those traditional negotiation skills, or the traditional courses we provide in a Business School, it’s about business transformation skills and how we enable the future leaders of our organisations to manage change. So how do we prepare leaders to meet organisations in the midst of all that volatility? It requires organisational change management – transformation skills – and we don’t deliberately build those into our curricula. It’s fascinating that, at least in the US, most Business Schools don’t teach sales or business development. The jobs of the future will always entail some form of sales. How do we remain aligned with the demands of the labour market? I think core to all of this is ensuring that we are infusing curricula with real-world problems and getting people in the mentality of building a mindset of being able to exercise judgement in ambiguous circumstances. In the book, you call for a different type of learning ecosystem. What does this look like to you? To build a better future, instead of thinking about multiple systems running in parallel, we need to think about taking an ecosystem approach. This came out of the qualitative research we did with people who were part of that US population of 41 million people not thriving in the labour market. We were trying to understand the barriers they faced that prevented mobility, movement, and advancement. We kept hearing the same issues emerge around the inability to access
the right career navigation or support services, or to find the right educational pathways that were not a two or four-year degree, or a one-year certificate. Five principles emerged: the new kind of learning system must be more navigable, supportive, targeted, integrated, and transparent. We can all think of different sorts of solution, or interesting innovators and organisations that work on career navigation or target more precise opportunities, such as boot camps. The idea is that it’s not just about one solution, but instead about bringing together lots of different organisations and resources – existing and new solutions – to make this centre around the job seeker, so that they know exactly where to turn and how to navigate their next job change. Whose role is it to ensure the workforce is equipped with skills for the future? It’s on all of us, and that’s the driving motivation behind this ecosystem-based approach. In many cases, there’s a blame game going on where employers criticise higher education for not producing the candidates they need, and higher education blames employers for disinvesting in the education of new workers. Individuals often bear the brunt of this, having to navigate it on their own, especially as they mature in their working lives. It is not sufficient for us to continue in this manner, where the bulk of reskilling and upskilling is pushed onto us, as
individuals. We need to figure out the skills gaps that we have and where to turn to get the precise education that fills those gaps. We’re just kind of praying and hoping that a future employer will know how to make sense of this new learning. Our learners need to understand better who they can trust and ways of sorting through the different options – and that’s where venture capital innovators and social entrepreneurs have a role to play in helping all of us to make sense of this burgeoning ecosystem. It’s not one or the other; it’s not about blowing up something that exists today, it’s about really shifting the orientation around all of us as people and job seekers, because as we think about a longer work life (and the 20 or 30 job changes that we might have to anticipate for the future) we are all going to bump into the same challenges that those who are struggling today are already bumping into. It’s this idea of all being stuck in a web of mutuality – which is a term Dr Martin Luther King Jr came up with. If we cut into the curb for the people who are struggling the most, we open opportunities for everyone. It’s this concept of the curb-cut effects – when you focus on the people who really have the most constraints today, that means that all of us are going to be able to take advantage of the new ecosystem we are building. So, my answer is that it’s the role of each and every one of us to ensure that the workforce is equipped with the right skills for the future.
Dr Michelle R Weise is the author of Long-Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet (Wiley, 2021). Thinkers50 named her one of 30 management and leadership thinkers in the world to watch in 2021. She is the Vice Chancellor of Strategy and Innovation at National University System. She has also served on Harvard University’s Task Force on Skills and Employability, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education. Weise is a former Fulbright Scholar and graduate of Harvard and Stanford.
| 45
Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online