The Performance Improvement Blog

The Future of Work and Learning

I have been asked to speak to a group of 14 to 16 year olds about the importance of finishing high school and attending college. It’s one of my favorite topics. But as I thought about the talk I realized that I better say something about the future of work and why college has become more important than ever.  It’s fun but risky to speculate about the future of work and learning. The world is changing so fast. It’s hard to know what will happen next week, let alone 10 years from now.

As leaders, we should be thinking about the future, including whom we will be leading and what they will be doing in our organizations. We need to be prepared and we need to make sure our employees are prepared.  

A good place to start is with the tech industry because that industry will affect the nature of everyone’s work in the future. Chris Jablonski, in a ZDNet post titled, 5 trends driving the future of work, describes five major ways in which work is changing:

1. More independent workers (one estimate is 20 million by 2013) – These are the independent consultants, contract workers, free lancers, free agents, and temps who cycle in and out of organizations in a constant flow. More people want to work with more flexibility and choice in what they do and more companies want to have more flexibility and choice in who they hire.  I think we will see the rise of a permanent-temp labor force.
2. Working online – Workers will find jobs and do their work via email and Web sites and apps, possibly without ever setting foot inside their employers’ organizations. It’s outsourcing and it’s telecommuting and it’s working remotely; not as an exception, but rather as the principal mode of work.
3. Co-working – For cost reasons or social reasons or convenience, workers are choosing to share work space with people from other occupations and organizations. Sometimes they start out in business incubators and then grow into a more cooperative arrangement. Co-working is more about community than entrepreneurism, although it is some of both.
4. Lifelong learning – Workers need to be learning continually because of a world that is constantly changing.  Jobs are evolving and new jobs are being created in much shorter time frames than ever before. Whether one stays in the same job or moves to a new job, there will always be more to learn just to stay current. People will be working longer, much past the traditional retirement age, and doing that in new careers that require new knowledge and new skills.
5. Businesses that solve new problems – For example (from a list prepared by the World Future Society), we might need chef-farmers who can bridge the gap between farm and restaurant, or clone ranchers who can raise cloned animals, or drone dispatchers who can manage remote-controlled vehicles, or space junk haulers who can clear the skies of unwanted debris. It's fascinating to think about the possibilities.

To Jablonski’s list, I would add five more trends:

1. More small, entrepreneurial businesses – A desire for autonomy, control, and meaning, will drive many new workers (as well as baby-boomers) towards starting and growing their own businesses. New technologies and new consumer attitudes make these kinds of endeavors possible. However, there is a limit to this growth; not everyone is psychologically and financially equipped to take the risks associated with starting and managing a new business.
2. Knowledge workers needed for nearly every job – From assembly line workers to auto mechanics to farmers to truck drivers, jobs will require increasing sophistication in the management of information. Because they have the tools, workers today, especially in developed nations, are retrieving, storing, sorting, and making sense of vast amounts of information as a normal part of their jobs.
3. Changing jobs and careers frequently – Workers will no longer seek stability in their careers. It will become normal to move from job to job, “stop out” of the workforce from time to time, move in new directions and with different organizations, and form different kinds of work relationships with their primary employers. Change, not stability, will be the order of the day.
4. Just-in-time learning – New technology is connecting more people globally and bringing more information to our fingertips (literally) whenever and wherever we need to know something. Workers will become mobile learners and learning will be on-demand rather than learning according to HR’s schedule.
5. Solving complex and difficult global problems – Workers will be called on to solve, not just observe, the most intractable problems of our era: poverty; hunger; disease; global warming; energy conservation; violence; war and peace; and economic equality. We believe that we should be able to solve these problems and many young people are choosing to dedicate their careers to these issues.

Each of these 10 trends suggests that we need a workforce that is more informed, more able to integrate information from multiple disciplines, more able to interact effectively with diverse co-workers and business associates, and more skilled and knowledgeable about technology of all kinds. This is why I think a college education (two- or four-year degree) will be the “cost of admission” in the future, if it hasn’t become this already. To work for someone else or to work for yourself will require the breadth of knowledge, skills, and emotional intelligence that is developed in college.

What workforce trends do you see and how do you think a college education plays a role in the development of workers that will be needed in the future?

 

What's Better: eLearning or Classroom?

We need to examine the proliferation of Web-based education before it gets out of hand (It may be
too late.). Online college courses are being promoted as the panacea for producing more college graduates and strengthening the workforce. The Obama administration has been touting the educational value of online courses since coming into office over three years ago, and many colleges, especially community colleges, have adopted that mantra.

