Tag Archives: learning

Novel ideas can spread from a novel virus

I travelled to China during the early H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic in 2009. Concerns were low in Canada and there wasn’t a travel warning at the time. On my flight to Japan there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. However after leaving Japan, when we landed in Chana we were asked to stay on the plane and remain seated.

A team of people masked and dressed in white came on board and used an infrared thermometer to take our temperatures. Two rows in front of me a person that was coughing and unwell, and her husband, were escorted off the plane first. I remember thinking, ‘Oh man, sucks to be you!’

I thought that was it, but after leaving the plane I guess that we passed a heat sensor camera because I was tapped on the shoulder and pulled aside. A lady in a mask, shining a red light on my forehead, took my temperature and said, “Too hot.”

To say that I was freaked out is an understatement. I was visiting for 1 week to learn about my future job as a school Principal, and visions of quarantine in a foreign country, where I don’t speak the language, swirled through my head. Fortunately, a second reading was done and I was fine. I think a coffee right before landing, plus the fact that I run a little hot anyway, might have been the initial trigger.

Still, that shook me a little. I wondered about why these measures were not happening elsewhere? The response in China seemed preventative, while in other countries it seemed merely reactive. I’m not sure too many lessons were learned and the novel Coronavirus currently spreading across the world will likely have a significant impact on our globe before things get better. Yet I don’t mean that to sound like foreboding, and ominous foreshadowing. This virus will run its course, then some valuable lessons will be learned that were not learned by viruses like this in the past. Lessons that will hopefully help prevent the severity of a future pandemic.

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I read in interesting article, “How the coronavirus will shape the future” and want to expand on one section as it relates to schools and education:

If the growing novel coronavirus outbreak becomes a lasting pandemic, it could accelerate fundamental changes in the economy, politics and the workplace...

Going remote: Videoconferencing and remote work have exploded as the virus has spread.

  • According to Kentik, a global provider of network analytics, videoconferencing traffic in North America and Asia has doubled since the outbreak began.

  • Led by tech firms like Twitter and Facebook, companies are encouraging and even requiring their employees to work from home, both to slow the spread of the disease now and prepare for the worst should offices be closed in a quarantine.

  • Many experts believe business leaders will come to see that central offices and face-to-face meetings are less vital than they thought. “We’re going to see that work can be tied to productivity anywhere rather than putting time in an office,” said Peter Jackson, CEO of the digital collaboration company Bluescape.

At Inquiry Hub Secondary every assignment is already available online. Students have access to Moodle, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Teams from any connected computer or mobile device. The Microsoft tools also have immersive readers and dictation tools to support students no matters where they are learning from.

Using Teams, I can invite colleagues or students into a virtual classroom, sharing video including either my or a student’s screen, and we can all link to resources in the Chat. Students could collaborate and do presentations, submit work, and get feedback without entering a school. That creates a lot of opportunities that weren’t previously available. I have no idea if this is something that will become necessary in the coming months, but in some parts of the world schools have already been closed, and so the idea that this is possible becomes a topic of discussion.

Discussion about the possibility of remote learning invites questions about blended learning where some of the work, both asynchronous and synchronous, is done remotely. It also invites conversations and questions about what we should be spending our time on when we do get together?

We might not have to change anything to deal with the Coronavirus, but the fact that this virus is impacting the world the way it is might impact how we think about operating our schools and businesses in the future. What excites me isn’t the idea that more work might be done remotely, but rather the ideas behind what we do when we connect face-to-face, and how we use that time? Will we focus more on collaboration, team building, social skills, construction and creation of projects, and more personalized support? How will we engage students in learning when they might not be coming to school every day?

Adopting tools in a transformative rather than additive way

Years ago I was doing a presentation to high school educators and things didn’t go as planned:

I started my presentation and within 30 seconds the power went out. I picked up my laptop and said to the 100+ audience members, “Ok, everybody gather around here.” 😉

I started a conversation about ‘What tech tool can’t you live without, that didn’t exist 5 years ago… and by the time people had discussed this with their neighbours and we started sharing as a group the power turned on… “POP” … that would be the sound of the ceiling mounted LCD light bulb burning out.

