The Future of Learning for Our Careers is Up to Us

In There Is Life After College, Jeff Selingo explores why students struggle to launch into a career after college and how they can better navigate the route from high school through college and into the work world. It will be released by HarperCollins April 12, but pre-order your copy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other online booksellers for a free signed bookplate and access to exclusive bonus content. Then send receipt to [email protected]. Additional details here.  

In the 1970s, Xerox opened a massive campus in suburban Washington, D.C., to train its global sales and management workforce. Some 1,800 employees would come through the facility in any given week for classes. But Xerox sold the campus and now conducts most of its training virtually, every day, with more than 10,000 short web-based videos and another 20,000 on-demand reference materials. Today, 70 percent of Xerox training is online. 

Online education saves the company money, but according to John Leutner, Xerox’s head of global learning, it also improves retention because workers learn on their own time and at their own pace. “We think too much of education as having a beginning and an end,” he said. “We need to think about learning more iteratively and in milestones.”

The idea of professional development needs to be reimagined for a 21st century economy.

Over the last two years, as I researched my forthcoming book on the future of the workplace and careers for today’s college graduates, I heard often about the widening disconnect between the skills learned in college and what is in needed on the job. This gap is usually blamed on one of two players: either colleges for failing to provide the needed curricula for specific jobs or employers for their lack of investment in worker training.

Both are at partially at fault. But there is a third player in this game: the workers themselves. 

In a day and age when careers and industries expand and contract at an alarming speed, workers can’t expect that their undergraduate or even graduate education will be enough to sustain them for their entire working life. Nor can workers expect that companies will invest in every facet of their professional development, given that today’s workers switch jobs and careers much more than their counterparts in the past.

We all need to become lifelong learners to compete in a new economy.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 63% of working American adults consider themselves lifelong learners focused on improving their job skills or expertise connected to career advancement. But most of that learning happens in work-related venues, according to the survey—like what Xerox used to offer at a centralized site.

In the future, our learning for our careers will be increasingly self-directed and likely happen outside the walls of the traditional workplace. To succeed, we’re going to need to transform from individuals who think like students—whose learning has largely been directed for us by teachers and professors—and into learning animals who will constantly explore and discover what’s next for us.

In this new era, the most important skill higher education will provide us is the ability to learn how to learn. Rather than plug into a formal learning economy for our career development, whether graduate school or professional certificates, we will come to navigate a set of providers that offer education in short spurts, online or in face-to-face classes.

We will come to find three types of providers in navigating this new learning economy:

Boot camps: There are some 63 coding boot camps operating in the U.S. and Canada. They teach basic programming skills to students who typically don’t have previous experience. Right now, the boot-camp model is limited largely to information technology skills, but in the future this idea will likely translate to other career fields. 

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Several dozen elite universities, including Stanford, Princeton, Penn, and Harvard, offer free online courses through two major organizations, Courser and edX. More than 100,000 people have signed up for some of these classes, which span a variety of topics. MOOCs have attracted criticism in recent years because only about one in ten students completes an entire course. But applying the traditional measures of how we define success in higher education to this new way of learning misses what many of the students I interviewed told me was their reasons for taking the classes. Some enroll to try out a course or they want to watch a particular lecture for its content. They never planned to complete the course, and it was free so they have nothing to lose when they stop taking it.

Digital learning resources: The Web is full of DIY education sites, from YouTube to iTunesU, where students can piece together their own curriculum. Some of these sites have more visitors in one month than universities have students over an entire century. The Khan Academy, for instance, serves some 10 million people a month with 5,000 videos. Lynda.com, an online education company, reaches more than 4 million people a year with its how-to tutorials in everything from management skills to programming.

Of course, as the burden of career development shifts more to the individual so does the cost of it. It’s difficult enough to pay for a traditional bachelor’s degree or master’s degree. We shouldn’t expect workers to shoulder the cost of training if the additional education largely benefits the employer. But workers need more options to pay for lifelong education, whether by accessing federal student aid or education savings accounts, which are largely restricted to traditional providers right now.

The findings from the Pew survey make it clear that professional learners have benefited from their continuing education. Nearly 30% say it has enabled them to find a new job or consider a different career path. But the results also show that those benefits mostly go to high income, well-educated workers.

We need to create a future professional development system that rewards learners in all types of jobs, at all points in their career.

Jeffrey Selingo is author of three books on higher education. You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.

He is a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Grade Point blog, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and a visiting scholar atGeorgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities.