D2L's Teach & Learn
Teach & Learn is a podcast for curious educators. Hosted by Dr. Cristi Ford and Dr. Emma Zone, each episode features candid conversations with some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 education space. We discuss trending educational topics, teaching strategies and delve into the issues plaguing our schools and higher education institutions today.
D2L's Teach & Learn
What Living Longer Means for the Future of Work and Education With Dr. Michelle Weise
This is how a typical work life unfolds: we get an education, then a job and after 40 years or so at that job, we retire. But experts say, that won’t work in the future. (Pardon the pun).
People are living longer, healthier lives. Now, before you start planning an extra, extra-long retirement, consider that the longer you live, the longer you’ll need to stay in the workforce. And the more important life-long learning will become. People will need to be able to work while gaining the competencies and skills required for jobs that don’t exist yet.
But how can we make education and work, work with minimal disruption? How can we plan for a work life that will span nearly a century? What can we make our careers future-proof? Our next guest says we need to create systems today that can better support us in the future.
Teach & Learn host Dr. Cristi Ford and guest Dr. Michelle Weise unpack what a longer life means for the future of work and life-long learning. In this episode they touch on:
- What the future of work might look like
- What systems need to be designed to enable future workers to upskill with minimal disruption
- Who should pay in time and money to educate the workforce: The employer or the individual?
- What we can do today to future-proof our careers
To learn more about visit MichelleWeise.com and check out her blog, Skilling Me Softly. And order your copy of Long-Life Learning today.
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Class dismissed.
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- This episode is all about the future of work. Dr. Michelle Weise is the author of "Long Life Learning," and in this episode, we'll discover what living longer means to our careers in education. We'll tackle some fascinating questions, including whether or not humans will be paid by how well they work with machines, and why a four-year degree can't sustain us if we're living a century-long work life. Join us for the answers to these questions and more.- [Narrator] Welcome to"Teach & Learn," a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.- [Cristi] Each week, we'll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 space. Sharpen your pencils. Class is about to begin. I'm a big fan of your book,
"Long Life Learning:Preparing for Jobs That Don't Even Exist." It's an award-winning book in the world of continuing higher education literature. And the book talks about the increasing lifespans, traditional concepts of retirement are no longer linear paths. Those frameworks are becoming obsolete. And so individuals will likely have multiple careers that you purport in the book throughout their lives. I think you mentioned that we will see a dramatic shift to something to the tune of 20 to 30 jobs that an individual may have in the lifetime.- I got really excited when I read the work of the authors of the "100-Year Life." And what they said was that since 1840, we've been adding on an extra three months of life expectancy every single year. And then you take that and then combine it with what futurists and experts on aging and longevity are saying, and they're predicting that the first people to live to be 150 years old have already been born.- Now that's crazy.- It's insane, right? Like it's just sort of, it's unfathomable.- Yes.- And then you kind of sort of hold that in your consciousness and then think about how our Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that our baby boomers are retiring on average with 12 job changes in their careers. So it's not just that kind of 40-year career that we might associate with our older generations. They've already been moving through the workforce at this kind of interesting rate of change. And then when we then think about all the technological advancements we're going to contend with in the current state that we're in today with the early happenings of generative AI and sort of extrapolate out, that's where this number of 20 to 30 job changes to come comes from. It's just sort of like, as we sort of push out into the future, it's not that hard for us to imagine if our lifespans are extending, if our work lives are extending, we may have to think about constant job changes and also ongoing skill development as a way of life, right? Because it's hard to imagine with that longer work life, and I've had people tell me, "Oh my gosh, kill me now if that means my work life is gonna be 60, 80 or 100 years long." And while that seems completely insane, it's a helpful just sort of spur to us, right? It kinda sparks us to think, oh my gosh, even if we just use that as a mental model of a 100-year work life, there is absolutely no way that even a two-year degree or a four-year college degree will somehow sustain us for that longer work life. And so that's where this conundrum really comes from of like, okay, we're gonna have to think about long life learning. And if we think about it in that way of how do we contend with this longer life ahead of us, it then pushes us to think about, okay, we're gonna have to start designing and building the infrastructure to sustain us through those longer work lives.