 Moderating our panel today on innovation and disruption is Kathleen DeLaskey from Education Design Lab, and we have Anna Leonard from the University of Michigan, Cheryl Grant of the Community Success Institute, and Christopher Kent from the Foresight Alliance. Please join me in giving them a welcome. Thank you all for staying for the last panel. Your gift cards will be waiting outside. We didn't tell anyone until now. We really do appreciate it. And this is the future, so hopefully we can leave you thinking about things besides who will have a job in the next decade. Hopefully we all will. So I'm going to start off with the question, the aspirational question that I was asked by Connecting Credentials and funded by the Lumina Foundation workgroups last summer. I co-chaired a workgroup where the design question was how might we build a world where people can be hired for what they know and what they can do rather than who they know and where they went to school? And if we kind of set that as our sights of what we're trying to get to, and we'll have a poll question in a minute about the competency-based hiring, how far off is that? So be thinking about your answer as you talk to folks. Because the fluidity, we have an interesting panel because two of us are really going to be talking about the future of work and two of us are more broadly about credentialing, I would say. So we're going to start with the future of work, folks. Everyone is going to sort of give a few minutes overview of their work and their impressions. And then we're going to really try to have a conversation here that will include everyone in the audience, hopefully. So be thinking about your questions. We're going to start off, and we're not going to do formal introductions because you can see who we are up here and our descriptions are in the book. We're going to start off actually with Christopher Kent, who is going to give us a few of his, what he's learning about future work and his work foresight. Thank you, Kathleen. Can anybody? There we go. My name is Christopher Kent. I work for a futures and foresight consultancy here in Washington, D.C., called Foresight Alliance. And our interest in the future of work was sparked about three or four years ago. The Rockefeller Foundation came to us with a pile of money and said, we'd like you to do a report on the future of work, and we're not done. We said, sure, we'll do a report. And so for the last three or four years, we've been looking into the future of work, and I should take a step back. What my firm does is we look at the forces of change that are driving either an industry or a sector for whoever our clients are, and our clients are both nonprofits and for-profit organizations. And we help them to understand what's driving those forces of change, so they can take advantage of the opportunities and challenges that these changes present. And so what we made this report on the futures of work for the Rockefeller Foundation, interesting to us to do besides the money, was the fact that they were interested as a philanthropic grant-making organization. They were interested not just in the future of work, as you see it in Glossy Business Magazine State, which is white-collar knowledge work. You can take your laptop to the beach and work from there, and you can work all hours of the day. As a grant-making organization, they were very concerned with what the changes that were occurring, how they were going to impact the entire workforce, particularly what they termed the poor and vulnerable, because they tend to get overlooked when big changes happen. And so I can't go through everything in the report. You can find it on our website at www.ForsightAlliance.com. It's free to download. So I just want to hit some top-line ideas that are affecting or driving the changes to work and how it's helping work evolve to the future. And this conference has made this presentation a lot easier because it's validated a lot of what we said, because a lot of what I'm going to talk about we've already talked about today, which is good. You guys are already thinking ahead. But the first thing that we looked at or that we thought was interesting and important, particularly for this group, is work is becoming more and more atomized, that you no longer have, as we all know now, the graceful 20-plus-year career at an organization at a job. You're mostly going to have a number of jobs over the course of your career. But within that, jobs are becoming atomized. It's being sliced into, you know, jobs are now becoming work. Work is being sliced into tasks. Everything is, all work is becoming more and more atomized. And one of the drivers of that is the next, is the next idea. And Rob talked a lot about this in his presentation, but that is automation. And automation has become the big boogeyman in regards to the future of work, you know. It's coming for your job or it's not coming for your job. And from a future perspective, the question of automation is really interesting because we've been looking at this for four or five years now. And usually after five years, you can definitely see a trend, a distinct trend emerge. And I think the reason why automation and the automation of work is still causing so much angst is because there is still no clear trend as to how automation is going to play out. There's the two sort of dominant paradigms, which is, you know, one that automation is going to take all of our jobs and we're just going to be left without any income and without any hope. And the second idea, which is a more less dystopian, more hopeful idea, is that, and Rob talked about this previously, that automation will eliminate sort of the monotonous, low-skill, low-knowledge jobs, leaving the higher-skill, higher empathy, higher-paying jobs for human workers. And so the result of that being that we'll all be working better jobs and automation will be taking care of all of the monotonous, terrible, boring jobs. And again, what makes this so interesting is for every data point that we see that says we're all heading towards this dystopian hellscape, there's almost equal data points showing that, no, we're actually moving towards the more utopian, the more the situation we like to call human-machine