your book um yes absolutely so that category of explorer I think really applies to anybody who is interested in business education but is not entirely sure about what they're going to do next so somebody who has a background in humanities or social sciences and who is thinking you know ah you know I I have this sense that maybe I need a business education but I'm not totally sure what I'm going to do with it yes I would consider you an explorer and I would say that as you kind of dive into the business curriculum you may be very surprised by what appeals to you what doesn't appeal to you and what kinds of opportunities you see come up great thank you um bo had a question about translation I'm gonna let let them ask hi bo can you hear us hello yes I'm from China I'm just wondering where was the book we translated translated the other language like Chinese in the future I really hope so so my publisher is working on that right now I can tell you that there's an interest in Chinese and in other languages as well which I'm not remembering off the top of my head but I'm very hopeful that the book will be translated into other languages in particular Chinese thank you very much I'm really looking forward to it good thank you okay thank you our next question comes from techno techno you're on the air yeah you can go ahead and ask a question I hey hello yeah yeah so I was asking you know these MBAs are like they are tailored according with the example and all of that according to the environment so I was asking how relevant is that book to an African MBA like relevant to an MBA that's provided in African environment how that book is relevant um well so to answer your question so I I think it's highly relevant to an african setting for a few reasons so number one the cost of a european or american MBA is extremely expensive especially if you're coming from from africa and the quality of the education that you can get through these courses is extremely high so you can really maximize the education that you're getting I did this entire education from africa actually I was living in rwanda and and I I was able to do all of my courses and all of this from africa and one of the things that was really cool for me was I got very interested in entrepreneurship and in particular um base of the pyramid entrepreneurship and so um it was really fun for me to be able to directly see concepts that I was learning about um social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship for development just in my local community um I don't know if we can get techno back I'd like to know where in africa you are located um and what your goals are because the other thing I've seen in africa um or in the african context that I'm familiar with was um credentialism so so where people kind of put too much emphasis on the credential so in that um in that respect it may be less relevant to an african context if you're just trying to get a job at a regular old company and they really wanted to see that piece of paper um I think that's one kind of that's one drawback and I've seen people be even more attached to the credential in in certain contexts that I've worked in um but if you're going in the entrepreneurship path or if you're um working in a family business I think it's highly highly relevant um so uh so that's kind of my my sense on that and actually lauri a question I'm sorry to interrupt you're gonna have another one about credentials so you can okay after this yeah well I I came actually his question follows right up on that great yeah akim you're on here go ahead okay um I my name is Amataya I came from Nigeria hi okay um actually you answer 50 percent of my question um I'm because of I I am also into I also do a lot of um YouTube videos where being at all to be able to um up my skills I don't know that even MBA using through data university and all of that but it is very difficult to get things like job and all of that here in Nigeria for example so now my question is that how do we manage how do we manage after getting all of these skills and we are already good to go but we can't get job because of everybody needs certification they want a recognized certification and all of that so how do we go about it well I have some tips for you um I do think this is a real problem and it can be difficult um but I my my advice to you would be to seek out kind of shorter programs that come with a certificate so maybe not the full-scale degree but perhaps um you know bootcamp style education or online training programs that include a certificate that then becomes kind of part of your evidence I would caution you not to have you know like 20 certificates but really to focus on like one or two that are very impressive and to add to that a portfolio of work so that then when you are going for that position that you can point to the specific training that's very impressive that you're certified for and then and then it goes with like it's kind of matched to some work that you've done that you can also show and then you can talk about that work in your cover letter and you can have it as part of the experience on your CV so that rather than just having this is something I've seen when I've done hiring um is I've seen people who've got like you know 20 certificates and I don't know how to go through it like I've seen like oh you were in a workshop on this and you were on a workshop on that and you did a course and they all just kind of look like short little courses to me that don't seem very impressive and maybe I skip over that resume because I can't tell what I'm looking at on the other hand if you've got a very targeted CV that says okay you know I learned this skill and this skill through these courses and I put those skills into practice and you can see evidence of the work