- I love that. And Michelle, as I read the book, you know, we have been talking about in higher education and just more generally when we think about the future of work. We've used the rhetoric, you know, lifelong learning. I'd love to kinda just understand how you flipped that on its head and talked about long life learning as you just talked about this premise of how we need to always continuously be adapting and changing and evolving and upskilling.- Yeah. So like you, I've been in the space and I've gone to so many different conferences over the years, and I remember vividly sitting in on a conference for liberal arts, it was liberal arts presidents kinda talking about the future of higher education. And as a panel of them were talking about the future, so many of them were kind of alluding to the concept of lifelong learning. And you see everyone in the audience, I kind of looked around, everyone in the audience is like nodding their heads, right? Yes. Lifelong learning. We all need to be lifelong learners. And I remember sitting there thinking, "But how? Like where? Where do we go? Where does this exist?" I mean, we have obviously different kinds of, you know, continuing education programs in universities, but we're already seeing kind of the disconnect between education today and workforce needs. So how is it that we're gonna actually better align these systems so that fewer people are falling through the cracks? And that's the real kind of lack of, or just like a ton of inertia I was seeing in this space of, yes, we all believe intuitively in this concept, but I'm not seeing anyone building the systems we need to sustain that kind of ongoing skill development. Right? How do we get precisely what we need and then move on our way seamlessly without having to leave work, without having to forego our wages in order to skill up. And that just doesn't exist, right? We can't imagine getting just what we need without disrupting our family lives, right? Our work lives. Having to pursue education on top of where we all are as adult learners today, it's so complicated, right? And that seamlessness isn't there. And so how do we strive and aspire toward that kind of smooth sailing for the future is really what helps us. If we think about long life learning, I think it better snaps us into attention as to how we begin to design now.- Yeah. And the piece that I wanna kinda drill down on a bit is you talk about this systems approach thinking. I love that you're talking about the fact that we have to do things differently. And so when you talked about in the book, this comprehensive support system, you talked about financial support and mentorship and career guidance and all of those things being critical for, you know, long life learning. How do we start looking at this differently because, you know, it's such a big glacier that we need to start moving in a different direction or a big cruise ship that we're trying to turn in a different direction. How do we do that as institutions?- Yeah, it's interesting because I started off my career working with Clayton Christensen and his think tank on disruptive innovation. And I think in the past, people used to think of disruption as, "Okay, well this isn't working. Let's blow it up and do something radically different," as like that is somehow disruptive. That's not actually what disruption is. And what we've realized in our context when we're thinking about the moves between education and work is that it's a highly interdependent ecosystem we're dealing with where you have so many different kinds of stakeholders involved, right? You have the actual job seeker, the learner, you have educators and learning providers of all different kinds of types and sizes. You have employers, you have governmental policies, right? And then you have technology. You have all these pieces that fit into this larger interdependent ecosystem. You can't just actually blow up one part of the ecosystem and somehow expect it to work, right? So how do you mobilize differently? Has to be the question, right? And how do we kind of move towards this better functioning ecosystem? Part of that involves, you know, knitting together data. We don't have ways of connecting an understanding of who someone was when they worked at this particular employer. And then maybe they did some online education over here, then they went to a community college over here, then they went back to work in this other state. Then they moved to a different country for a little while, then they came back and you know, and they've acquired all these different kinds of skills over time. But we have absolutely no way of bringing that all together as sort of a holistic view of someone as to where they are right now relative to where they might wanna go the future. And that requires a data infrastructure that doesn't exist today. So that's one piece of it. And that data and that kind of connection of understanding of all the different parts of the ecosystem has to then come together in five specific areas. So the way that we kind of figured out a way to move forward is we talked one-on-one in one-hour interviews with close to 100 different folks who were not earning a living wage in the current labor market. So these were folks who were just not thriving. And we were trying to understand, okay, what are the pain points and the barriers that are most significant for you? And what we kept finding is they kept coalescing around these five areas. And one was navigation, one was the support systems that are in place that we don't have enough of. One was just sort of more precise targeted