Michelle R. Weise's Blog, page 2
March 8, 2022
Transforming Higher Ed, Live from SXSWEdu
This week’s episode features highlights of a discussion involving Michael Sorrell, Michelle Weise and Bridget Burns.
“Transformation” is a buzzword in today’s world, and it’s easy to talk about why it’s necessary. But how do you actually do the hard work of bringing about change within a college or university?
This week's episode of The Key features highlights from a panel session at this month's SXSW EDU conference in Austin, Tex. The discussion, heavy on practical advice for leading change within and across institutions, includes Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College; Michelle Weise, vice chancellor for strategy and innovation at the National University System; and Bridget Burns, CEO of the University Innovation Alliance.
This episode is sponsored by Pearson Inclusive Access. Hosted by Inside Higher Ed Editor Doug Lederman.
November 29, 2021
Hybrid Skills Are Ascendant in the Post-Pandemic Talent Economy
In the United States right now, there are more than 10 million jobs for the fewer than 8.4 million workers who are unemployed, according to a September 2021 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Closing those talent gaps would appear to be simple, but the unusual circumstances and shifting norms of the pandemic seem to be prompting a broader awakening among Americans in their attitudes toward work and the workforce, with 4.3 million Americans (2.9 percent of the entire workforce) quitting their jobs in August alone.
For some reason, the “Great Resignation” has come almost as a surprise, as employers somehow expected workers to return to low-paying jobs with zeal. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it bluntly, “Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out.”
Part of what we witnessed with the onslaught of the pandemic was the lack of mechanisms we had in place to identify transferable skills to move people from those “crappy” jobs to better economic opportunities. At one point, the unemployment claims tallied to over 36 million, revealing how incredibly stuck Americans were, unable to transition into a more promising field.
To exacerbate matters, few employers offered clear pathways to advance within the company. According to one survey, 44 percent of employers offered zero upskilling opportunities to their employees. For many, there was simply no roadmap to get ahead — to figure out which skills to build in order to thrive and find fulfillment.
But we know from labor market information enabled by artificial intelligence that a retail worker might be 70 percent of the way there toward a role in human resources and just doesn’t know how to articulate those skills. A server might be 40 percent of the way toward an in-demand role as a network analyst and just needs those skill gaps illuminated. Workers need ways to surface the skills they bring to the table, as well as the skillsets they need to acquire that will be critical for advancement.
Even though we may not be able to predict the jobs of the future, we can begin to crack the labor market code in today’s economy and home in on the hybrid, or human and technical skills that will help working-age adults prepare for the jobs of today and tomorrow.
Read more about those hybrid skills here at Chief Learning Officer: https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/...
August 8, 2021
Plan B Success: The Future of Work
Plan B Podcast hosted by Rajeev Mudumba
June 7, 2021
May 23, 2021
TalentTalk Radio
We know that our guests are eager learners and hungry for education. On this episode of TalentTalk with PeopleG2 CEO and host, Chris Dyer, and guests, Michelle Weise, Author of, “Long Life Learning”; and Chuck Cooper, Managing Member at WhiteWater Consulting. We discussed navigating better economic opportunities, HR AI opportunities, how to attract & retain high performing employees, and more. First up, Education & Workforce Strategist, Thinkers50 Radar List 2021, and Author of Long Life Learning, Michelle Weise. We discuss how today's workforce is different from years past and how educators and employers can adjust to this. We’re covering how to improve the skills gap and a “new ecosystem for education.”
Stay tuned for Chuck Cooper, Managing Member at WhiteWater Consulting, who is passionate about helping business owners navigate the world of HR through consulting, education, analysis and solutions, to eliminate the fear, uncertainty and doubt business owners have when it comes to solving their people problems. We discuss what the future of work look like for small and midsize companies, how COVID has impacted employee engagement and mental health, what leaders can do to help their employees deal with mental health challenges, and how employee benefit strategies are impacting talent retention and employee engagement. You’ll want to tune in to this discussion for more on how the pandemic changed leadership and talent management needs and how the economy and education systems need to play catch up.
April 19, 2021
Get Reworked Podcast: Are You Ready for the 100-Year Career?
It's quite possible that people now entering the workforce could hold 20 or even 30 jobs over the span of a career that will last far longer than it has in the past. And the skills they learned to prepare for the jobs of today will be obsolete in record time.
In this episode of Get Reworked, Dr. Michelle Weise, senior advisor at Imaginable Futures, joins us to talk about what this all means for the future of workplace education. She shares insights from her recent book, "Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don't Even Exist Yet."
The short story? What we've done in the past isn't going to cut it anymore.
In this episode, Michelle explains how medical advances are making a 150-year life span a reality, meaning the next generation of workers could very well have a career that spans a century. Highlights of the conversation include:
What extended careers mean for education, both at school and at work. The role of companies in helping workers reskill and upskill. The skills we'll need to thrive in the jobs that haven't even been created yet. How lifelong learning is like a spiral staircase.Plus, co-hosts Mike Prokopeak and Siobhan Fagan share how their first jobs quite possibly violated multiple child labor laws, but the lessons learned carry on to this day. Listen in for more.
April 6, 2021
The Modern Hustle
Michelle chats with Warren Kennard on EdUp Edge, conversations about higher education for professionals in the sector. Learn, be inspired and meet brilliant people doing extraordinary work in the broadly defined education ecosystem.
March 22, 2021
Shaping the Workforce for the Lifelong Learner
As higher ed is moving towards serving the lifelong learner, it’s important for both higher ed and the workforce to come together to provide solutions that will meet the needs of these learners.
An interview between Michael Palmer and Michelle Weise originally publised on ,The Evolllution
Mike Palmer (MP): Can you talk about what drove you to put the book together?
Michelle Weise (MW): It’s a play on lifelong learning. And to me, it’s important because I’ve been in a space straddling higher education and the workforce. People loved talking about lifelong learning, but I wasn’t necessarily seeing that translate into action. So, I thought a new mental model might be helpful.
One of the most useful prodding mechanisms to push us into action has been this thought that, “Oh my goodness, what are we going to do if we actually have to navigate a longer and more turbulent work life?” Because many of the different forecasts and prognostications are indicating not only a longer lifespan but ultimately a longer work life. So, as we think about lifelong learning, it suddenly makes clear all the different changes and moves we need to make in order to better connect the future of education and the future of work.
MP: Even with a great undergraduate experience, it can be hard to apply lessons learned to your professional life. As someone who looked at disruption with Clayton Christiansen, and how it relates to higher education, what are your thoughts on that?
MW: There are many different kinds of innovations. Not all of them are necessarily disruptive innovations but things that we need to pay attention to and think about scaling or building out more. When I was at Clayton Christensen’s think tank, we would get hundreds of inbound requests. People wanted us to look at what they were building to ultimately write about them as disruptors, but they also just wanted to see whether we knew of anything similar on the market.
It’s been fascinating to see the span of innovations and the incredible burgeoning of solutions out there. At the same time, it’s also been hard to see so much reinvention of the wheel, duplicated efforts, or just siloed activity. All of these amazing innovators are building parallel to one another, not realizing how their solutions overlap and might actually be more effective if brought together.
MP: Can you talk about the type of skills that people should be thinking about to stay job-relevant in that long life and prepare for jobs that don’t even exist yet?
MW: We’ve already seen, just over the last decade, jobs that previously didn’t exist emerging as the hot jobs of today. The purpose of the book is not to identify the specific jobs that will be in demand in the future but the kinds of skills and problem-solvers we need to become in order to meet that very uncertain world of work ahead. As we think about better preparing ourselves for this turbulent future, we have to realize first that there are certain skills that humans can leverage better than robots. But there are certain skills that we have to relinquish to machine learning and AI just because they’re always going to do it better, faster, and without any mistakes.
Also, workforce competencies around collaboration and teamwork, and exercising judgment, systems thinking, creativity, curiosity—all those kinds of things are going to be core skills needed in the future.
We also have to realize that in order to be someone truly marketable in the future, we have to have enough technical or domain expertise in order to also assess our own work or intervene at the right times when we’re seeing how it plays with artificial intelligence or these different kinds of rapid technological advancements.
MP: As the demographic in the workforce changes, how does that change the way we engage with learners?
MW: It’s fascinating because even today people are staying in the workforce for decades longer than we had anticipated. They’re well into their sixties and seventies before they think about retiring. So as a mature learner, how do you evaluate and surface the different kinds of skills and experiences you’ve accumulated along the way that have never been formally recognized? There is so much richness in what you’ve learned, and the labor market has no idea how to make sense of it.
When people think about reskilling and upskilling, they immediately think of the technical skills needed to remain relevant as technology advances. But often it’s those more human skills that we really need to work on. And for older learners, what kind of learning experience allows them to broaden those skills?
We tend to always situate that kind of learning in a two- or four-year degree. We associate it with a liberal arts experience. A 55-year-old learner needs something in short bursts, that is more affordable and more relevant to the skills that they want to build but also enables that broadening of human skills.
