Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
“A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black”– Henry Ford
There is a lot of folklore about this quote, but if I were to summarize it in a sentence: Henry Ford wanted to minimize options and maximize production, and every choice reduced efficiency.
Today our schools are all about choice. And our universities are all about differentiating themselves from the competition. People don’t just go to MIT Media Lab or Stanford d.school for the name, they go for the reputation, the proven success, and the opportunity to collaborate with other elite students. They go for the experience. People want to walk the halls of Yale or Harvard.
I know a family in the US who pay as much as my yearly salary for their two kids to go to University every year… And those kids are home taking online classes. It doesn’t matter what car people bought in September, they are all driving the same colour now.
How will this change people’s view of these schools? How much value do the hallways have? The Ivy schools will survive, even in a depression there is always a market for luxury items. But not all universities and colleges will survive post pandemic. Some schools will become fast food chains… All online year-round service, or half the price and double the students. Others will specialize. Others will partner with big business.
Universities are having a Henry Ford moment. They’ve been reduced to the same choice for all. It will be interesting to see what options come out of this.
“A lot of companies complain that they can’t hire enough people with the skills they need. This is lazy thinking. Graham Weston, the cofounder and
chairman of managed hosting and cloud computing company Rackspace, based
in San Antonio, Texas, proudly showed me Open Cloud Academy, the
vocational school his company founded to create the workforce he needs to hire.
He told me that Rackspace hires about half of the graduates; the rest go to work
in other Internet businesses.” ~ Tim O’Reilly, WTF – What the Future
This goes well with two other quotes:
The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. ~ Henry Ford
And,
Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to. ~ Sir Richard Branson
When I think of Tim O’Reilly’s book and his catch phrase, “Create more value than you capture”, one of the ideas here is that there is social capital that you can capture by creating a workforce that is going to help you, not just because of the money, but because they want to. Yes, good and well trained people will leave your company, but is that because of the training you provided, or the lack of support or encouragement that came during or after that training? While some occupations will keep employees for decades, many employees will work for several companies in the careers, and some of those will be competitors. Creating a positive work environment, and training staff, are essential for success. Social capital will be essential for success in the future of most organizations.
Also related:
Work is going to get much more specific and instead of job descriptions like, “A bachelor’s degree and 5 years of experience in the field,” what we will see are descriptions like, “Familiar with at least 2 coding languages and willing to learn on the job.” Or perhaps, “Portfolio evidence of a growth mindset.” Both of these suggest the person is a learner, and willing to learn on the job, with the first example having a specific skill added (in this case coding), and the second one asking for evidence of learning, rather than certification or accomplishments. That isn’t to say that certifications won’t be important, in fact certifications will become more important than degrees.
My nephew has a great job with a startup in Silicon Valley. He didn’t get the job because of his 4 year college degree, he got it because of the 18-month comprehensive training certification in the field of programming and artificial intelligence. Even then, his learning curve on the job was huge. He is and will continue to be successful because he is interested in learning and he wants to learn. He is working in a job where the expectations are high, but it is a rewarding and positive environment.
There will always be a place for university degrees and technical colleges. There will always be a need for doctors, lawyers and teachers, as well as plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Technology will remove some of these jobs, or some aspects of these jobs, but they aren’t ever fully going away. Neither will the degrees and technical training needed. But this won’t be what most work and educational pathways to work will look like in the future. For most employees in corporations and stores, both large and small, the nature of work is changing. The idea that there will be manufacturing and office jobs that don’t involve learning and training and re-training is disappearing. Employees of the future will need to be learners. They will be learning on the job, for the job, or they will be looking for a job.