that I did and I'm going to talk a little bit about it in my cover letter and that matches to the job that I'm hiring for then I think you have a much greater chance of making it through that first screen. Thank you Laurie. Our next question comes from Naga Buu. I don't know if you can hear us but you're on the air I'm not sure if they're able to speak but I'll go ahead and read the question for you and it's about soft skills and electrical power, the electrical power professional I guess if there are any programs that can make him more exceptional, smarter in this field that you know of. Sure well so this is what I would call the the executive use case where we're talking about somebody who has strong technical skills and who's looking to move into more of a management role and that does come primarily through soft skills through the ability to manage people to give good presentations to take a global view of the business you know things of that nature it's kind of like going from the working level like going to a higher level of thinking about the whole organization and I do think that's something that is very very possible with the courses that are out there. Great and another question we have from one of our anonymous viewers is with so many you know my courses online behind paywalls how can we get the same value from auditing them going through the course without access to certain parts or no certificates or the only worth by I guess paying to get the full course. Yeah this is a great question and and this is obviously somebody who is familiar with MOOCs and how they work. MOOCs used to be totally free and open and it was so wonderful to be able to get these full courses they were fully featured they they were really exciting and then gradually they've kind of gone behind paywalls where like first it was just the certificate that was behind the paywall and now in in many cases it's even you know some of the assessments and the projects and things like that so that what you're getting for for free or when you audit a course is much less exciting and that's a real disappointment to those of us who were part of who were taking MOOCs when they were new so I don't think it is the case that you have to pay for every single MOOC that you take I think you can get a lot of value from what's being offered for free and then my advice would be to choose a couple of certificates in your kind of deep area of skills near your your skills concentration which is another thing I didn't touch on it in this talk but I touch on it in depth in the book of like how do you build a skills concentration so then when you get your certificates get like two or three in your area of concentration and for advanced coursework not for the intro level coursework but I think you can find most things you know even if you have to be a little bit creative about it you know you watch the finance lecture and then you find a finance project somewhere else or you you know watch the marketing lecture and then you kind of do some additional work to do the equivalent of an assessment or of a project on your own I think it's worth it and because if you're and if you end up paying for certificates for every single course you're talking about you're getting up to several thousand dollars and that that may not be worth it great thank you Laurie and our next question comes from John John has a bit of background noise I'm going to read the question for him and he says considering the craze in which employers have for experience in a person's resume would it be wrong to a wrong move to seek experience in a field that you did not study for I think it's a great move to seek experience for any position that you're applying for especially if it's not in the field that that you were trained in I mean I think that is what's required actually if you're going to try to switch fields one of the one of the pieces of advice that I sometimes give to people if I'm asked about you know do I need to get an MBA one of the things I say is if you're going for the triple move if you're trying to switch company role and industry you may well need another degree in order to be able to do that but if you're only switching two of those variables on a fourth variable would be country or location so if you're changing all four of those it may be a good idea to have a degree but if you're only switching two or three you can maybe make that move without getting another degree so and I think it's a great idea to try to seek experience in order to facilitate that kind of transition thank you Laurie our next question comes from Steenberg Ruwa and you're on the air hi hi hello uh can you hear me yes we can oh great um but I'm glad there's something here I'm actually from Kenya yeah and um there's one thing I really agree with uh she said yeah in Africa the problem is we place so much value on uh you know the certificate more than the skills and in fact like me as a person I would say I've really benefited a lot from you know the online courses there's a lot that I've learned that I didn't expect I was going to learn that's the first thing then you know the nature of our environment not everyone is able to afford to go to to you know college and get quality education because even the ones who go you find like the local universities around they don't offer that you know knowledge that you say you could actually be I have so many but even how like a friend of mine I was discussing with yesterday like she has a cousin who has even a he has a master's but she still can get a job so the problem is our you know our system of education around here is so centered around papers and it's not as cutting edges okay when you compare it to the the ones offered by mok but so the challenge is something that I wanted to ask about the