educational opportunities. Then there is this other piece of how do we reimagine on the job training so that education is integrated into earning a living. And then how do we get to more fair and transparent hiring practices? So these five elements need to come together in a way that makes sense to any person who might be thinking about changing jobs in the future. When we think about it today, and the way that each of us navigates a job change, we all do it differently, right? And we don't know where to go, who to call on, which particular learning experience we should take that will actually give the right signal to a future employer. All of these decisions are haphazard. But if we're gonna have to navigate 20 or 30 job changes to come, we need this ecosystem to be a whole lot more easily navigable, to make it easier for more people to make progress in their lives. And that's where in the book what we talk about is sort of thinking about the different kinds of seeds of innovation that exist today in each of those five areas and how we might begin to knit those pieces together into a more seamless or understandable way for a lay person to kind of begin to move forward with.- That's so good. And reading the book, you really got a sense of those individuals that you were talking about that were not earning a living wage and some of their obstacles. And, you know, being a part of an institution myself, historically, it was really hard to read some of the narratives and stories and some of the barriers that we have put up in institutions. But, but to a larger system structure question. I think the book also did a really great job for those listening as we, you know, have lots of educators, lots of senior leaders who listen and say, "Well, this is a structural issue, right? A funding issue." You do a great job of really introducing and highlighting some different funding models. So, you know, for those that are just thinking about the ways that traditional institutions work today, I'd love to maybe kinda lean over here a little bit and talk a little bit about something I know a little bit about from working in East Africa, ISAs, but also talk a little bit about career impact bonds, and I think they're called LiLAs? You mentioned that in the book as well.- Yeah, those are lifelong learning accounts that certain groups, like the country of Singapore is experimenting with to figure out how you might actually fund that. You know, if you need some bite-sized learning along the way, how does it maybe not always come out of your pocket because it benefits society? How might the government sort of take part in facilitating those efforts? But yeah, I think one of the crucial things to consider about sort of, especially in the United States, the conundrum we have in terms of the lack of economic mobility we're seeing today is that a lot of employers have over the last 40 years, really given and sort of shunted their own responsibility of training workers and sort of thrust that on higher education institutions to say, you better bring me people who are ready to work, right? And so we hear these stories of, you know, GE and other kinds of corporations who used to teach and train their new workforce, right? And their new workers. Peter Cappelli over at Wharton has actually come up with data to show that, you know, in 1979, we used to offer about 2 1/2 weeks worth of training for every new employee. And then that dwindled down to like less than 11 hours per year by 1995. Today, in an Accenture study, they showed that 44% of employers offered zero upskilling opportunities, right? So we've really kind of, from an employment per perspective, really kind of not engaged in training our people for the jobs of the future. At the same time, higher ed is really hard to sort of move as the huge kind of barge that it is. It can't just sort of quickly shift to workforce needs in a way that's like scalable and also nimble. And part of that is because of all of our regulatory challenges, right? And they make it so that once you actually identify some sort of business model that makes sense as a university, it's nearly impossible to innovate from within. It's really, really difficult to change. Whether it's the resources, the processes, the priorities, the value proposition is kinda stuck in one place. And so what this forces us to reckon with is if employers are sort of saying higher ed, you need to do a better job of bringing me workers for the future and higher ed is not necessarily able to fill that gap, we need to figure out where is that kind of source of learning where we might just need a handful of competencies to move forward, right? Where is that gonna happen and how might we imagine, you know, the workplace as the classroom of the future? Right? And that's a very different kind of mindset shift for all of us to think about as we move forward. So that's kind of one thing that kind of comes to mind as I think about what you just asked.- So as you're talking there, I'm also thinking about the fact that we have a global audience that listens to us a bit. And while I'm familiar with ISAs, I guess we should share with our listeners what is ISA-- Sorry, I forgot to explain that.- No worries.