That’s when I asked a new question: “How many of you have had the experience before of having a lesson planning epiphany… suddenly you are up late at night planning… you head into the school before class starts in the morning and when you get to the photocopier… it’s BROKEN!“ ~Most teachers raised their hands.

“So, keep your hands up if you said something like, ‘That’s it, I’m never using the photocopier again?’“ ~All hands went down.

Sometimes ‘technology’, be it a photocopier, a presentation, or even a pen doesn’t work.

Other times the technology is new, and different, and not intuitively transformative. That doesn’t mean the tool can’t be transformative, it just means it’s hard to see the benefit or the value.

This afternoon a good friend and educational leader, Dave Sands, and I will be presenting to principal and vice principal colleagues. We will be sharing the value we see in using Microsoft Teams with our staff in schools.

For some people this is just one more tool to add to the list of other things they need to look at in a day… it doesn’t add value, it adds work. However Dave and I see it differently. We see how this tool can change workflow in a positive way, making it an effective way to streamline communication with different teams of people that you work with. Here are a few key points about how a tool like Microsoft Teams can be transformative:

1. It can reduce and be more efficient than email.

Have you ever shared an email that requires a response from a group of people? Some ‘Reply All’, some don’t. And you’ve got to figure out what’s what, and collate the information while responses trickle in.

Have you ever shared information with a group and one-by-one people ask the same clarifying question that you end having to respond to individually?

Have you received an email from someone that you wish you looked at sooner than you did, but instead you were dealing with 30+ other emails that came in after that?

Using Teams contextualizes conversations. It allows you to keep responses public to the team, and to clarify responses in contained conversations rather than scattered throughout email. It also allows you to prioritize your teams over the most recent items in your email inbox.

2. Using Teams creates a shared learning space within your community.

Have you ever worked as a staff on professional development, sharing paper resources that never get looked at again? Then someone shares a great resource through email, but that resource stays in your email?

My staff has created channels within a Team to work on our professional development. We co-create the notes, share files, and publicly follow through with our plans. Afterwards if someone adds anything, everyone has that resource available within the context of the learning that happened, not lost in email.

3. You are working with a team of people in other buildings and you don’t see them often.

Email is brutal for this. Conversations get scattered, supporting each other is challenging, it doesn’t feel like you are a community. When you create a Team with this group, everything is shared in one public space. When a question is asked, the whole team is there to respond, and resource sharing is easy. It shifts the environment from a broken up group into a shared community.

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That’s three quick examples of how a tool like Teams can be more effective than other tools like email, but it requires shifting practice to be truly transformative. If you are communicating with your team or staff using both Teams and email, then you are being ineffective and adding more to your plate. But if you replace communicating through email with Teams, now you have a few key advantages you didn’t have before:

  • You can actually prioritize the people within your community that you want to give your attention to by going to teams first, before dealing with the most recent and often erroneous emails at the top of your inbox.
  • Communication on Teams is public to your team, and responses are easily clarified for everyone.
  • You can embed forms where everyone can see everyone else’s responses.
  • You can easily switch to the private chat function when information becomes relevant to just one or a few people.
  • You can use the @name function to specially address a person or a whole Team.
  • You can build a sense of community and support that email does not provide.
  • Conversations are contextual. I can prioritize what I look at first, at a glance, not just by the most recent items.
  • You can reduce the amount of email you get! My email has gone down by more than 1/3 since adopting Teams.

For me the ability to prioritize my teams in a space outside of email, and reducing the amount of emails I get, have been the greatest benefits to moving to Microsoft Teams.

Note: I share expectations and etiquette with my teams about how and where to communicate. It’s a good idea with any new tool to make the intentions and expectations about how to use the tool clear. Otherwise, the tool isn’t transformative, it’s just one more shiny new thing to check, without really seeing the value in using it.

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Related: Transformative or just flashy educational tools? (Written almost a decade ago.)

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Also shared on my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog

The memories that make us who we are

What are the defining moments in your life? When asked a question like this, we often think of big choices, like choosing a university, a life partner, a house, or a country to live in. But what about the little moments?