relevance of like the mba you're telling us about the mba how relevant is mba especially in this digital the way we are shifting towards a digital economy how relevant is it well um so so yeah so I I I really understand what you're talking about in terms of the overall in my opinion overreliance on credentials and I'll tell you know when I've done hiring in when I was working in Africa and I would see these resumes that were literally they were literally CVs that were six pages long just filled with trainings and sometimes they were really hard to read and and I and I sort of felt like the the person whose resume I was reading was like trying to give me just everything you know everything I've ever done so that you can see that I'm a qualified professional and in a way it almost made it harder as somebody who was hiring to see you know so much um so and and I've also seen you know I've been so impressed with some of the entrepreneurs that that I've met while I was working in ronda who kind of found they were looking at some kind of business problem and come came up with just the perfect solution um for that local context and and I was so impressed with you know some of those types of solutions so I guess what I would say to you is that um I think that there may be it may be worth taking a risk um to try to package your your CV in a different way that um if you employ some creativity if you um really try to think from the perspective of whoever is going to be reading your resume what do they need and so that's kind of I guess that's why I'm drawing in um something from entrepreneurship just to think about you know not just like what is a resume supposed to look like what is the path that I'm supposed to be going down because that's kind of what I've seen on on many resumes that I've evaluated but rather to think from a different perspective which is what successful entrepreneurs do and to say what is the problem that I'm trying to solve who is the audience for this what is the solution that's going to work for them and to create your resume that way um and I think that there's a potential there I'm not going to say that I'm positive that that will work for you but I think there that may be a way to to approach this that could potentially get around some of this problem of just not having exactly the right credential and feeling like your resume gets passed over okay uh thanks thank you lori I believe I came on to ask another question you are on the air I don't know if you can hear us all right um well since then we've actually received a question again from one of our anonymous viewers um saying I am currently practicing a practicing engineer with uh flare an interest in marketing and business strategy I have taken some online courses um and he lists a couple of examples how can I convert these skills to be able to you to uh to use them to get a desired job um in these areas of marketing business strategy um and I get a follow-up to that as everything is going online nowadays when do you think that uh these online courses will be valued appreciated like those offered by traditional educational institutions um good questions okay so the first question I would say if you're practicing in a field um your first best place to look is where you're already working where people know you where you have a reputation where you have a very good sense of what is needed um to try to get onto some kind of group or committee or even chat with the marketing person or marketing people um and start to get into those conversations if there's an opportunity there if there's not an opportunity there I would say um some volunteering in um for a nonprofit type organization that's related to what your skill area is where you can be a valuable contributor and then kind of expand your skill set into some of these things that you're really interested in um those would be my my two kind of main tips and I guess a third one would be working on your own business or on your own um kind of venture especially if there is scope within your organization for some kind of intrapreneurship um some of the you know marketing and strategy are things that are really needed not just when you're dealing with an external audience but also when you're dealing with an internal audience and there can be a lot more potential and opportunity if you're in a in a company to propose a new idea and then kind of have to market you know you're kind of you're like an entrepreneur in the sense that you're solely responsible um for that you know kind of nurturing that idea and helping it to grow and you need a full um 360 degree business type education and view of that idea to help foster it and and know what it needs to get legs so that's that's that's um to your first question um to the second question uh when do i think that online courses will be valued and appreciated in the same way that traditional um degrees are you know i i don't i uh if i had to kind of gaze into my crystal wall and say what i think is going to happen um i think people will still be paying attention to to degrees for for a while to come but i think what's going to happen is that um degrees will be seen more as kind of one option among other options um that people will especially for targeted skill sets that shorter credentials may become really important you know things like MOOC certificates uh micro masters specializations nano degrees you know all these kind of burgeoning micro credentials that are out there um i think that those are going to become systematized and that employers are going to take more recognition of those and i also can imagine um employers beginning to even create their own pathways um educational pathways that that prepare people really well for roles in technical fields especially in fields where