This pushes us to think about how we engage with learners differently than ever before. Even if you look at some of the open-access mega online universities that cater to 30-year-old-plus learners, they still aren’t meeting learners where they are. It’s still not quite flexible enough for people to integrate into their busy lives. We need to break down this monolithic category of adult learners and identify the different stages and phases for adult learners based on what their needs are.
MP: How do you stay optimistic about the future of higher ed?
MW: Being in this space of the future of work can feel daunting and paralyzing if you focus on the jobs that are going to be automated by technology. But once you shift away from that, you start to see how you can adopt a more positive and hopeful vision of the future.
My worldview was shaped by Clayton Christiansen. His theories of disruptive innovation have always offered me this very constructive lens through which I can look at a whole slew of innovations.
Hope comes from all the innovation that I see. We can’t just be in this mode of constant activity; it has to be geared toward a common agenda. That’s where the language of an ecosystem is critical. We cannot continue to have a K-12 system siloed from our higher ed system, which is in turn siloed from our workforce training system. We’ve done that for far too long.
MP: Can you expand on the idea of creating that ecosystem?
MW: If you think about an ecosystem like a forest, we tend to look at what’s above ground. What we fail to notice are the incredible workings underneath, and underneath is where this amazing communication network occurs. A near-intelligence emerges.
That ecosystem is what we need to aspire to have. When we think about the incredible data across all of those systems that we have—K-12, post-secondary, workforce—it is difficult today to understand the learner outcomes. We have no ability to stitch together wage earnings and outcomes data, so, we need to figure out how we pull all of these different strands together to make this data make sense. Once it makes sense, we can prioritize what to build and how to allocate resources.
MP: How do we get this new learning ecosystem to operate in a way that is not unfair and isn’t perceived as rigged?
MW: We have to be transparent about skills. How do we help folks actually translate what they can do into language the labor market can understand? That communication breakdown stymies learners from graduation throughout their work lives.
Part of this phenomenon has been this concept of skills-based hiring, which is an attempt to move away from thinking about pedigree or a degree from a prestigious institution—to rather get very granular about the kinds of skills needed in the workforce. There’s an assumption that if we can get transparent, there will be less friction in the labor market.
Right now, we’re flooded with the credential engine—there are over 730,000 different kinds of credentials out there. It’s impossible for a hiring manager sift through that. So, we have to figure out how to make the process fairer and be very clear about the skills we need.
It also goes back to learners who may have experience in the workforce but no degree. How do we capture those skills? A lot of the innovations that I point to in the book are showing different ways of acquiring this marriage of in-demand skills and those in supply. That can come in the form of different kinds of skills compasses, which I point to from places like SkyHive, MD, and Future Fit. There are different assessments that try to democratize the process and help us understand what skills someone possesses and compare them to what we need.
There are different, emerging innovations that are trying to reduce that friction between higher ed and the workforce. Even though this concept of skills-based hiring is trending, and employers are open to moving in this direction, we haven’t actually seen meaningful data from it yet. We haven’t actually seen this tremendous shift towards skills-based hiring. We have quite a bit of work to do there.
MP: Is there anything new and exciting that we haven’t talked about so far?
MW: I would say the concept of a skills compass. There are different kinds of AI-powered platforms out there that are trying to do a better job of helping us surface our competencies and helping employers understand the skills of their existing workforce.
It’s fascinating how poorly employers understand their own people. They often are struggling to figure out what to do with names and titles. They don’t actually know the granular skills that they have, or whether they should be skilling up some portion of their existing workforce for the jobs that they anticipate in the future.
One company in the skills compass family is Future Fit. They’ve gotten into the business of out-skilling—helping learners navigate a layoff. A lot of employers are now realizing that in the future they will have to maybe lay off a thousand workers. The optics of that are terrible.
And how do they do better for their people?
Now, some of these companies are bringing in a group like Future Fit to get clarity on skills and help some of these learners draw maps to better jobs elsewhere. They’re actually helping those workers understand their competencies and skills, and then helping them identify different pathways forward, as well as the education providers in their area that can help them fill their skills gaps. These are the kinds of things that, even if they’re more nascent innovations today, give me great hope for the future.
Read more here:
March 19, 2021
DivingDeepEdu Podcast
First aired on DivingDeepEdu with Matthew Downing
How do we prepare for jobs that don't exist yet? Michelle Weise guides us through this transition with thoughtful insight and tons of examples. Michelle explains how the system needs to be transformed in order to support new workers and workforce. This conversation keeps innovation at the forefront with many ideas that can be easily applied beyond higher education.
March 1, 2021
Thinkers50 LinkedIn Live Session
Who are the management thinkers to watch? Michelle is featured in this #Thinkers50 #LinkedInLive series to talk about the big ideas that will shape the organizations of tomorrow.