cooperation where you'll be working alongside automation and not working for and not having your job eliminated by automation. Another interesting idea that has cropped up in our research and it's sort of been talked around a bit today and yesterday in regards to sort of trust and authority and authenticity is the idea of reputation. And I know that we've talked a lot about credentials and what does credentials mean, but a lot of work now, a lot of, not just work, but a lot of society now is moving towards a more reputation-based society. And so you're seeing things now where your reputation is your entrant into a job. So with companies like Fiverr or TaskRabbit, your reputation proves your worth as a customer. You see that with Uber or with Airbnb. Your reputation proves your worth as a seller, as with eBay or with Amazon. And so reputation is becoming a lot more important and there's a number of reasons for that. It's becoming more salient both within and outside of companies. It's becoming stickier as we see with a lot of the credentialing innovations that there's new ways to port your reputation that's just like there's new ways to port your credentials. And so your reputation is becoming harder to escape things. We sort of, some of the groups talked about that yesterday when they were talking about the waste data manager and how do you, how does that going to play out in regards to reputation? It's becoming, your reputation is being generated by a lot more data points. Some of it is how you work, some of it is what you do online, that there's more data points. And also the data points, the reputation is becoming a lot more democratized. It's no longer flowing down from an authority, but it's flowing, it's flowing up through organizations like Glassdoor or it's coming at you sideways based on your own work. And you see that in organizations like Angie's List where your reputation is being crowdsourced by the people that you serve. And the last thing that I just wanted to bring, the last sort of big trend that I want to talk about is speed. Speed gets caught up sometimes in the discussion of technology. But speed itself and the speed of change is something that needs to be looked at and sort of paid attention to on its own outside of how it's being created by technology. Because the speed of change is starting to strangle the way our civic institutions and organizations are able to handle the changes that are coming. These days there are more jobs being created than there are credentials to sort of keep up with that. And in the past, things happened, speed of change happened slower. And so the civic societies and civic institutions had more time to absorb the dislocated workers. They had more time to absorb the changes that are happening to society. It gave them time to write laws. It gave them time to pass regulations. These days speed of change is sort of being dictated by how quickly a disruptive idea can be brought to market. And so paying attention to speed and the force of speed on these issues is really driving some of the ideas of the future of work. So what does this mean for the future of work? Well, again, we've talked a lot about some of what this means over the last couple of days. Obviously new skills are going to be needed. Kevin Kelly, who is the founding editor of Wired Magazine, has said that in the future you'll be rewarded for how well you work with machines and automation. Obviously new organizations and institutions are going to be needed to help deal with some of these changes. I know that as we talk about people having three or four or five different careers, there's organizations now like Encore or the Transition Network, which helps people who are later in their career, not just starting out, but say 20, 25 years into their working life, transition to new careers, help them and help them not just find jobs, but also find ways for them to use their skills in new ways. And we've discussed today too about the role of education and educational institutions as the future of work changes and people need to continue to reskill and upskill that if the story of education in the 20th century was sort of a democratization of four-year institutions, I think the story of the 21st century is going to be the rise and the importance of technical schools, vocational schools, community colleges, shorter training organizations. And the last thing I just wanted to mention is that as work changes, the idea and how we look at what work is changing too, that as jobs have started to become more atomized and automated, it's starting to reveal the fact that a lot of professions, white-collar professions, that we used to think as professions where you would need to possess a body of knowledge to do the job, and there's still some doctors, CPAs, lawyers that need to have that body of knowledge, but a lot of white-collar jobs that are seen as professions are really just crafts. Journalism is a craft. Graphic design is a craft. And so as this realization sinks in, you're going to see there's a good chance that you don't need to go to a four-year school to learn these crafts. You need to go to a two-year school or less or a training school to get the accreditation to prove that you have the skills to do the job and not to show that you have the body of knowledge that you need to do those jobs. Great. Well, thank you, Christopher. So to set up Anna, you said something, Christopher, that the first point you made that we're either going to have, you know, there's the paradigm that automation will take away all of our jobs, and then there's the word utopia and paradigm that the jobs will be higher skill and will be working alongside robots. I guess the big question is what about the people that don't have the higher skills and what happens to them, how education is not currently set up to really solve for all of those people. So that's probably the dystopian view within the utopian view. So that sort of sets up Anna, who has really taken a deep dive. I think the reason that we want to do on this panel in particular is you've done some really interesting research around transportation workers which make up what's something like six or seven percent of the economy. So, and mostly men. So what happens to all those workers in either the utopian or the dystopian view? Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Just briefly, my name is Annalyn Hart, and I did just graduate from the University of Michigan. I got a Master's of Public Policy, but I did also stack on a data science certificate which shows you that I am reading the data on what we're going to need soon. Prior to graduate school, I had two titles that I worked with. So the first was as the founder of the Next Generation of Service which was an online alternative career center that had the vision of creating a world where everyone had done a year of service, so AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, World Teach. In that role, I worked with students from over 300 universities and spent a lot of time in the field talking to them about what they wanted from work, from their career, and their fears about the future. But that job never paid me, so I spent about 10 to 40 hours a week as a Salesforce.com CRM developer. That was a credential I got, and I did freelance work and subcontracting work. So all of this led to showing up at grad school and knowing that I wanted to work in the future of work and specifically look at artificial intelligence and what it would mean. So I chose truck drivers because they're often pointed to. Policymakers love to point to the 1.8 million people currently employed as heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers. What's going to happen to them? It's a very tangible occupation because we do see autonomous vehicle development going towards fully autonomous trucks, and it's something that's very foreseeable. We do have some time. We have some technical and political challenges before we see a fully autonomous truck, but we are looking at potentially 15, 20 years. So I wanted to study it for that reason. I also wanted to study it because it's an occupation where we have an idea of what's going to happen between now and that full automation. We actually have a sense from some of the startups and what they're doing of what that collaboration between human and AI is going to look like and so we can get a sense of that. So I wanted to ask the question, knowing that we have limited workforce development re-skilling dollars, what should we do to get this massive population of people who could completely lose their job to get them re-skilled? So to answer this question, I used Onet data, which is not great as we just heard from what we have. It's what we have. And specifically I used the skill level data if you're familiar, and so it contains about 1,000 occupations are in there and there's 35 elements. So these are like skill elements, like active learning, programming, and they're zero to seven as the levels and they're averaged. So I did the best I could with that. And so the first question I asked is, which occupations are most similar to truck drivers based on skill set? Which of those are growing and have decent wages using VLS data? And then which are less susceptible to automation? And for that I looked at tasks and I did look at the study from Oxford, it's always cited, but it's a good base. And so I actually noticed a few things that were actually kind of encouraging. So for example, in the equipment selection and installation skill set from an average truck driver, it actually makes them a decent fit to work in elevator installation and repair, which actually turns out to be a pretty good job. And with a slight increase in reading comprehension and service orientation, which you can imagine some average truck drivers might already be above average in those things, that actually makes them a good fit for endoscopy technician. Now again, we know to be an endoscopy technician you would need some formal training, but it's nice to think that it could be a little less friction moving from there. Some less optimistic things that I found is of the jobs that were the high quality, less susceptible to automation and the near future jobs that got clustered with heavy duty truck drivers, the science was actually the biggest skills gap. And that's slightly more concerning, because science is not a skill that we can easily in six months kind of give you, right? Of course, ONET doesn't break down what science means very well, but it's still, we can imagine, it depends on a pretty strong foundation in K to 12. So I think that's something that's important for all of us to keep in mind. So the next thing I did is I really wanted to look at the evolution of truck driving. So what are we seeing? And we're seeing a couple trends that I think are interesting for those of you working in credentials. So the first is the idea of platoon driving. This is the idea of you have a caravan of drivers. The first driver is driving. The other trucks are following along using technology and autonomy. The drivers in those following trucks are doing logistics work. They're napping, waiting until their truck is in the front. And they also could be using that time to watch an online course, listen to a podcast. I mean, I think there's some creative ways we can think about building skill making into this job that's monitoring. The other trend that is being tested and we will likely see in five, ten years is remote driving for highways. So autonomous trucks on a highway waiting to get to the city where they'll have a real driver that does the driving within the city. But that autonomous truck on the highway is being remotely monitored and even driven by someone in a warehouse like a video game using like a joystick. And you can imagine building in some communication techniques. We heard Joanne mention this this morning. There's a lot you can do when you're in a video game type environment. So you can imagine building skills that way too. So it's a little out there, but I think if we think about how jobs are going to slowly work with AI, what opportunities exist there for re-skilling on the job during that work with AI, if those exist. And really thinking about kind of the monitoring skills and other things we expect to see as we collaborate in that way. So who's responsible? Who should be responsible for that on the job retraining? Yeah, I think that's the really interesting question. I think the way I