Work ... but no force ....
Doesn't have to be 'chompGPT' for traditional higher ed institutions ...
I recently participated in two excellent Colorado sessions where industry led the conversation about tomorrow’s workforce.
The state has a 10+ year tradition of innovating around workforce — Rework America, Careerwise, AdvanceEDU, ActivateWork, and GuildEducation all started in Colorado. The state’s new, permanently funded Office of the Future of Work now has 21 full time employees.
Colorado has almost three job openings for every unemployed person, yet less than 50% of Coloradans go on to post-secondary education. The state’s historic ability to fill the gap with imported talent is at risk as Denver struggles to respond to the new world of work, and plan for a more residential, family-friendly future. Housing and child care costs have soared, and remain among the highest in the country.
With the state’s ‘business rankings dropping’, Colorado Succeeds and the Colorado Business Roundtable co-sponsored a ‘future of work’ event with a couple of hundred industry attendees. Employers, who want clear single-source information about workforce efforts, instead saw slides depicting spaghetti plates of Federal and State workforce efforts. Over-credentializing jobs and college recruiting status-quo are understandable when the alternative looks impenetrable. Employers appreciate Dem-led Michigan’s and GOP-led Virginia’s recent moves to consolidate workforce efforts in streamlined departments or agencies.
Colorado’s Office of Economic Development, facilitated by Common Group, followed this with an inaugural Industry and Workforce Innovation Summit , which launched the next, $50 million round of OpportunityNow! grant funding. Like Commerce’ TechHubs program, the state wants proposals to be industry-led.
Highlights included Governors Polis (D-CO), Cox (GOP-Utah) and Hobbs (D-Arizona) agreeing vehemently that innovative pathways to prosperity are not partisan.
Keynote speaker Martin Ritter, CEO of Stadler USA, the American branch of the world-renowned Swiss railcar manufacturer, eloquently expressed how Stadler set up a Swiss-style apprenticeship system for their American subsidiary. This fully-paid program takes rising high school seniors and over three years prepares them both to be highly qualified specialists in electrical and mechanical system assembly and process and gives them a debt-free associates degree. The first, diverse graduating cohort will earn at the top 20% of pay of all Stadler employees — as 21 year-olds.
Exciting times — and change is still slow, and subscale, and hard.
A recent survey from Multiverse finds that about half of employers believe that two years of work experience prepares workers as well as a four-year degree. Yet apprenticeships, which connect on-the-job learning and classroom instruction, … make up less than 1% of the U.S. labor market
Traditional higher ed isn’t responding quickly enough. Only 36% of Americans have a ‘great deal’, or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in college — down by 20 percentage POINTS in 8 years. Consolidations and closures are accelerating.
Yet demand exists — and it’s surprisingly bi-partisan;
Nearly 4 in 5 Americans (78%) say completing additional education after high school helps a person's well-being, including 78% of Republicans and 82% of Democrats. Two-thirds say education beyond high school is needed to have a good life, and 75% of Americans hope their child or loved one will go further than a high school diploma.
But it’s not simply demand for more degrees, and full-time, in-person 18 - 25 year-old post-secondary experiences. America needs to move fast to fill the skilled worker gap to implement our new industrial strategy and stay competitive . The new White House cybersecurity strategy calls for filling the 400,000 cybersecurity job openings with a
focus on hiring on skills “rather than merely credentials”
Clearly, traditional go-to-college-then-get-a-job is past is sell-by date. The average longevity of any workplace skill is now 2.5 years and declining quickly as AI proliferates across jobs;
By 2030, activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI.
It doesn’t have to be ‘chomp-GPT’ for higher ed, and America’s public post-secondary institutions don’t have to be dinosaurs (oof …apologies for the bad #dadjoke). They can — and should — lead the change in supply. These institutions have important, expensive scale advantages, particularly in their ability to attract and teach learners along trusted, certified and accredited pathways, and in distributed physical facilities.
A few are trying, driven both by government and industry;
As part of the UT System’s Texas Credentials for the Future initiative, over 240,000 learners across nine UT campuses now have access to the Career Academy on Coursera, which includes more than 35 entry-level Professional Certificates from leading companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce. The expanded partnership represents the most extensive industry-recognized microcredential program from a U.S. university system.