- Yeah, so what we were talking about was like kind of different ways of funding this ongoing skill development. So we have lifelong learning accounts, there are income share agreements that have come about, they're now kinda more legal strictures that make some of those difficult in certain countries. Career impact bonds or social impact bonds is the same sort of idea where it's almost like you are paying for the success of a learner, right? So you're banking on that learner's success in the future and that they will pay back some measure of what they have taken out, right? And that the money that they are being kind of given at the time won't be leveraged back at them at a huge or a high interest rate, right? It's not your typical student loan, we know you're gonna be successful, we know you're gonna pay this back in some way. And so, you know, when coding bootcamps were all the rage, this became right, like a popular way of kind of funding these quite expensive models that were upfront, nearly impossible for someone to kinda pay for out of pocket. But it gave people a way to move forward with their education, find a way to fund it, and then find a way to pay it back in a way that wasn't going to make them worse off in the future. We do have to figure this piece out'cause as we were talking about social security depletions or different kinds of models that exist to sustain us as more elder workers or learners in society. We know today already that people who are 55 and older are staying in the workforce for far longer than they had anticipated. Well into their 60s and 70s because they know they can't retire yet. Right? And so even beyond this idea of having a second career, we may have to think about third or fourth careers, right? We're gonna have to be very resilient and adaptable in thinking about how we skill up for the future and how we kinda take the most valuable things that we hold today as our skills assets and port them over into maybe seemingly unrelated domains or new domains. And that is gonna require some skilling up. And how are we gonna pay for that? We're gonna have to get really creative about these models. What I also mentioned in the book is a lot of employers, for instance, offer different kinds of tuition reimbursement or tuition assistance programs, but again, they're kind of based on whether potentially, a university is accredited or, you know, they have the right sort of signal in the context that it's in. Some of those universities aren't necessarily building the programs that can actually skill people up for these jobs for tomorrow. So we have to get more creative about how we think about how we begin to pay for that upskilling and re-skilling.- And as I listened to you, it also makes me think about another point in the book where you talk about the importance of not just having this work happen off the side on the weekends. Like historically marginalized populations don't always have the additional time and resource. And I'm talking about time resource to be able to work a full day and then have the time to be able to, you know, open a computer or go to a site or engage in some kind of learning activity. And so, you know, the juxtaposition of what I'm hearing you talk about learners need to have more upskilling, but employers are looking at the numbers and the data are not providing as much of the upskilling and are not investing in the current workforce. And sometimes, go outside and get a new worker to fulfill some of those areas. You know, it's a lot to grapple with and really to figure out how do we start to break this chasm down and start to see more signals in the right directions for those who are not making this livable wage.- Yeah. I think that is one of the most interesting kind of insights from all the research is that when we think about funding and facilitating these transitions and pursuing education< we sometimes assume that the biggest barrier is a financial barrier."I can't afford to pay for this new learning to move forward." When in fact, yes, money is a huge barrier, but time is equally as precious in terms of the resource. And more and more I think forward-leaning employers are starting to realize they have to carve out time in the flow of work to begin to build new skills for the future. It cannot always be put onto an individual and their families to take on that sacrifice and burden themselves. That has kind of been the model because in most cases, employers had the upper hand and can just pick and buy talent wherever they want. But as the labor market gets tighter and tighter, it's harder and harder for employers to rely on that kind of game. So how do you take your existing talent and build on that sort of talent goal that you have in front of you and shape those people into the jobs of the future? That's the more interesting question. And that requires carving out time during the workday.- Yeah. You know, gosh, I can have this conversation with you all day'cause I find it to be so fascinating in terms of the ways in which at every level, and you harken this in your book, at every level of the system there needs to be change, it just can't be in one area. But as we talk about in this convo, traditional education focuses on upfront learning. So you talk about that two or four-year degree and that not sustaining you through your full career journey, you know. And in a time of AI, you talk about in the book that new skills are gonna be required. Can we just maybe talk a little bit about the skills of the future? I think one of the things that I like that you shared in the book is you said humans will be paid for how well they work with machines. You know, how do we need to start thinking about upskilling and the skills of tomorrow?