imagine is I think as public the public sector and policy makers in the government should have almost an agreement with industry. That is we will get every young person in this country to age 18 with high level of reading comprehension, really good science skills, really strong base and also some of these very, very important people skills and empathy and things that we've been talking about too. Don't want to underplay those. And then at that point, hopefully that foundation will be there for quick re-skilling and I do think there's going to have to be some incentives in place for industry to do a lot of this if they can. I think that's what the Education Design Lab is doing. We're a nonprofit that's been working for about five years in testing new models in higher education and we really take the philosophy like Don was mentioning and I wish I was from the show me state. We're really about let's begin to learn by doing and let's start to put some of this stuff out into the wild and see what happens and learn from it and build on it. We started out with digital credentialing and we decided to start with 21st century skills partly because in working with universities it was open territory. There was nobody was telling us not to do it because it wasn't in any of the silos of a major or discipline and it was certainly areas around informal learning and working with universities where they felt like yes, we need to figure this out too and I think that the skills gap that employers are complaining about is largely the skills are things like I've got the, let's see I can show you I'll come back to that. These are, can you all see the actual badge names? So we began doing we worked with this is the first slide shows the numbers of universities that we worked with we're now working with folks well beyond universities high school districts workforce development programs in Africa and a lot of workforce and even some employers but this is sort of the group that we've worked with over the past couple of years to just really test and prototype 21st century skill badges really trying to answer the question that I mentioned at the beginning but more specifically will a 21st century skill badge for a community college student or a truck driver could it get them through the filter because a lot of hiring now is done through online filtering where it's keywords and if you don't make it through the filter it's not a question of what to bring to your interview do you even ever get to that stage so we were really trying to experiment with can we help level the playing field with 21st century skill badges which might become more important in many of these jobs when you mention collaboration for example I'm thinking oh maybe we should do a badge on machine collaboration we think of it as working in teams which certainly gets cited as one of the probably the biggest ones that employers are expressing interest in here as we're working with employers are oral communication creative problem solving collaboration and maybe critical thinking but resilience and empathy are also ones that have been we have found a lot of take up on to hold these out to the public and we decided to because we're hoping that they can create a framework for we have each badge has four sub competencies and a bad journey process that includes includes a learning component a practice and reflection component and assessment and then we have learning outcomes for each of the sub competencies we put them out there they're on our website in fact a number of you have come up to me today and said we're in your beta group so thank you for that and Creadly has been working with us but we work with all the platforms so we're really trying to now take it to a larger scale and see if we can get now the next step is to really get employers who have been working to design with us but the next step is to get them to try to actually say yes we'll take a first look at students who have been badged I'm going to skip this slide to say these are the kind of comments that we're getting from or the self-reporting that we're getting from students so we really started out trying to think of this as an employer play to help employers have a way to screen students but what we found is that the badging process itself has been so useful to students to even understand and articulate their skills in this area even if we can't get employers to go after it a lot of schools are wanting to adopt it anyway because it's a great way to help them capture the new language of what GenEd needs to be doing and so we have a lot of people working this framework into their GenEd redesign I wanted to show this slide so how many of you are familiar with the idea of the T-shaped individual so there's been a lot of discussion there's been a lot of discussion about how the types of skills and the range of motion is really increasingly important in the future we think of the horizontal skills or the 21st century skills and the vertical skills or your technical skills and what a lot of employers are telling us about the hiring manager at a hospital in Michigan and this is a student and we've asked them we're doing this workshop a lot around the country where we ask them each to fill out the skills we ask the employer to say what skills do you need in hard to fill jobs she's filled it out for a nursing job and then the student is trying to translate, where am I getting that is it through this club is it through this course translation across the 21st century skills and then our next step is to build some way for people to have like a dashboard so that's part of our 2.0 version that we're looking at but we are getting a lot of really positive feedback from employers through this campaign that we're calling T Up the Skills we have an advisory board and that's going really well so I'll just sum up to say that we're learning a lot about the use, LinkedIn has done reporting saying that if you have a badge on your LinkedIn profile you have 6 times more click through and visibility for your LinkedIn profile and we feel like the next step is really we've really got to have proof points from employers in order to really drive to the next level of adoption but I'd be happy to talk to you I've got an