Lifetime employability not lifetime employment

Posted by mattpoy on September 18, 2017September 18, 2017 Posted in Big Data, Education, Future of Technology, Future of Work, Learning, Next Gen, Skills Tagged Education, Engagement, Future of work, Future Technology, Robots, Skills

I am currently preparing for a presentation that will look at how the acceleration of today’s market trends, coupled with cross-sector technology innovations, might affect the future of education and assessment. I enjoyed Richard and Daniel Susskind’s book The Future of the Professions and will be referencing some of their thoughts – I recommend it as a very good read.

The changes this is bringing the professional world is a far cry from a time when McKinsey consultants had to wear a bowler hat as part of their uniform as evidence of their professionalism. Today, with fewer jobs for life, much less security and very little predictability, we will see both disintermediation and decomposition of roles within the professions and a new emphasis on the ability to learn and adapt as roles change – in smaller, bite-sized pieces, learning and quite possibly assessing on the go.

Knowledge and information have taken on a greater importance compared to traditional assets such as physical capital and natural resources – an educated and highly skilled workforce is among the most valuable assets an organisation has today. But because of the pace of change and progression, the workforce must continually retool its skills.

The knowledge economy is also borderless and knowledge workers are not a homogenous group; they have specialised skills and perform specialised roles, and knowledge workers do not spend their careers with one company; they change jobs frequently and with future generations the likelihood is this will increase.

Therefore, lifetime employability instead of lifetime employment is the goal of knowledge workers. Yet more and more tasks that once required human beings are being performed more productively and cheaply by machines and new capabilities are emerging on an almost daily basis. Machines can look back into data, discern patterns and make predictions (Big Data). Systems such as IBM Watson, with whom we have partnered here at Pearson, can perform tasks that we normally think requires human intelligence. Machines can interact with manual skill and dexterity via robotics and systems are getting smarter at detecting and expressing emotions.

We used to believe these tasks were the sole purview of human beings – are we just training machines to make us redundant? How do we stay in the game, differentiate and compete?

A 60-year career

Posted by mattpoy on August 16, 2016August 16, 2016 Posted in Future of Work, Learning, Skills Tagged Education, Future of work, Learning, Skills

Gladys Hooper, the oldest person in the UK, recently died at the age of 113. This raised further interest in the population living and working for longer and it seems we have the potential to live much longer than generations before us and way beyond 100 years old.

If that becomes the case and we do live to that ripe old age, then we will need work careers of 60 or so years just to be able to support ourselves. Furthermore, if technology continues to develop at the current pace, and the likelihood is it will as there are no signs of a slow down, then we will experience several cycles of work and will have to re-skill in order to keep ourselves relevant.

Throw in to the mix that by 2030 as many as one-third of jobs in the UK could be at risk of being automated, according to research by the University of Oxford, where do we turn? Our learning will be down to us as individuals to own, to continue to update our portfolio of skills, plus as companies contract at the core, people telecommute and we move from project to project and job to job, we will have to learn on an almost constant basis – for new tasks, new models and new work environments.

I quite like this idea – it sounds more interesting than Nintendo brain challenges that the doctor recommends.

Live Differently

Posted by mattpoy on January 9, 2016January 9, 2016 Posted in Education, Future of Work, Learning, People, Skills Tagged Education, Future of work, Learning, People, Skills

I was reading with interest a claim that the first humans to live way into their hundreds are alive today, and remembered this great picture of Ignacio Cubilla Banos, around whom there was a story as he celebrated his 111^th birthday at his home in Havana surrounded by his family a few years back. It made me think.

If the next generations are going to live way beyond a hundred, how many cycles of learning will they require just to stay up to date with change? Surely they will need a 50 to 60 year career, so learning will need to evolve in parallel.

What we learn today doesn’t carry for very long – we have to refresh what we know almost constantly (think of the story of the university degree, and what a student learns in year 1 is out of date by the time they graduate). As our knowledge and skills become redundant we will have to stay on the cycle of learn-and-apply just to allow us to keep up.

I have variations of this quoted on Twitter and other platforms:

My father had 1 job in his entire lifetime.

My job at Pearson is my 5^th in 30 years.