  • Parents who hugged you when you fell and cut your knee.
  • Being read a bed time story.
  • Family vacations.
  • Visits to or from grandparents.
  • Sports teams.
  • Sleepovers.
  • Trips abroad.
  • Boyfriends or girlfriends.
  • Parties, camping trips, hanging out in basements, dances, night clubs, and concerts.

If you are lucky, each of these examples will bring fond memories, and smiles. For others, one or more of these could trigger a memory of abuse or neglect or of missing out. For some, the memories are mixed, a blend of joyous nostalgia and bitter reflection.

These memories accumulate and our choice to focus on them help define who we are now, and what choices we make in the future. We might like to think that today is a new day filled with potential, but that potential is determined by our past, and the patterns we have set for ourselves. If these memories and patterns didn’t matter, we wouldn’t need so many self-help books, and therapists, and seminars that are available to help us break the cycles we get stuck in.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could alter our past to help us better align with the future we want? Could we look back at past memories and make the painful ones more distant? Could we find the hidden lessons we need now and see the value from the hardships we faced? Could we alter our histories by deciding to focus on what has made us stronger, wiser, and more resilient?

Do we own our memories or do they own us? If this is a choice we can make, what’s stopping us? Do we not have the power to make the memories that make us who we are?

Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn

We talk a lot about learning through failure, but not a lot about failing to learn. When we fail because of lack of resources, lack of support, lack of knowledge, and/or lack of reflection, it’s just a failure. We do not necessarily learn.

When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.

Who learns more, the person who follows the cookie-cutter curriculum and content-focused assessment, or the student who tries something really original, challenging, and maybe even epic? Even if both paths led to the coveted mark of an ‘A’, which path holds the most promise for deep learning?

We never want students to fail, but we also don’t want them to have such an easy path to success that the learning is forgettable. The struggle that potential failure can create is something that separates learning through failure from failing to learn.

(Image by Bill Ferriter)

My new approach to learning from books

I’ve always been a slow reader, and so the transition to audio has been a refreshing way to consume more books than if I stuck to reading text. Even so the amount of books I can read is very limited, especially when you consider that a typical audio book runs somewhere between 7 and 12 hours of listening. So I was very interested when a colleague told me about Blinkist, a book summarizing service. He shared a link with alternative summarizing services and I ended up getting a competing service called 12 Minutes. The app chose me when a lifetime membership went on sale for less than 2 years on Blinkist.

I tried this out and I didn’t like it much. Although the summaries are short, I found my attention waned. Informational books devoid of the compelling stories and examples couldn’t hold my attention even for 12 minutes. I was disappointed.

But recently my desire to get through more books increased after reading a Tim Ferris blog post that said,

“We don’t have that much time left to read books. Tim Urban’s The Tail End makes this clear. Based on his calculus, he might only read another 300 books before he dies. He and I are roughly the same age, and Tim is a very fast reader.”

I’m older, and a slower reader than both of them. So I thought, let my try again with a different approach. I opened up my iPad to a sketching app, called Paper, and then opened 12 Minutes and saw the feature book was The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is the perfect book because I wanted to read it, it was gifted to me by a parent at my school over 3 years ago, and it sits on my shelf unread, not even on my list of books I have have time for in the near future.

Here are the notes I created while listening to The Lean Startup:

It took longer than 12 minutes. I didn’t time it but I’d guess 20-25 minutes with pausing and reminding. However this book is relatively small at only 8 hours and 38 minutes on Audible… and I likely would never have gotten to it.

With this new two-pronged strategy, I was able to stay focused and take a couple useful ideas from the book. I also have some notes I can come back to later. So unlike my audiobooks that I listen to working out and commuting, I will probably use the 12 Minute App in conjunction with a sketching app, and I’ll see if this new approach to learning from books is something I will stick to?

Just follow the steps

I enjoy solving puzzles like this:

The thing about these kind of puzzles is that if you don’t see the solution, you make a guess, you toss around ideas, then you eliminate them, and suddenly you see the pattern… you’ve figured out the steps, and you know you are right even before you’ve completed the answer. At that point you just follow the steps.