example of a t profile I'll just end on a slide that shows you where you can learn more about the badges so with that I wanted to so that's sort of one example of a project that's really trying to actually live in the wild and use badging and try to help make it a transaction and a field leveler we're now going to turn to Cheryl Grant who will talk a little bit about the ecosystem right and I'm aware too we're getting dangerously close to happy hour on Friday and I'm an academic and I can talk a lot so I thought just to put you out of your misery I would just give you three things that I've been thinking about about the badge ecosystem and then I'll just flesh those out a little bit and try and tie this in without too much whiplash with what everybody else has said and I wasn't here yesterday I think yesterday I would have been able to sort of characterize this in a way that really captures what you all talked about throughout the whole conference but bear with me this might be a little disjointed but these are my three points the first one is to me the most revolutionary thing about all of these conversations that we're having it's going to sound super boring when I say it is that the learning content that is getting a credential is smaller than a course unit that is the most revolutionary thing about everything that gets talked about and I find mostly when people are having this conversation we've been talking like this for a hundred years I mean ever since there's if you want to look at the future you look at the past and where I used to work at Haystack we worked with a lot of humanities so shout out to anybody who has a humanities degree where we would look back at some of the ways that people were standardizing in the late 1800s into the 1900s and it is exactly the same conversation it's recognizing that the more value you put into something the harder it is for people to get so you get fewer people who get it it turns into an elite thing how do you get universities to buy into something that's actually chipping into their bottom line all of those conversations we're doing it all over again but the one thing that does feel revolutionary is this piece this tiny piece of learning that gets a credential that's smaller than the course unit that is the big takeaway that's the clickbait right there the second thing that I find really interesting about this work is this is the first time in human history that our reputation is tethered to a proprietary platform so it is true like you were saying earlier Christopher that reputation is a really interesting part of this conversation credentials are a type of reputation they're a very special kind of reputation but this is the first time that's been tethered to a proprietary platform and that is a huge problem and in the eight years that I've been working around credentialing and badges really what I've seen is that the conversations like that is too big and too hard and too technical a lot of people don't have double deep skills to be able to talk about engineering concepts and go back to the design and do the human messy work as well and so as a result there's kind of been this cleaving that has happened where we're just hoping that Cradlee and other platforms like it are taking care of the things that we talk about when we say ecosystem but the siloing that happens with credentials is actually happening with platforms also and so you're going to have this fragmentation for employers to have to figure out how to sweep it all together and this is not necessarily an endorsement of a company but I will say the one company that I think might be doing this and of course proprietary versus open source is a big conversation here but the proprietary platform that seems to be figuring this out is sort of taking the LinkedIn model and allowing badges to come into it so it's that granular piece of learning the quick thing that you can pick up to pivot and to adapt to a job whether you're driving in a truck or you're in between naps which is like such a great idea so that's the second thing the third thing what's the company what's the company you talked about portfolio and what I love about the way that they work and I have a feeling if there isn't competition already that it will start soon is people are sort of trained on LinkedIn right now there's a webinar wrote a book called Down and Out in the New Economy Ilana Gershon and people have read that and she did not go out to study LinkedIn but that's what she ended up studying because she was looking at recruiters and HR departments how people are getting jobs and it was all going back to LinkedIn so we are kind of culturally being trained to think about jobs in terms of LinkedIn like it or not and so portfolio has a portfolio it's free for students it's nicely designed the user experience is really nice schools can buy it so that they can look to see what their students are saying about their soft skills in order to I think if I'm not mistaken about the company the way it works is that you have to tag your soft skill with evidence and then you can also slurp up badges and there's a machine readable component to this and algorithms and then employers can come in so it's like the whole ecosystem in this little package the third thing and this is just a personal beef that I have is my concern is that going forward that the people who are really good at getting credentials are going to get really good at getting more credentials and so the equity piece is huge and in the very beginning of this conversation I felt like we talked a lot about it more that it was on panels more that people were trying to figure out exactly how do you think about it this way and I don't know if it's such a difficult problem or it's a difficult thing that people don't talk about it as much but I know in some of the communities I go into that's the last thing that they are talking about is a badge and I'm trying to create a culture around understanding badges and what not so it's just a big concern that I have that especially when you are talking about platforms because the engineering decisions you make and you would be surprised if you do not have engineering expertise once you get a little bit and you know how to talk to to talk