This is Part III of a series of posts related to how technology is enabling a re-imagination of the education to employment pathway. Part II highlighted a few companies redefining to how skills and competencies are developed by both educational institutions and employers and discussed new delivery models for that content. This final part of the series will touch upon how employers can create feedback loops to the educational system and how to create a more efficient process for matching an individual’s skills and competencies with job requirements that move beyond previous experience and a college degree.
Employers are increasingly partnering with educational institutions to leverage their content expertise to build more effective professional development programs. One of our companies, ExecOnline, partners with executive education programs at top business schools like Columbia, Berkeley, and MIT to build online programs in strategy, innovation, operations, and leadership based in part on employer input that include a capstone project oriented around delivering real business impact. ExecOnline then sells those programs to corporations, targeting the “missing middle” of managers and VPs that are too senior for programs from Skillsoft or Pluralsight, but also too large of a population to receive the expensive development initiatives targeted at senior management. Starbucks made headlines a few years ago by announcing a partnership with Arizona State University through which all Starbucks’ employees would receive full tuition toward a full year online degree, committing to more than 25,000 graduates by 2025. Guild Education is a startup that has partnered with employers to offer “education as a benefit” to employees, working with companies like Chipotle to offer employees guidance on how to best leverage the educational system to advance their careers, and WorkAmerica seeks to establish itself as a bridge between employers and community colleges so that graduates are prepared to enter the workforce after graduating with an associate’s degree.
To help inform the design of such programs, employers are increasingly applying technology to analyze both the current skills of their employee base and the competencies required for success in certain jobs and the combination of experiences and training to design career paths that will set up the individual and organization for the future. Comprehensive talent management platforms such as Workday and Taleo have become standard practice for large corporations, while a multitude of startups have developed solutions to track and manage training and career paths such as Axonify, PerformYard and a small investment Osage made last year into a company called BetterSkills.
As the value of the primary tools for connecting education and jobs, namely a bachelor’s degree and job posting, evolve to incorporate competency based approaches, new technologies will be required to more efficiently match individuals’ skills with the jobs of the future. Startups such as Credly and Degreed, together with the MOOCs, have begun to design credentials and micro-degrees that are meaningful to employers, while Portfolium provides students with the opportunity to create competency profiles by uploading papers, problem sets, and presentations that can demonstrate specific skills. These companies aim to establish themselves as a trusted authority that can validate the quality of a competency based program or course or verify an individual’s competencies, a growing market need given the potential abuse of the system that can arise from this proliferation of credentials, something we at Osage have experienced first had as we have found several entrepreneurs or job seekers highlighting their Harvard “degree” that the small print reveals was a week-long online course.
LinkedIn is perhaps the best positioned company to take advantage of this evolution of the education to employment pathway. With data on the skills and experiences of millions of individuals, a deep understanding of what employers are looking for through its recruiting solutions, and now, with its acquisition of Lynda for $1.5B in 2015, a platform to deliver compelling training content, LinkedIn is uniquely able to make potentially lucrative recommendations to both learners and employers on how to match the right people with the right jobs.
As we at Osage look to the future, we see numerous investing opportunities along this education to employment pathway, from continued innovation in how content is designed and delivered to a rethinking of the hiring process to better identify the required competencies and screen applicants for them. We are therefore encouraged by the possibilities of automation to free human capital from rote and manual work to become more creative and enlightened and deliver the next wave of innovation, enabled by systems that promote lifelong learning. There is data to support this optimism. As the McKinsey study noted, previous technology shifts have resulted in massive transitions of the labor force; in 1900, agriculture represented 40% of US jobs, which has fallen to 2% today, while manufacturing represented 25% of US jobs in 1950 and fell below 10% in 2010. The Economist noted that barcode scanners increased the number of cashiers and the number of bank tellers has grown since the introduction of ATMs, while McKinsey also cited a study in France in 2011 that suggested that for every job that had been lost in France as the result of the advent of the internet in the previous 15 years, 2.4 new jobs had been created. To realize its full potential and minimize the possible downsides, the age of automation must be partnered with a similarly transformative rethinking of how to develop human capital, and technology will undoubtedly be at the center of that transformation. At the same time, a number of questions emerge as both a citizen of this new world and as an investor hoping to identify the next wave of innovation. Who ultimately bears responsibility for retraining the workforce – Individuals? Companies? Society? (Singapore, for one, has identified a societal need and begun to provide a universal stipend for all of it citizens to access lifelong learning courses). Where will the value accrue to address this massive need, to the developers of the educational content or the platform for distribution? Regardless of the answers, there will undoubtedly be a wave of innovation, with technology at the core, all along the education to employment pathway, and we hope to capitalize on this massive market disruption, and at the very least, make investments that will help retrain us when algorithms eventually take our venture capital jobs.