Easy… Or is it?

Sometimes the solution eludes you. Sometimes you just don’t see the pattern. In the example above, I can even tell you the next line of numbers and if you don’t see the pattern, it won’t help you understand: (13211311123113112211). The new row I shared would just become another set of confusing numbers. The solution won’t help you figure out the steps.

For some learners, getting started on a project or an assignment is like this. The blank page is daunting, giving no hints as to what to do next. Interpreting the question is too hard even before thinking about possible answers. For others, getting started is easy, but knowing how to finish involves a roadblock such as, explaining a process, collecting relevant data, summarizing information, extrapolating what the teacher wants, understanding the conclusion, or figuring out the purpose of even doing the assignment in the first place.

It took me about a minute and a half to solve this question, with half of that time doing the simple math to ensure I was right:

Find next number in the series:
23 21 24 19 26 15 28 11 30 7 36 ?

If you know the pattern, great! But if you don’t and I told you the answer is 5, that wouldn’t actually help you figure out the next number in the sequence.

When you know or understand the steps to get to the end of an assignment, it’s just a matter of doing the work. When you don’t understand the steps, or when a learning challenge gets in the way, then the steps become cliffs, too big to climb.

How often do we ask learners to climb cliffs?

Kids do well if they can

I love this video by Ross Greene:

Moving from ‘kids do well if they wanna’ to ‘kids do well if they can’ is a significant change in philosophy. I like that Ross admits that this philosophy is “a lot harder and… more productive”.

It’s easy to blame a kid who doesn’t want to do school work. It’s hard to figure out what’s getting in the way of their learning. But which of these models provides the most reward, for the student and the educator?

I know there are students who are really hard to figure out. I know there are students who refuse to accept help. I know there are educators willing to bend over backwards to support kids who still opt out. But if you believe they will do well if they can, then you are still in a better mindset to find a way to support a student than you would be believing they just don’t want to do the work.

Kids do well if they can.

Blind to My Privilege

Part 1. “You silenced my voice.”

It was the summer of 2006 and I was spending five weeks in Eugene, Oregon, completing my Master’s degree. I was there with a cohort of teachers from Coquitlam, BC, Canada, and we had many classes together. A colleague Christine and I had every class together, including a Statistics class we had where there was also a larger cohort of new Oregon teachers who were much younger than us.

These early to mid-20 year olds were in a program where students did a masters right after their teaching practicum. I think at the time the US ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy demanded teachers have so much additional education within the first few years of teaching, beyond their teaching degree, that moving to your masters level before starting teaching made more sense than starting teaching then adding credentials while you taught.

It was the last week of school, in this Stats class, that I learned a valuable lesson about my privilege. The class was being taught by the Teaching Assistant, who we knew because she was also our program faculty advisor. The lesson centered around research done in a school. The data was tracked by race among other variables. I don’t remember why, almost 14 years later, but the data was interesting and the fact that race mattered was relevant to the lesson.

After the lesson one of us, Christine or I, had a question and since we were living one floor apart in the same complex and walked to and from class together, we waited together to speak to the Teaching Assistant. In front of us, a younger, female, (*I assume) Chinese-descent American student was talking to the Teaching Assistant. This student was saying that she thought it was not appropriate to bring up race in the example given in class. I don’t remember if Christine or I interjected first, but we joined the conversation. We didn’t see things the same way as this student. We couldn’t figure out what we were missing? After that conversation was over we finished up with the Teaching Assistant and headed for the door. Before leaving the class, the Chinese American student came up to us and said, “You silenced my voice.”

We asked for clarification, and she explained that she had an issue around race that she was trying to address with the teaching assistant and we interjected and silenced her. We dismissed her concerns and she felt hurt that we had done this to her.

We apologized.

We insisted it wasn’t intentional. She told us this wasn’t about our intentions, it was about how we made her feel. She had a concern, and we dismissed it, we silenced her.

We apologized again.