to engineers or to look at what they're designing you can see how a small decision can make a huge difference in a user experience you can lay down some highways that are so difficult to rip back up after people start getting used to those platforms so some of this happens at the design level and I'm going to say most people in this room are probably in some way or other designers whether you think of yourself that way or not if you're making decisions about how people are going to be experiencing credentials or badges or how they're going to access them or move them around or whatever you probably are designers and so these decision points that you're making you don't want to just hand it over to Credly and say please make sure it's all going to be okay try to get to the point where you can understand the concepts well enough that you know whether or not this is really going to be a good thing for your users you don't want to find out that the very people you were trying to serve don't understand how to even access the system or use it or what it's for or things aren't getting moved over to where they need to be onto transcripts and you don't want any of that kind of stuff to happen so that's my third thing that I'm really concerned about so the first thing is just to repeat the revolutionary piece is the size of the credential because you can pick these things up so quickly and I know that there's a lot that goes into that design of that credential I'm not making light of that but it does feel like we end up talking a lot about that that sort of vertical stack I think of value for that but the other piece is also that our credentials are getting tethered again just like other reputation so to me there's like this new thing that's happening and we're just making it worse at the technology level and then the third is my concern about people who are good at credentials becoming excellent at getting more credentials and I don't know if I'm close to time am I okay with time is this you went like that I'm gonna stop there I've got a whole bunch more to say but again you actually it's good you're like dusting up a lot of interesting fodder so the first thing that I would ask we've experienced this ourselves is who are the trusted agents in this new world if not platforms that are social mission for profits which are providing the platforms and often the content what who do we turn to I mean we're trying to figure out for example at the lab as a non-profit who should our issuers be who should our new accreditors be for these small units that you describe and where should they live if they're gonna be stackable everyone who's stepping forward to work with us is a for profit government is not stepping forward to work with us what should we do is a question for me for you but others can feel free well one thing I'm really curious about from like a design perspective is we never really went out and said to students like how do you share credentials or how do you think about sharing your credentials or what do you think would be valuable or how do you want to use this such a desperation about getting jobs or like moving to the next thing but I think education design lab I'm not saying that just because you're sitting here does a fantastic job of talking to the students your students, your group your local group how do your students think about sharing this I know for teachers for example for them they only want badges this is what the research says anyway badges to show up in their professional email signatures they don't care about it on Facebook they don't care about it on LinkedIn I'm sure doctors would be different or nurses would be different so like figuring out that design piece from that perspective will at least make you pay attention to the assumptions you have about your particular users so that when you think about what happens to that badge after they have earned it after you put them through all those hoops to earn it I think that's what the market place and I do like the word currency for credentials because I think it really forces us to think about the trust framework and the value framework and how to actually move this thing around a marketplace where it has value I don't know if that gets serious we don't know the answer to I wish government would step up either at the state level but it's just too early for them to do it but as you say the carpet's getting laid and they may step up too late we'll come to in a minute let me ask Anna with credentials being at these small units and you work with underserved folks how are they supposed to make sense of it all and to get their stacks and what is a stack anyway I know I loved your last point because I think it's very true I think people who are good at getting credentials will just go out and get more and so what I like about the idea of in fields that are becoming automated if there is a space for people to be able to study during downtime one thing we're seeing, just to kind of back up a little bit is monitoring is a skill that is becoming more and more important we saw it in pilots over time we know most planes fly themselves and the pilots sit there and they read the wash and pose we know that they're allowed to read the wash and pose but we're going to see that showing up in other professions as well so if it gets built in so if the trucking company says we're going to pay you to do two hours of work and you get to choose what you want to study or what you want to get this microcredential in then part of their job is to get set up on the platform someone's going to help them do that and it can get them started I don't know exactly how it would roll out but I think building it into the jobs is helpful I'll also really quickly comment working with young people who are freshly coming out of undergrad just coming out of their community college they really want experience they're okay with these badge things they're waiting for it to shake out they're waiting to see which ones actually matter and get looked at but more importantly they know they need to get experience so that's why they come to my door I want to do AmeriCorps I want to do something with these classes that I just took so that I can put them into a portfolio so I can put