Meanwhile, employers are wandering through a duststorm of programs, certifications, stackability, innovations, intermediaries, linkedin and un-linked ‘credentials’ . The fastest-growing potential employee segment is a part-time, #WFH, gig workforce looking to constantly re- and upskill. Some, mostly tech firms are large enough to take advantage of these shifts, but most don’t have the staff to wade through the sirocco of new stuff and grapple with which one works, will be around, and is worth their time.
Both sides of this creaking marketplace need much more innovative leadership. As Coursera is demonstrating, the ROI to post-secondary institutions that become platforms for employer-connected, skills-based, lifelong learning is extraordinary (I’m still waiting for the first ‘university-as-a-service lifetime subscription model!). As Stadler’s Ritter expressed, the ROI in retention and recruiting benefits to employers who re-credentialize requirements and provide lifelong skills-based training to their people .. is immediate and significant.
More can be done at the Federal level;
just $4 billion in funding at the federal level could put one million more apprentices on a path to economic opportunity.
Or go big, as Scott Galloway proposes;
The federal government should offer the largest 500 public universities (approximately the top third) an average of $1 billion per school (adjusted by size), in exchange for the following commitments. Over the next 10 years:
Reduce tuition by 2% a year;
Expand enrollments 6% a year via investments in technology and infrastructure; and
Increase vocational/certificate programs to 20% of students.
The net result, in 10 years, would be double the freshman seats at half the cost (accounting for inflation) and a step-change in opportunity for kids who do not have the money, skills, or desire to pursue a traditional four-year degree. Nearly 50% of Germans have some sort of vocational certification; in the U.S. it’s 5%. Pro tip: Neither you nor your kid have failed if they don’t get a four-year liberal arts degree.
And state-based programs like Colorado’s OpportunityNow! can drive both sides of the market together, to change faster.
What if significant grant dollars were available to traditional public post-secondary institutions if they open up their facilities — and lean in to support —large-volume, employer-defined (and funded!), lifelong skills-based training? America’s manufacturing and green energy renaissance requires Swiss-quality, cross-industry facilities for practical training all across the country. Grant recipients would need to engage actively; employers need not just places but also a trusted platform partner to recruit, teach, and maintain credible credential records for their learners. In Colorado, CSU, CU Denver, and the University of Denver all need funding to complete innovative STEM facilities. Downtowns, which often are home to significant higher ed facilities, need new life.
Place-based grant programs can also fund intermediate entities to provide the long-term ‘table’ for employers and educators to collectively share best practices, compare outcomes, and develop and update curricula where needed for these new pathways.
These ‘tables’ should be organized by industry sector. Places can leverage work already underway to organize ‘tech hubs’ for key technology focus areas in Federal programs like Build Back Better, NSF Engines, and Regional Innovation Hubs. But segmentation shouldn’t be too tight; advanced manufacturing curricula across industries is more similar than unique, as railcar manufacturer Stadler explained to Boeing. Digital tech skills for cybersecurity , data science, and AI are more similar than dissimilar across industries, too.
I’ve seen efforts like this have some success — but most haven’t had scale, or endured. In many places, too many business groups feel they ‘own’ the workforce topic , don’t collaborate enough, and shield their employers from directly engaging in the work.
State programs work, and can be
a promising antidote to market failures in skill upgrading… (with) a large and positive impact on company sales and employment, both overall and for some subgroups. Employers experience the program as a valuable tool for building internal learning infrastructures, retaining employees, and boosting morale.
Change takes forever, then comes all at once. We (should be) on the verge of moving from a one-size-fits-all post-secondary world to our wonderful educational institutions becoming platforms for lifelong, skills-based, employer-connected (and largely funded) learning.
This isn’t just an ROI argument — it’s an opportunity for a return of reputation and relevance for higher ed as well.
America should do what it does best — innovate at the system level by leveraging its great existing assets to accelerate prosperity for each individual, whose relationship to work and learning has changed for good.