The walk home was solemn. Christine and I felt awful. We both shed more than one tear. We tried to rationalize our participation in the conversation, but no matter the reason, we could only see that we caused hurt. Our words had power, and that power usurped the power from someone who felt less privileged than us. Our reasons didn’t matter. We were two older, white people who were dismissing the ideas of a younger minority.

Part 2. Rationalizing my blindness

I will preface this rationale with an important clarification: This is not a justification of any kind, it is in fact evidence of my blindness to my own privilege.

My family: My wife describes me as ‘a Chinese Jew from Barbados’. My grandmother on my dad’s side is full Chinese. I have many cousins and second cousins who are full, half, and quarter Chinese. Those that are mixed have mostly white, but also black, and East Indian parents.

When I described the minority student who we silenced, I described her as “(*I assume) Chinese-descent American student“. It’s an assumption because I didn’t ask. What informed my guess was that she didn’t look like another kind of Asian, she looked like family. She had the look of one of my mixed cousins who are mostly Chinese. She wasn’t ‘other’, she was ‘like me and my family’.

That said, I don’t look a lot like that part of the family. Despite my 1/2 Chinese father and my predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish roots, I have a look that Italians mistake for Greek, and Greeks mistake for Italian. I am neither. I’m used to not fitting into any box. In fact, whenever I have to fill out a survey that asked my race, I never check ‘white’. I always choose ‘Other’.

So when I saw this student, I saw family, someone like me. She didn’t see a likeness. She didn’t even see an ‘other’. She saw a white guy… An older white guy and an older white woman, both taking away her minority voice, on the topic of race in a classroom.

My context: I was in a school of higher learning. I was in the last week of a 2-year program where I was invited on a regular basis to challenge the thinking of others. I was comfortable in this role with the Teaching Assistant, (our program advisor), and with Christine. With Christine the metaphorical gloves were always off. We fully engaged in challenging each other’s ideas.

Many a day leading up to that last week Christine and I, both educational nerds, would continue our classroom conversations all the way home. Often, we would arrive at the complex, where we would head our separate ways, but we would remain there for 10, 15, even 30 minutes continuing the conversation.

We saw discourse and disagreement as learning opportunities. We were comfortable with this. We were comfortable doing this with our advisor. But this other student was not part of our community where this was the norm. Besides that, the topic had a very specific charge for her, and we were totally ignorant to it. We were also blind and ignorant to the very different charge that our discourse had.

Part 3. I silenced her voice

I will reiterate: My rationalization above is not a justification of any kind, it is in fact evidence of my blindness to my own privilege. I lacked awareness of my privilege. I could not see it. But my lack of awareness does not negate my privilege.

It does not matter that I did not see her as a minority. It matters that she was one in her eyes.

It does not matter that I thought I was joining a learning conversation. It matters that by joining the conversation, I took away her ability to address a concern with her teacher.

It does not matter that it was not our intention to silence her. It matters that our interruption led to us diminishing her voice.

I am glad that she spoke up. I’m sorry because an apology didn’t feel like enough. I’m also sorry because I have to wonder, when have I done something similar and the person felt they couldn’t speak up?

I know how hard it is, I’ve heard slurs that impact my heritage, and I’ve had to choose when to and when not to say something. But even there I speak from a place of privilege. Those slurs were not directed at me, a person who looks like an ‘other’ to the slur. I don’t live in a sphere where I have to think about my race, and how others will perceive me on a regular basis.

Even in my years that I lived in Barbados and later in China, where I was an obvious minority, I was still in a privileged minority. I didn’t always feel that way, but my experiences that were positive far exceeded the negative. That is not the case for everyone.

If I’m in a conversation where someone will feel silenced, it likely will be me being the imposer, rather than the silenced. Even now, in my current job, I’m further put into that imposing position as a principal talking to students.

Part 4. Accountability

When I made the mistake of silencing this student’s voice I was blind to my privilege and did not see my error. I apologized. I cried. I learned a valuable lesson. I am more aware now of how my privilege can be unintentionally imposed on others.

This experience made me more aware of race and its impact on minorities. I’m bothered that while my heritage is mixed I don’t need to identify with any race, and other people need to; that my privilege gives me a pass that others don’t get.

