In the past, we had what you might call a temporal model of learning.
First you'd learn, then you'd work.
But in the current era, working and learning will have to be much better integrated.
They will have to be connected.
If you think about the transition to the industrial age a generation ago, people who went from
farm jobs to factory jobs, actually that transition was not that difficult.
It was essentially a different way of using manual skills in order to be able to do the
work that's required in that new age, in the industrial age.
In the transition from the industrial age to the knowledge age, we have a very different
set of circumstances.
So, for example, the people who were recently laid off by GM are not going to easily transition
into coding jobs.
It's a very different set of skills and abilities that they will need to be trained in, that
they'll need to be educated in, in order to be able to do these new jobs, to do the "human
work" that's required.
So there's a growing understanding that human work, the work that only humans can do, does
not need to take place in a job.
It can take place in a context where you have an interaction with someone who provides the
resources, the money for you to pay for what needs to be done, but is not in the context
of a job.
And I think we're going to start to see that in terms of how the learning system connects
with how we're preparing people for jobs.
In other words we don't need to be preparing them for "jobs" in that sense.
We need to be preparing them for the human work, and we need to be thinking about people
not as students or as workers but as worker-learners over the course of their entire lifetime.
Now, in this context, I think it's important for us to remember that as we prepare people
for that future of work we actually have to make sure that they have both generalizable
knowledge and skills as well as content specific knowledge.
In other words, you're not going to be preparing for a job in accounting or chemistry or graphic
design.
You're going to be preparing for a broader set of knowledge skills and abilities that
you can apply in different work contexts.
Some of that might be in the context of what we today traditionally call a job, but going
forward I think people are going to be working in lots of different ways, in ad hoc ways,
as independent contractors, et cetera.
That's the kind of work we need to be preparing people for.
Lumina's vision for this is that we actually have need to have a system where we match
the credentials that people attain with what they will actually need in this future workplace.
We need to make sure that the credentials are transparent, that they actually show what
people know and can do.
That the learning providers are actually preparing people to get those credentials – whether
they be degrees, certificates, certifications, badges, licenses, whatever it may be, in ways
that are transparent, that actually do help both the individual and the person employing
them or the company employing them understand what they know and can do.
And those transparent credentials actually have to be applied in a way that aggregates
so that society benefits from those credentials.
In other words, you as an individual need to get a credential that is important to you,
but ultimately we need to have our eyes on the prize, which is the combination of all
of those people with those credentials.
That talent is what's going to power our economy, strengthen our democratic systems, ultimately
improve our well being, because of that talent that's being developed and acknowledged through
the credentials.