- Yeah. I think one way I've realized is an easy way to think about it is to think about times in the workplace when you feel uncomfortable. You know, when an employee mentions something and you have no idea what they're talking about because it's a new platform or a new technology and you've maybe heard it whispered in the ether, but you don't really understand what exactly they're talking about. You have to sort of think about finding the data in that discomfort. It's really trying to understand, okay, why is this making me feel uncomfortable? Is it because I am not skilled enough to understand what this thing is? Am I gonna need to understand how this connects to the work that I do? And if so, I better figure out a way to get smart fast in that subject area. Right? So part of it is like understanding enough to be dangerous, to be able to use the jargon that people are using, right? To be able to get your foot in the door for an interview as an example. What we're really starting to notice though is, you know, I think there were different kinds of narratives out there where it's like,"Nope, you need to be a computer science major to be successful in this STEM future." Right? That was a big narrative, especially right after the recession, The Great Recession. Then it was when the future of work conversations were getting super trendy before generative AI, it was, "Nope, you need to have human skills in order to complement the work of robots of the future." But I think what we all know is you do have to have these generalist skills where you're leveraging those kind of human broad-based competencies. But you also need to have some technical or technological expertise. And it's gonna also vary in the depth that you need to pursue it. So if you're wanna go into cybersecurity, you need real depth in cybersecurity, you can't get away with that just sort of shallow understanding. But maybe I'm gonna be, you know, leading a product team and kind of liaising between the business side and the engineering side of a house. And it's for a cloud computing service, right? Maybe in those cases, I don't need to know quite as much about the intricacies of cloud services, right? And so you kind of have to understand like the context in which you want to sort of, as, you know, move toward to understand the depth and the mix of those human and technical skills that you need. And so the book goes into different ways of understanding what those skills kind of manifest as in the labor market and what employers seem to be seeking. But it's not enough to be kind of either or. You can't just kinda be like either a STEM major or a liberal arts major. You have to be both. You have to show that kind of intellectual dexterity mixed with that kind of technical expertise.- So you're telling me that all those folks that got interdisciplinary degrees were onto something?(both laughing)- Yes. I think that is, you know, it sounds... I know we like to joke about it, but it is gonna be actually the critical thing that I think a higher ed institution is going to figure out for the future is how do we actually cultivate the best problem solvers in the world? Because the way that we currently silo and sort of create different sorts of departments within a university as their own, like little fiefdom of how you acquire a major in that area is almost counter to how we solve problems in the real world, right? Because when we're dealing with an issue, it cuts across every disciplinary boundary. It's not a math problem or an anthropology problem, it's a design thinking problem mixed with some AI, mixed with some chemistry, mixed with some anthropology, right? Like it's all the things. And to think about how we truly build real world problem solving skills. What we're seeing today is that those interdisciplinary majors that really do it right are the ones that help people understand the structures and ways of thinking analogically across disciplinary domains. And it's inordinately difficult to do, right? Like I think we want to believe that everyone naturally comes out as a great interdisciplinary thinker or learner, but it has to be done more deliberately in the future.- Yeah. And we have to build those muscles in areas, you know, of weakness or areas that don't intuitively maybe come to us or that we don't find as an area of strength. And so to your point, it's really about really, how do we become comprehensive in all those different areas? For sure. You know, the thing that I also think is so interesting about this conversation, often when we talk about higher education and we talk about education in general, K-20, we're talking about the learners. But when we talk about the future of work, we are also, you and I are a part of this experiment, right? In terms of where things are going. And you had a Ted video recently talking about the four tips to future proof your career and career. So as we're talking with folks that are listening, thinking about their learners, maybe we can talk a little bit about those tips and how they relate to even the educators that are listening today.