I have previously said we need to take a long hard look at our skills and ensure what we have is future proof or, if not, do something about it.
Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee give some very high level advice on what you should be looking for in their Second Machine Age: “Our recommendation about how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large frame pattern recognition, and complex communication instead of just the three Rs.” If you don’t already have these skills, how might you set about acquiring them when the world is still catering to those selfsame three Rs they guard you against?
Because I want to learn about technology and because a lot of what I want to learn is relatively new, and because I want a broad understanding, and because I have the technical foundation not to have to do basic IT learning, I have deliberately chosen more contemporary ways of learning than enrolling in a university course: I am reading blogs, doing courses with, amongst others, Coursera, and reading a lot of academic articles and books on the topics that interest me and that I want to learn about.
Concurrently, I have been in the market for my next professional opportunity and so I have been dealing with hiring managers, HR, and recruitment companies. As part of those interactions, I have been asked on more than one occasion to complete data release permissions to validate my degrees. Of interest to me is that nothing in the degrees I hold is really of very much relevance in the sort of job I do. Good to have, but not directly relevant. And, of even greater interest, there have been no requests for evidence of any other learning that offers such evidence such as self-education through MOOCs (University of San Diego and Wharton School of Business on Coursera) or other online courses I have done (or could have). I could provide evidence because these educational methods provide them. But no one has asked. But what about a way to deal with the reading I have done? I would argue my contemporary knowledge is of most relevance to prospective employers and yet there is no way to actually show my commitment to lifelong learning. So, whilst what I know probably has great value to a prospective employer, the means of testing and validating what I know and how I have acquired that seem woefully inadequate.
Just as educational systems not be equipping us with the skills we need for the future is a problem, so too, it seems, are our hiring practices. Once we have bothered to acquire new knowledge, how to we prove it? It’s not enough to be a lifelong learner, diligently taking the advice of Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee if it’s a tree that falls in the woods with no one around to bear witness to its falling… if it cannot be seen through evidence, does it exist at all? I am wondering what we can do about that in the corporation, in our hiring practices, and in our own learning processes.
I have no answers but I think it’s a problem.