But that pass does not excuse me from anything. In fact it makes me more responsible to recognize my privilege and to be aware that it can affect others. Being more aware and responsible doesn’t fix everything. I will still have blind spots. If we could see into our own blind spots, they wouldn’t actually be blind.

I will make mistakes. Some of those mistakes will be shared with me and I need to be accountable for how my words and deeds affect others. When the effect is negative, rationalizations are not what is needed, apologies and reparations are.

To ignore my privilege is to be doubly privileged. This is hurtful and arrogant.

If I am blind to my own privilege, it should not be because I have shut my eyes. It should only be because I was not aware… and when I am made aware, I need to be responsive and hold myself accountable. This can’t happen unless I recognize my own privilege.

Rhythm and Rapport

I felt it. I mean I really felt it. A rhythmic wave resonated throughout my body. Before this moment I had enjoyed music but I never had it consume me so completely. And I was surrounded by others who felt the same way.

It was the early summer of 1992, and I was 24 years old. My uncle had introduced me to an NLP teacher, paying for me to take his course, and I loved it. NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is about harnessing communication patterns, that we all use, in more effective and powerful ways. The course I was in was very interesting because it seemed as if half the people were there to learn to be more effective and the other half seemed to be there for therapy.

The 9-day course started on a Saturday and ran daily from 8am to 4pm through the week and into the second weekend. It was the Friday morning and we were told we were in for a treat. We were taken to a small room filled with drums, shakers, tambourines, cow bells and assorted traditional music makers. The lesson was on rapport and we were going to use music to demonstrate it.

I think there were about 18 of us in this small room and we were broken up into groups of 2, 3, and 4, depending on the number of similar instruments. I don’t remember if we ended up with 5 or 6 groups. Next, each group was given a different beat to play. For instance, the cow bell players got tap-tap, tap-tap, pause, tap-tap, while a few drummers got a beat of 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2. That second example would have been the most complicated of the options with most others being quite simple.

We got counted down and everyone started playing their own beat in their groupings. As someone that doesn’t have musical training, it was good to have other people playing the same beat as me so that I could follow along and not be too distracted by the other groups. That said it was a ruckus in this small room. To put it kindly, we were making noise, horrible and loud clattering, pounding, clanging, dinging noise. It was awful.

I understood that we were supposed to build rapport and the music was somehow supposed to come together but it didn’t. There was just noise. We switched instruments and tried again. Noise. We switched beats. Noise. We switched instruments again, and I was given cow bells. More noise.

We were tired, and we were overwhelmed with the echo of instruments clamouring out of synch, and then something interesting happened. A professional dance instructor that was taking the course had a big gourd shaker in his hand, he stepped forward into the middle of our circle and connected with an older man on drums. This older gentleman that the dancer connected with was a retired music teacher. They sped up the beat slightly and I could hear their individual beats come together as if they were one pattern. The dancer with the gourd shaker was dancing to their beat and my beat fell into synch with his feet.

That was the moment it happened for me, and it was obvious that it was happening for everyone else in the room… our noise became music. But this was so much more than music, it was a wave of sound that reverberated through my body. I watched the dancer and realized that his gourd and feet were the backbone of the beat. We were all following his lead. Then I looked at the retired musician’s drum and I realized that it was him driving the beat. Then I looked at my cow bells and realized it was me that was leading the beat. Then I really understood what was happening. We were in perfect unison, we were one.

None of us were in the lead. All of us were in the lead. This was full rapport. We were all connected, all one beat, all one musical experience. We built up the sound to a full crescendo, it was all-consuming, bordering on ecstasy. There was a countdown, 3-2-1, and we all stopped playing. The instant silence was a final exclamation on an overwhelmingly beautiful experience. For the first time in my life I had felt, truly and to my core felt, the sound of music.

learn-by-gerait-on-pixabay

Learning on the job, for the job

I’ve been a fan of Tim O’Reilly ever since I heard his “Create More Value than You Capture” talk he gave at Stanford:

When a colleague suggested his new book, WTF? What’s the Future and Why it’s Up to Us, I knew I had to get it on Audible.

This quote from the book really got me thinking:

“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.