them through a badge thing I mean even if they're not saying that that's what they're kind of telling me I want to do the thing I want to get experience really easily to these badges is also what I hear being important and Christopher I wanted to come back to you on reputation the reputation and the speed when you were describing how people may not even realize how the reputation is suddenly being affected by ratings or what not it made me think of a credit score and if you think about it in terms of a credit score career facing digital credit score that we need to help students if one of the new roles of learning providers is to help students with their reputation credit score what does that look like what would you recommend? that's a good question what does it look like I think that I would take it from a different perspective and say how is it being built you know and so and I would even go even further down and say how aware are people that these things are being used to being used to create their reputation score so I think that for me the issue of reputation one of the big ideas has to be transparency not just that people can see what their scores are as they're being built but transparency what are the systems that are what are the systems being used to build their reputation and we're already starting to see some of these conversations in around how data transparency people get concerned about Facebook and the data that Facebook is sharing the Facebook I sound like that was a slip of the tongue I'm not that old Facebook is sharing both consciously both publicly and as we find out more and more surreptitiously so from my perspective being a critical future looking at these systems and how they're being built the transparency of where the data is coming from and the ability for people to say I'm not comfortable with that there's more increasingly there are companies now that are people are wearing Fitbits and other devices where the company is monitoring is monitoring their bioscience even though it's being used to show maybe tracking them through the building or how long they're sitting at their desk it's still personal health data that the company is accruing and I don't know how clearly these companies have laid out to their employees what data they're collecting how they're going to use it after it's been collected or if they've been given an option to opt out without any sort of punitive without any sort of punitive measures if they do opt out my sometimes pessimistic view of humanity is that people who opt out are then the company is going to say well this is a prerequisite for working here out the door so okay we have a poll question about how fast is the future specifically of competency based hiring how far off is it so we'd love for you all to answer it I think it's going to come up in a minute so we just have up here how fast will adoption happen but specifically of a let's say just to make it a little bit narrower a little maybe closer to the time for maybe one or two sectors major employment sectors for the employees to be using digital badging in their hiring decisions regularly let's see you've got yeah that's about what I would have expected the group to say five to ten years is in the lead and within five years actually that's gaining ground I'm glad to see that people feel closer than thought if someone could just call out what industry do you think is best poised or do you maybe see it happening already just shout out where you see it happening yes interesting very specific he could screen for that any other employment sector that you think is particularly ripe for digital credentialing well I would say I don't know about digital credentialing but talking about how fast some things will go away I know that Anna has talked about truck drivers going away but I think that credentialing and badging and then the adoption of machine learning I think that hiring managers are going to go away I would because the machine learning is going to be able to as we've been talking over the course of the last two days is going to be able to learn who needs to work in this job needs to have and the credentials will indicate that they have those skills the non-credential competencies like your report from your manager she works well with others she's very empathetic all of that stuff goes into the machine learning the machines are going to say the person we need for this is this person and you might not even work at that company and they will send you an email it's a good job here if you're interested because we think that you're perfect for it well that's already happening actually there's a beta project that LinkedIn is doing now where it recommends like I hired LinkedIn for a role that I had to hire for and there's a beta where you they're just showing you people that you didn't that they think are a good fit based on the keyword keyword search in fact one person that showed up was someone who already worked for me which suggested that he had checked the box he was looking for new opportunities this is where it gets really dangerous yeah any other yes Deb we've actually been talking to IBM about that work so they've issued about 10,000 badges but mostly to internal employees they put them up to show people what you need to be able to do on the outside but they haven't figured out how to use it as a recruiting tool yet but they would like to I think IBM and then Microsoft is doing something similar so you can imagine a couple of these folks getting together in fact they've talked about it getting together and saying what does an IT essentials badge look like and if we endorse people who have this we don't care what school they come from if they can do these things so that's kind of exciting in a way as a field leveler to think about yeah I would say IT is definitely where it's happening the minute I got I had been working as a sales force developer for three years and then sat for the exam and then LinkedIn has been non-stop ever since in terms of just recruiting emails every other day so these are the credentials and the badges that already hold so much weight are in these like Python our sales force AWS those ones I think are already almost there I think cyber security is a big