- Yeah, so the first one was thinking about what human skills do you bring to the table?'Cause I think we get caught up in our technical skills that we need to put forward. And those can be technical skills like editing or our coding skills. But we really need to think about how do we translate these really critical human skills into the language of the labor market. And so that goes for even folks who have spent many years caregiving and raising a family or taking care of a child with special needs or, you know, taking care of a parent with Alzheimer's. There are all kinds of really important skills that we have acquired over time. We just have to figure out really interesting ways of translating those into the language of the language market. So the second piece is become a skills translator. So if I have had those kinds of experiences that have required me to have deep, deep kinds of empathy, right? And care, how do I then show how this manifests into the design products that I build, right? That it goes into the user interface that I think about because I'm thinking about accessibility design or whatever the thing may be. You have to help make that clear to an employer'cause they can't do that cognitive work for you, right? You have to do it for them. That third piece was, you know, thinking about this idea of finding the data in discomfort, right? Like understanding what makes you feel uncomfortable or why is that person getting promoted and you aren't? Right? Ideally in the future, more and more employers will start to make internal mobility pathways clearer to folks of how you actually achieve and advance. I think a lot of it is like, well if I just work hard, someone will see it. That needs to change on the employer side where we show the clear roadmaps to future success. But in the meantime, we need to kinda take stock of what is it that makes us feel that discomfort and how do we then move toward action? And then the final thing is, you know, how do we get picky about our future employers? I think we tend to kind of think about employers trying to suss out whether we're worthy of working for them. The future will require that employers really begin to take care of their employees in a different way to show them those clear roadmaps toward advancement. Even though, like I've talked about 20 or 30 job changes to come, it would be so amazing to think of sort of the future gold watch generation. If you remember like folks who stayed in the same job for 40 years, they leave with a gold watch. If employers do this right, they can also, again, if they think about building the classroom within the workplace and carving out that time, they're going to build loyalty. They're going to build a different kind of class of worker who understands that sort of long-term investment that the employer is making in them. There's this huge myth that employers have really bought into over the years, which is, if I skill up my employee, they're gonna leave me for my competition. There's actually just no data to support this myth, but it's had this kind of enduring-- [Cristi] Interesting.- Sort of quality where it's hard to break that mentality.- A mental model, yeah.- Yeah.- Oh, I love this convo. I love this. And so, gosh, Michelle, I could talk to you all day. I just want to wrap up the episode. For those who are listening who have fears about the future of work, is there a lasting comment or maybe a call to action for those that are listening in terms of how they can get in the game and as you mentioned, think about themselves as a part of this equation as well?- Yeah, I think the thing that makes me deeply positive about the future is that I have had the privilege of having a perch in this innovation space, getting to see all the different kinds of edtech and workforce tech innovations that are bubbling up. When I worked for Clayton Christensen, every for-profit and social entrepreneur was showing me what they were building.'cause they wanted us to talk about them as disruptive. And with that, I got to see hundreds and hundreds of demos of new things being built to solve for the inefficiencies and the inadequacies of our current state. So there are so many incredible people trying to work on this problem. And that's what I tried to sort of illuminate. And at the end of each of the latter chapters is all the different kinds of innovation bubbling up, which is so exciting to see. And if we just get more of that and if we get more people to understand that these kinds of solutions exist, it's gonna be better for all of us. And so I have just a real positive orientation for the future that I wanted to share with folks through this book. To show, yes, it feels like the system is rigged, but there is this future that we can build. And it doesn't mean starting from scratch. We actually have a lot of the pieces in place. It's just a matter of kind of knitting them together in a way that makes sense for more people.- Fantastic. Michelle, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for such a great generative conversation that continues to inspire me around the work that I do.- Oh, thank you so much for having me, Cristi.- So I would urge our listeners to pick up a copy of "Long Life Learning," which is available for purchase on Amazon. Please make sure to order your copy day. You can also find out more about Michelle's consulting and advisory business, Rise & Design and check on her blog. I love the title, "Michelle, Killing Me Softly" by visiting riseanddesign.io. Thank you to our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere. And remember to follow us on social media. You can follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook @D2L or check out our YouTube channel @Desire2LearnINC. Please rate, review, share, subscribe to our podcast. We want you to make sure you never miss an episode. Bye for now.- [Narrator] You've been listening to "Teach and Learn," a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L. To learn more about our K-20 and corporate solutions, visit D2L.com. Visit the Teaching and Learning Studio for more material for educators by educators, including masterclasses, articles and interviews, and remember to hit that subscribe button and please take a moment to rate, review, and share the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Until next time, school's out.
