What Living Longer Means for the Future of Work and Education

Full Transcript

Dr. Cristi Ford:
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 and 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.

Voice Over :
Welcome to Teach and Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Each week will meet some of the sharpest minds in the K to 20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin. I’m a big fan of your book, Long Life Learning: Preparing For the 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, that 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 their lifetime.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
That’s crazy.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
It’s insane. Right? It’s unfathomable.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yes.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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 going to be 60, 80 or 100 years long.” And while that seems completely insane, it’s a helpful just sort of spur to us. It kind of 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 going to 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 going to have to start designing and building the infrastructure to sustain us through those longer work lives.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
I love that. And Michelle, as I read the book 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, lifelong learning. I’d love to just understand how you flip 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 up skilling.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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 kind of 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 nodding their heads, yes, lifelong learning. We all need to be lifelong learners. And I remember sitting there thinking, but where do we go? Where does this exist? We have obviously different kinds of 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 going to 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 the 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. 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. We can’t imagine getting just what we need without disrupting our family lives, our work lives, having to pursue education on top of where we all are as adult learners today. It’s so complicated 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.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah. And the piece that I want to kind of 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 long life learning. How do we start looking at this differently because 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?

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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 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. 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, 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.

So how do you mobilize differently has to be the question and how do we kind of move towards this better functioning ecosystem? Part of that involves 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 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 want to 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 figured out a way to move forward is we talked one-on-one in one hour interviews with close to a hundred different folks who were not earning a living wage in the current labor market. 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 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 going to 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 begin to move forward with.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
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 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 to a larger system structure question.

I think the book also did a really great job for those listening as we have lots of educators, lots of senior leaders who listen and say, well, this is a structural issue, a funding issue. You do a great job of really introducing and highlighting some different funding models. So for those that are just thinking about the ways that traditional institutions work today, I’d love to maybe lean over here a little bit and talk a little bit about something I know a little bit about from working in East Africa, 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.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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. 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, 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 thrust that on higher education institutions to say, you better bring me people who are ready to work.

And so, we hear these stories of GE and other kinds of corporations who used to teach and train their new workforce or their new and their new workers. Peter Capelli over at Wharton has actually come up with data to show that in 1979, we used to offer about two and a half weeks worth of training for every new employee. Then that dwindled down to less than 11 hours per year by 1995. Today in an Accenture study, they showed that 44% of employers offer zero up skilling opportunities. So we’ve really, from an employment 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 move as the huge kind of barge that it is. It can’t just quickly shift to workforce needs in a way that’s like scalable and also nimble.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Right.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
Part of that is because of all of our regulatory challenges, 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 kind of 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? Where is that going to happen and how might we imagine the workplace as the classroom of the future? 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 comes to mind as I think about what you just asked.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
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 ISA’s, I guess we should share with our listeners what does ISA stand for and talk a little about that.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
[inaudible 00:15:46].

Dr. Cristi Ford:
No worries.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
Yeah, so what we were talking about was 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. There are now kind of 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. So you’re banking on that learner success in the future and that they will pay back some measure of what they have taken out. And that the money that they are being given at the time won’t be leveraged back at them at a huge or a high interest rate. It’s not your typical student loan. We know you’re going to be successful. We know you’re going to pay this back in some way.

And so when coding boot camps were all the rage, this became a popular way of funding these quite expensive models that were upfront, nearly impossible for someone to 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 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 anticipated well into their sixties and seventies because they know they can’t retire yet. And so even beyond this idea of having a second career, we may have to think about third or fourth careers.

We’re going to have to be very resilient and adaptable and thinking about how we skill up for the future and how we 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 going to require some skilling up. And how are we going to pay for that? We’re going to have to get really creative about these models. What I also mention 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 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 begin to pay for that skilling.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
As I listen 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. 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 open a computer or go to a site or engage in some kind of learning activity. And so, the juxtaposition of what I’m hearing you talk about learners need to have more up skilling, but employers are looking at the numbers and the data are not providing as much of the up skilling and are not investing in the current workforce and sometimes go outside and get a new worker to fulfill some of those areas. 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.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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 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.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah. Gosh, I can have this conversation with you all day. 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 and in a time of ai. When you talk about in the book that new skills are going to 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. How do we need to start thinking about up skilling and the skills of tomorrow?

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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 when an employee mentioned 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 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 going to 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. So part of it is understanding enough to be dangerous, to be able to use the jargon that people are using 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 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.” 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 going to also vary in the depth that you need to pursue it. So if you’re want to 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 going to be leading a product team and kind of liaising between the business side and the engineering side of the house, and it’s for a cloud computing service. Maybe in those cases, I don’t need to know quite as much about the intricacies of cloud services. And so, you kind of have to understand the context in which you want to 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 kind of be 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.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
So you’re telling me that all those folks that got interdisciplinary degrees were onto something?

Dr. Michelle Weise:
Yes. We like to joke about it, but it is going to 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 little fiefdom of how you acquire a major in that area is almost counter to how we solve problems in the real world. 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. 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. 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.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Yeah. And we have to build those muscles in areas 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.

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 through 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 in terms of where things are going. And you had a TED video recently talking about the four tips to future-proof your career 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.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
Yeah. So the first one was thinking about what human skills do you bring to the table? 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 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 labor 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 and care, how do I then show how this manifests into the design products that I build, 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. They can’t do that cognitive work for you. You have to do it for them.

That third piece was thinking about this idea of finding the data and discomfort, 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 road maps to future success. But in the meantime, we need to 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 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 I’ve talked about 20 or 30 job changes to come, it would be so amazing to think of the future gold watch generation. If you remember 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 going to leave me for my competition. There’s actually just no data to support this myth, but it’s had this kind of enduring sort of quality where it’s hard to break that mentality.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Mental model. Yeah.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
Yeah.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
Oh, I love this convo. I love this. 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.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
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 ed tech 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. They wanted us to talk about them as disruptive. And with that, I’ve 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 going to 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.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
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.

Dr. Michelle Weise:
Thank you so much for having me, Christi.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
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 and Design, and check on her blog. I love the title, Michelle, Skilling 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 at D2L or check out our YouTube channel at Desire To Learn Inc. Please rate review, share, subscribe to our podcast. We want you to make sure you never miss an episode. Bye for now.

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To learn more about our K through 20 and corporate solutions, visit d2l.com. Visit the teaching and learning studio for more material for educators by educators, including master classes, articles, and interviews.

Dr. Cristi Ford:
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.

Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Long Life Learning
• The 100-Year Life
• Clayton Christensen
• Michelle Weise Website