My kids will quite possibly have 5 jobs at any one time.

This is the future.

Everyone is worried about skills

Posted by mattpoy on March 20, 2015 Posted in Learning, Next Gen, People, People Skills Talent, Skills, Talent, Technology Tagged Education, Investment in people, Learning, People, Skills

I have traversed three continents these last few weeks, from Europe to the west coast of America, then back and across to the Middle East.

The trips all centred around assessment and skills events – culminating in apprentices week in the UK. “Everyone is worried about skills” said the BBC’s Steph McGovern at the CITB Building Futures conference. The challenges are different but the concerns are the same – whether you sit in the US or UK with their growing economies or the Middle East with their large numbers of young people, a shortage of the right skills to meet the needs of employers and their evolving industries will impact progress.

I believe technology doesn’t always help – young people make choices based on cultural changes and technological influences, and yet industries, jobs and the needs of employers are not the same. They must be aligned.

We do have a solution – young people learn from other young people, so let’s showcase our stars and use technology to promote them as case studies of success. In other words, a career in IT can mean working at Sky TV or motor racing, a career in construction might give somebody the opportunity to be in the team that builds the next Shard or Premier League football stadium. Let’s create success stories of young people who love their work and promote them as role models – then use technology to spread the word.

I close with real hope – I was very impressed by the enthusiasm and desire to succeed shown by the apprentices at the JustIT learner awards night where I shared my thoughts on the fusion of technology and education – I will continue to shout from the rooftops, that if you wake up with the attitude, desire and motivation to do a great job, invariably you will do well.

Minds Wide Open

Posted by mattpoy on July 8, 2014 Posted in Learning, MOOC Tagged Learning, MOOC, People

I am just back from a whirlwind trip to Barcelona for EduLearn 2014. Good conference and very engaged audience. It was too short, as always, but I picked up some great new contacts and nuggets of learning.

My topic was “Making MOOCs (In)Credible,” using examples from Harvard and others on how to give customers your ear and anticipate tomorrow’s needs. I think MOOCs will transform education in time and everybody will be learning in smaller bite-sized chunks from handheld devices, on the go and anytime – and the MOOCs fit that need.

With technology impacting learning so much I feel we have a duty to keep our institutions ahead of the curve and explore new ideas. We know how important it is to give customers our ear. We recognise that social is the new marketing and yet I sense not everyone is listening. 93% of small and medium sized-businesses are still not mobile compatible.

My biggest takeaway these past 2 days actually relates back to a poster I saw in one of our Pearson offices – “Minds Wide Open”. Embrace the opportunity new technology can bring and don’t be afraid to try things – you can easily change course along the way.

These kids operate differently! How many times have we heard that?

Posted by mattpoy on June 24, 2014 Posted in Learning, Marketing, Next Gen Tagged digital content, Education, Engagement, Learning, Marketing

We know that mobiles and smart devices are transforming how we shop and communicate today, and how we will learn in the future. Generation Y has mastered the art of mobility and will not want to be tied to one office, nor one company, as they seek varied and interesting employment in future.

What remains is that our role as educators is to transform these learners to earners – to give them the skills to embark on career pathways to suit their needs, to give them a platform to upskill or change direction as they see fit – but importantly to furnish them with the skills for the world of work.

It is important we understand how they operate, for they are both our workforce and our customer of tomorrow. How do we offer this to them? How do we engage them to shape how learning meets their needs in future? With things evolving faster than ever before, how can we stop for long enough to make impact?

Workplace in the classroom

Posted by mattpoy on March 15, 2014 Posted in Education, Future of Technology, Learning, Next Gen Tagged Education, Future Technology, Investment in people, Learning

I was delighted to be asked to present at the 2014 National Apprenticeships conference at the Film Museum last week. I talked about technology and education coming together and the inextricable link between learning and working.

I shared a story from 100+ years ago and the World Fair in St Louis. The man that was selling ice cream ran out of paper cups, and the exhibitor next to him who was selling waffles decided to roll them flat and curl them into the shape of a handheld cone. Thus the ice cream cone was born. Two distinct ‘ingredients’, no connection between the two, coming together to create something completely new.