one I'm watching a lot of companies hire people sans degree but they have these certificates in cyber security so high demand in the certificate program is well flushed out but again making that a microcredential or a series of microcredentials I'm not quite sure yet yeah I think hospitality also we're doing some work in Washington DC with hotels who are saying they're actually doing like the T profile that we created and saying that we only care about oral communication and empathy that's it everything else we can teach them so we're doing a boot camp with adult charter schools around just those just those skills okay so we have just a few minutes I want to do like a quick round with the panel and then also invite people to join in with this question which is if we were going to do a little design session here and say what needs to be true for this system or the ecosystem to develop for the carpet not to get laid in a way that is you know is unchangeable and maybe our dystopian future what needs to be true what are our design criteria for the ecosystem of the future I think you said one which has to do with you don't want proprietary systems I love proprietary systems but the badges have open technical standards in them they're supposed to be able to push out and a lot of the platforms have not put a lot of emphasis on that so we come from you saying to them it's really important to us that our students can take this wherever they want and export them and that's just a super geeky part of this conversation so portability is that portability and you know I love Don I don't know if Don is still here she was talking earlier about the Missouri Wins project but I love the way it was such an elegant design approach down to the MOUs the data sharing agreements I mean this is all heavy lifting stuff that is so important so if it is going to be it has a it does have perimeter to it if you're going to be working in something that has a perimeter like that like in a system those that's where the unsexy stuff is really that's where all the hard work is and where it actually has interoperability because it's humans recognizing we're going to accept this including if you don't have a badge or if you've earned it in some other way I mean I would hate to think that these platforms come and sweep your data and they're only going to pick you up if you have checked that box or if you have that badge or what not I mean it should be okay that you have these soft skills without a badge that you can convey it in some other way so some of it is I prefer I mean I like that the badges have the open standard so that they can be pushed out and that the platforms they actually do that and that everything is all good technologically but I do really also like these ideas of trust frameworks this is the work that the community success institute where I am now it's really what we're looking at there are no trust frameworks in education that come close to what we have in the finance sector or what we have in the public health public health is still a little bit unstable but I would love for a conference like this to bring in experts from those fields to talk to us about what it's like to actually build something when you think about money you can use apple pay, you can use chips, you can use magnetic strips, you can look at it through Mint, I mean it's all kinds of things you can do with money and I know that credentials are not exactly the same but these trust frameworks are similar and they start with MOUs and data sharing agreements and all that kind of stuff so it's really thinking about we're printing money, printing money is fun and easy and exciting but we have to think about this whole other piece to it as well and approaching it like you're with a designer mindset and what does every stakeholder who's going to hit this credential, how is it going to affect them doing persona work where you look at the persona before and after they have gone through the experience of earning a badge and walking through all that other really, I mean people who do this work have to be very optimistic because it's hard work, but I think Don's example is that you can do stuff like this and stand up and give yourself a backpack because it did seem like that those are some really big barriers to break down. Okay, any other quick, as we wrap up, any other quick design criteria for this new ecosystem? Yeah, mine's not sexy at all but we have to have high quality science education for everyone low income school districts included otherwise this is just not fair it won't be fair and that means right now we live in a country where if you have an attitude for science, you are likely not going to go teach science, there's just too many other options for you that are better jobs higher paying jobs, easier life we have to come up with a way to encourage people to work at Google and also get their teaching credential and do some teaching in science, we have to figure it out. And building on what Anna was saying also I think that at the start of it you need to query your assumptions about who your users are and the type of people who are going to use this system and do not assume that everybody will find their way to it on their own from the same starting point because as Anna was saying there's low income users who probably benefit greatly from these systems but they might not know about it because they're not in a situation where they're going to be exposed to they're going to be exposed to it and know about it from the get go like other students like other workers and learners are so you need to make sure that there's an on ramp for people who do not think would be part of that system but should be part of the system. I'll channel my Uber driver to the reputation point, one of my design criteria that you can repair your reputation he wanted to be a lift driver because he said he got a better deal but he got a couple of bad really bad scores and he said nobody was Bonnie so he had to switch over to a different operator but that seems like how do you ever get over that how do you fix that and so where do I go to get my reputation back there needs to be some design for that I think I think we're getting the high sign are we good thank you very much