employers find that graduates of regular programs are not just aren't ready to do the kind of jobs you know right out of the degree program um so so i do think we're going to continue to see changes and and i think what we're going to see rather than um fewer kinds of programs i think we're just going to see more um for the foreseeable future and that maybe that a kind of a culling down is not going to happen for quite some time thank you lori i noticed we have three minutes left i don't know if you had any final question you wanted to ask uh no but i think there's one more question that i don't think we had a chance to get to and there was a request for examples lori of sites we can get free um online mba or courses that are you know because as you mentioned uh i think a lot of companies have caught on and put courses by firewall so can you cite any examples of free courses that you would recommend sure well so i think almost everything on edX is still free at least there's an option to audit um on course sarah there are still some programs that are that are you can audit or you can audit some portions of the course um i'm also a big fan and these are not free but i'm a fan of courses on utomy especially if especially if you're trying to put skills you know find ways to use your skills i find that those courses are very skill focused so one thing i would probably do if i were doing this today would be to take the academic course you know audit it do whatever portions of it they've made free and then go on to utomy and find their course you'll find the the professional in the field who's teaching from their professional expertise and do the ten dollar course on utomy to be able to then like you know put the skills into practice so that that's one strategy that i would use not totally free but but much more affordable than you know 40 50 60 or more dollars for a certificate and then my other piece of advice is to go on to class central i don't know if you're if you're the question answer or asker is familiar with class central but full disclosure i'm working for class central because i think they're such a great company and there's a lot of overlap with with what i do but class central is a search engine for MOOCs and they've got a pretty complete listing of courses so you can search across platforms and you can see you know what is the free option what's the option for the certificate is there a credential involved it allows you to really compare across courses and across platforms in your subject area wow that's a great idea for a service uh let's try and get one last question in i have it and here we go if you guys don't mind uh we have uh Osuola you're on the air can you hear us i think there's some background noise i'll ask the question on their behalf and the basic question says can you advise me on how to reduce distractions and focus uh to complete courses because i have there are so many i'm not completed and i i'm assuming this is probably a frequent question to get from people who are doing online courses yes it is a frequent challenge it's really hard this is one of the hardest things is maintaining your motivation so i've got some tips for you on this um actually i wrote an article on class central um a couple years ago with a it's a list of 25 different ways to try to maintain your your focus motivation but i would say number one is have a goal um that's really important number two i would say make yourself accountable to somebody besides yourself so like tell a spouse a friend a partner a a course buddy an employer you know a parent anybody that you intend to finish a course and then ask them to hold to help hold you accountable um i would say to become part of a community so that if you've got you know other people in the course who you're working alongside a course buddy or people that you know outside of the course or people who you meet through the course you know continue to do the course with them i would say use your calendar so that you block off the time when you are trying to study um and then i would also say like close all your other windows on your computer like don't allow yourself to be check in email or multitasking i've even done where i've sat away from my computer where i like move my chair two feet back from my computer and sit with a piece of paper so that i can't click on anything else i'm just watching that course um and i found that to be effective as well but i agree with you it's hard it's hard in a regular class lecture too i don't know if the person asking the question has been in a college lecture hall recently but like you see people with their laptop out their phone out people are distracted everywhere they go so this is not just a problem in the online classroom it's a problem everywhere great thank you lori uh thank you this has been wonderful great questions great presentation i want to remind people that the book is i'm gonna hold it up again uh here you go here's my copy too you can uh actually you see better lori's screen uh and i'll also let the audience know that there's a companion guide to the book which is available on my websites i actually printed off a copy and got it spiral bound but this is available for download when you buy the book and it just it's it pulls from the book but it's basically just all the checklists that are in the book of how to go through this education on your own oh that's great very helpful and i want to remind people too that lori's website is nopaymba that's all one word dot com and the cg website where you can also find other alternatives uh for online education is the thgcge.net i want to thank everyone for their time especially lori uh for a great presentation and discussion and tobi thank you for engineering all the questions bye everyone thank you bye bye