Many companies are also convinced that “elearning” is the answer to their employee training and development needs. They are told elearning will be cheaper, faster, more convenient, and more effective than traditional, classroom training. Also, using elearning programs makes managers feel like they are staying on the cutting edge of technology. Nobody wants to be left behind.

Feeding this appetite for online programs is research that seems to support the notion that online is better than face-to-face, classroom instruction. A study by the U.S. Department of Education found a small advantage for online (blended) programs. However, they qualify that finding by writing:

Despite what appears to be strong support for blended learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium. In many of the studies showing an advantage for blended learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages.

The problem is that whether online programs are better than face-to-face depends on the purpose of the course, learning goals of the program, skills of the instructor, and expectations of learners, among other things. I published an article about this nearly 10 years ago in Educational Technology. At that time, I wrote (in ilalics):

1. E-learning will not revolutionize training; it is only one instructional method among many, each better at achieving some instructional objectives than others. (I was wrong; e-learning is revolutionizing training. However, the change has been in the accessibility of information, not in the impact of instruction.)
2. Putting a course on the Web or on a CD-ROM does not ensure performance improvement.(Learning and change depend more on expectations of learners and organizational culture than on the mode of delivery.)
3. Employees learn in many different ways. (For some, online instruction fits their style of learning, but for others it is not always the best mode.)
4. E-learning is not a low cost alternative, especially if it is not aligned with the organization's strategic goals. (If the content is not aligned, it will be a waste of time and energy. No matter how cheap it is per learner, it will be too expensive.)
5. Having a vast selection of courses is meaningless. (It’s wonderful, for personal edification, to have access to thousands of courses from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other prestigious colleges. But if these courses aren’t related to what learners need to know on the job and can’t be applied immediately, then more is not better.)
6. Work and learning are the same. (The tendency of managers is to think that by having instruction online, employees can use non-work time for learning. But this separation between work and learning is a false dichotomy. Especially in this day and age, employees have to be continually learning; it must be part of their job.)

In the past 10 years, the technology of online instruction has evolved considerably. Interactivity has advanced. Audio and video have continued to improve. Practical mobile tools for just-in-time applications of elearning are now available (e.g., smart phones and tablets). However, the danger is that organizational leaders and technologists will assume that any learning that is computer enabled is better than direct human contact. For some learning, this could be true. For other learning, it is not. We need to align method of content delivery with intended learning outcomes.

photo credit: Mr_Stein via photopin cc

Complete to Compete: Community College Student Success (Part Two)

This post continues my comments and observations from attending the 2011 Annual Convention of the American Association of Community Colleges.

Critics of Student Success Agenda

The completion agenda is not without its critics. Several college presidents reminded me that the stigma of community college as being grades 13 and 14 still exists in some quarters. Also, some transfer students who are focused on community college being a vehicle to a Bachelor’s Degree, don’t see the value of earning an Associate’s Degree before transferring. And many employers don’t recognize the value of certain community college certificates. All of these factors are barriers to motivating students to do what is necessary to receive a credential of completion.

One presenter asked, “Why isn’t jobbing-out an acceptable outcome?” Another presenter made us aware that although average completion data might be improving across the country, segments of the population, such as low-income minorities, are completing at a much lower rate. For example, Pima College (Arizona) spends $22 million each year providing developmental courses and has only a 4% success rate.

Other observations from presentors:

• Faculty (full-time and part-time)are at the “fulcrum” for change. They must be part of the solution.
• The message we are sending to High School students is that they don’t have to do anything and they will still be able to go to college. Is this the message we want to be sending?
• We are also sending the message that community colleges are the economic engines of the community and that we will train everyone at very low cost. Can we continue to keep doing this?
• Pell grants are not performance based. In effect, Pell is a reward for not graduating.

Job Supply Side of Success

Several presenters encouraged us to think about community college education from the job supply side of the equation. Roberts T. Jones had this to say about the job market:

• Percent of workforce eligible people is declining
• Today’s jobs require more skill and more knowledge
• 85% of new jobs require a post-secondary education
• One third of the workforce doesn’t have a post-secondary education
• Jobs for many of the unemployed are gone forever
• Employees need the ability to learn new jobs quickly
• People in the current workforce are not prepared for new jobs
• Need to align workforce training with college credit and workplace demands
• Need a performance-based and performance-driven system

Folks from ACT are promoting a national system of assessing (of course) and credentialing workers, especially mid-level employees. In Breaking New Ground: Building a National Credentialing System, they argue for identifying a core set of skills and then measuring where all workers are on each of those skills. I have my doubts about the value of such a system, although I can see why ACT would want it.