Now I applied that connection to work and education (thanks Noel Tagoe, Executive Director at CIMA, for the inspiration). Companies have to be part of the education process and give young people a chance to get a taste of what the world of work is all about. We should all be giving apprenticeships an opportunity to sample the workplace and make working a part of the overall learning experience. Similarly, employers have to be involved in influencing education, so that what is taught in the classroom has relevance in the workplace. Then, when students start on their career path, they can make a contribution from day one. Let’s stop teaching irrelevancies, no wonder kids switch off and turn to their phones every 6 minutes.

Classroom in the workplace, workplace in the classroom – that is the future.

Everyone is a media company

Posted by mattpoy on June 13, 2013 Posted in Learning, Marketing Tagged Engagement, Learning

I talk a lot about technology facilitating change in life and business. I found this picture in an airline magazine recently, of something called a ‘skycot.’ Can you imagine being allowed to suspend a baby from the overhead luggage compartment in a cot today?

I was in discussion with the director of a leading learning organisation this week and we discussed how embracing the new way of marketing, riding on the coat-tails of technology, is now a given. The brilliant Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, which through its digital vision is leading the way in innovative uses of technology, said recently, “Everyone is a media company.” If social networks and are where the next generation of learners, workers and shoppers choose learn about our products and services, that is where we have to be present to engage them.

There is one caveat to this that I experienced – yet again – recently. This doesn’t change for me. While I recognise that certain roles require very specific skills, as a generalisation I will continue to hire on ATTITUDE. In today’s world we have to keep learning and evolving just to stay in touch, so I will focus first on people with great attitude, because I can teach them everything they need to know about the company and its services

The Evidence

Posted by mattpoy on March 25, 2013 Posted in Learning, Marketing, Technology Tagged Future Technology, Learning, Marketing

At a recent event we talked about getting out of our comfort zone in order to be remarkable. If we stay doing the same things in the same way, why do we expect results that are any different?

We must break from the past and need look no further than a company I grew up with, Kodak, if we are to see how destructive this technology movement can be if we stand still and don’t embrace change. Regardless of the sector our business is in, we are being impacted – a new way of listening and engaging, a new way of reaching our customers and in many cases entirely new ways of transacting.

Kodak invented film, but they also created digital photography. What the company didn’t do was embrace a new way of working and let go of the past (I have talked about ‘Learnability’ in this column before). Often it takes bravery and imagination to leave behind a legacy, especially when the legacy has held the company in good stead for decades, but for Kodak it was catastrophic.

The digital age has changed more, faster, than anything that preceded it. The number and speed of smartphones sold compared to desktop and laptop computers is evidence of that. We need to remember the past and learn from it, but we must also leave it behind. Every company has to find where the magic happens, because that place is somewhere different.

The MOOC thing

Posted by mattpoy on January 10, 2013 Posted in Education, Future of Technology, Learning, Skills Tagged Education, Future Technology, Learning, Skills

Technology continues to disrupt and next in line is education. There has been a lot written about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and many renowned institutions are involved – Harvard, MIT, Stanford and more recently the Open University here in the UK with their FutureLearn model. The Khan Academy, launched by Salman Khan, delivers 200m classes via YouTube, with zero hosting costs, now that is clever.

MOOCs are still trying to establish their model and this may take some time, but what is really important is that traditional learning institutions cannot just sit back and disregard this wave of change. I accept that tier-one universities such as Harvard or Cambridge will always have demand for places due to the prestige associated with studying there. But a student in Europe or Asia will refuse to pay large sums of money to sit in a mediocre lecture in their own country when they can learn online from world class tutors and be associated with a leading university.

Currently the MOOC interest is more about bridging the gap between current knowledge and acquiring new skills in order to do a better job, or find a new one. These modular, bite-sized chunks of learning are possibly the icing on the cake. If 5 candidates interview for one role and have a similar degree and one has an additional 20 certificates of mastery in a specific area of study, it is likely that their CV will stand out. In today’s world, it is all about differentiation. The modules offered by MOOCs not only allow an individual to keep up with changes in the business world but possibly in future even anticipate how market sectors will evolve.

This is just one example. Technology is breaking up the majority, the mainstream and the mundane. Which sector is next?