Peggy Taylor, VP of Global Talent Acquisition, Hilton Worldwide, made an important observation about community colleges partnering with companies. She gave the example of Hilton needing to hire 50 accountants in the next 30 days. She wants to go to community colleges for help but they need to recognize that she, too, is trying to do more with less; they shouldn’t expect her to spend a lot in this collaboration.

Solutions

Community College League of California has done a lot of work on issues of access and success. They published 2020 Vision, which has many suggestions on how to improve access and success in community colleges. The contributors to this report encourage inviting legislators to meetings to discuss how to increase student success in the face of budget cuts. They also talk about “stackable certificates” that mark progress and accumulate to a degree. And they talk about requiring students to take courses that are essential to progress and completion. One person said, “Students don’t do optional.”

One of the treats of the conference was hearing from Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone. He said that when he tells people that he spends $5,000 per child in addition to school aid money, they say, “But Geoffrey, you can’t bring that to scale,” and then he says in response, “We brought $37,500 per prisoner to scale; why can’t we spend $5,000 now to prevent spending $37,500 later?” For many students, college success depends on investing more in them before they get to college.

 

Complete to Compete: Community College Student Success (Part One)

I’ve written previously about reasons why organization leaders, whether business, nonprofit, or
government, should be concerned about college completion. The talent that these 21rst century organizations need in order to thrive and succeed will come from college graduates who earn a certificate, license, or degree that signifies their readiness to work in a profession.

Full disclosure: I have a special interest in community college completion because I am on the Board of Trustees of Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan and that institution, like all other colleges, is coming under scrutiny regarding the retention and graduation of their students. To learn more about these issues, I recently attended the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges where concern for increasing student completion rates dominated conference sessions and the exhibit hall.  

I hope the following comments and observations from the conference will stimulate discussion among college trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, and students.

Student Success Surveys

The opening session honored Byron and Kay McClenney for their work in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas. Kay McClenney directs the Center for Community College Student Engagement which does an annual Survey of Entering Student Engagement. This survey is interesting to me not so much because of the data but rather because of the survey items and what they say about a definition of student engagement.

In a session on The College Completion Agenda, presenters offered these key points:

• Access doesn’t necessarily mean success; many other factors determine success.
• We have to re-imagine what it means to be an educated person today and what should be the new “architecture” of education.
• Community colleges have to partner with high schools if they want to make sure that students come to them ready to do college-level learning.
• Parents need to be involved in achieving success; this is especially true in Hispanic families.
• A big challenge is scaling –up; being able to address needs of all students.
• Another big challenge is increasing the number of completers while, at the same time, improving quality.
• Boards of Trustees need to decide how they want to support their college’s student success agenda.

Since 2004, approximately 350 community colleges have participated in the National Community College Benchmark Project. This project collects data from participating institutions on a set of performance indicators that is made up of measures of student outcomes, institutional effectiveness, and community and workforce development.

Similar to the Benchmark Project, the Voluntary Framework of Accountability is AACC’s effort to identify a common set of measures of student success. So far, they have identified metrics in three areas: 1) Student Progress and Outcomes; 2) Workforce, Economic, and Community Development; and 3) Student Learning Outcomes.

Student Success Indicators

The Michigan Community College Association has considered these Benchmark indicators in its proposal to the State of Michigan (in response to a request from the Governor) for how the State can judge the performance of community colleges. MCCA proposed five indicators:

1. Developmental Student Success in First College Level Course: Percent of students that were successful in the immediate prerequisite in developmental Math or English prior to the college-­‐level course in Math or English, then enrolled in and successfully completed the first college-­‐level course in Math or English.
2. Fall to Next Term Persistence Rate: Percent of students that were enrolled in the first, fall term and are still enrolled in the next full academic term.
3. College-­‐Level Course Completion: Percent of students that successfully complete college-­‐level courses.
4. Successful Completion or Transfer: Percent of students successfully completing a degree, certificate, or licensure; or transferring to a baccalaureate-­‐granting institution after six years.
5. Student Performance at Transfer Institutions: Cumulative first year Grade Point Average (GPA) for all transfer students at a state university.

The Study of How Community Colleges Organize for Student Success , a project of Achieving the Dream, is asking these questions:

• What organizational structures and policies can be shown to improve student persistence, transfer and completion?
• How do community colleges organize to support student success? What structures and policies do community colleges currently use?

Based on President Obama’s challenge to graduate five million more community college students by 2020, Harper College in Illinois has set a campus goal of 10,604. They calculated that this number is their share of the five million. That goal is known throughout the institution and administrators, faculty, staff, and students are asking themselves, “What do we have to do to reach 10,604?” It has become a way of focusing campus attention on student success.

More to come about community college student success in my next post.