The Growing Marketplace for Skills
The conference — held last week in Washington, just blocks from the White House — gathered a number of college administrators, representatives from nonprofits, and ed-tech companies in work-force development to discuss the latest trends in advanced manufacturing, AI, work-force policy initiatives, education, and hiring. The panels all revolved around the topic of skills.
HolonIQ typically opens its conferences with an interactive quiz about demographics, education, and work. Among the questions:
How many employed persons are there in the world?
a.) 500 million
b.) 1 billion
c.) 3 billion
d.) 5 billion
How much money has been committed globally to upskilling and reskilling initiatives in the last year?
a.) $32 billion
b.) $88 billion
c.) $235 billion
d.) $500 billion
What percentage of students have reconsidered their course choice due to AI?
a.) 21%
b.) 28%
c.) 36%
d.) 49%
(See answers below.)
Much of the conference’s opening presentation featured HolonIQ’s market-intelligence data. Charts displayed trends in the work force by sector and how those sectors have largely shifted from manufacturing to education and health services, professional and business services, leisure, and finance.
It also featured predictions about the coming reordering of global economic powers: By 2050, the United States is forecast to be the world’s No. 2 economy, after China, and by the next century, third to China and India, which will have risen from its current place at fifth. Under current predictions, a number of continents face stagnant and aging populations, extending out to the end of the century. That has huge implications for labor-force participation and reskilling, said Patrick Brothers, who, along with Maria Spies, was a co-CEO and co-founder of HolonIQ (which was recently acquired by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a London-based firm specializing in analytics and consulting in higher ed and other sectors).
HolonIQ’s data pointed to almost 26 million jobs in the United States that are now highly or very highly vulnerable to AI, 64.6 million moderately exposed, and 64 million least exposed. According to the firm, the 10 most vulnerable states to AI disruption, in descending order, are Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota, Arkansas, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Mississippi, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. And the most vulnerable industry sectors include transportation, technology, environment, and defense. Education — perhaps surprisingly — is the least affected sector, the firm predicts, but technology is influencing how students route through the system: Just under half of students had said that AI had impacted their career choice in college.
Bachelor’s degrees are still dominant, but nondegree credentials will surpass them in the next 10 years, HolonIQ’s research predicts. “This is not going to be an either/or, it’s going to be an ‘and,’” where students are getting both degrees and certificates, said Spies. HolonIQ estimates that 100 million people now spend $10 billion a year on micro- and alternative credentials, the vast majority of that in online courses, MOOCs, and badges from Coursera, edX, and other providers. In addition, three million people are in professional-certification programs (for health-care workers, IT, or lawyers); one million people are in certificate and microcredential programs at colleges; and about 100,000 are in bootcamps.
Skills already carry a certain currency in the workplace. Much of what followed the morning presentation described how various nonprofit organizations, education-focused foundations, policy groups, and corporations are working on aligning education to work-force needs, building “talent pipelines,” or setting up “skills-first initiatives.” There was much talk of “skills-based hiring,” a “skills-forward approach” of finding talent, and “skills-based curricula.”
The conversations sometimes focus on the intransigence and slow pace of change of higher education, and those critiques even come from the sector’s advocates. Colleges and universities “need to do a better job of understanding what the skills are that are embedded in even the most traditional degree,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, who complained that many academics saw skills as a “bolt-on” feature to a degree, and something that typically focuses on tech skills.
A major challenge, said Julie Lammers, executive vice president at American Student Assistance, is in helping students in both K-12 and post-secondary education see the skills that they are getting in the curriculum or the skills they already have.
“If we’re moving to a place of skills-based hiring, but no one has told you that what you are actually doing is building communication skills, collaboration skills, ability to analyze data, then there’s a huge gap between how a young person articulates to an employer those skills that they do have,” said Lammers, whose nonprofit organization helps students make informed decisions about their education and career goals.
However, that framing raises questions about an implicit assumption here: That is, if the skill is in the curriculum, it’s now therefore thought to be embedded in the student who took the courses. But that’s not necessarily true. A student who doesn’t see their own skills — or doesn’t realize that a particular course or program developed them — might not have actually acquired those skills in the first place.
Much of the talk about skills treats them as a kind of token or nugget that you can embed in a curriculum or drop into a student’s head — but the acquisition of skills doesn’t really work that way, especially among those complex, knowledge-dependent, most-in-demand “skills” listed above, like critical thinking and complex problem-solving. Matthew T. Hora, an associate professor of adult and higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, points out in a new report that teaching transferable skills is a complex process of identifying the skill, modeling or demonstrating it, allowing students to practice it, and then evaluating the results. Moreover, he notes, skills within professions can be highly granular and dependent on disciplinary knowledge — defying the generic skills prescriptions offered by the National Association of Colleges and Employers and the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
And all of that makes the question of skills versus degrees — and how they’re divided and distributed, and to whom — even more crucial.
Seeing Skills, Seeing Paths
Making skills visible to institutions, instructors, students, and employers is certainly an important part of the education-to-work pipeline, as Lammers has suggested. But it’s difficult to set up a structure that can match skills to workers and to jobs — especially when those in-demand skills are continually shifting.
In a session late in the day, Kemi Jona, the vice provost for online education and digital innovation at the University of Virginia, pointed to data from 2016 to 2021 that showed that the most volatile job categories could completely jumble and reorder the top-20 skills needed in a field in just a few years. “We’re living in a world where I can come in, deciding I want to be a computer-science major as a freshman,” said Jona, “and by the time I walk across the stage as a graduating senior in computer science, three-quarters of all the skills that I thought that I needed for that job have likely changed underneath my feet.” With the emergence of AI in the past few years, that turnover has gotten only more intense.
Jona said he got to thinking about apps like Waze and Google Maps as a possible model in surfacing skills. Just as navigation apps give you three different routes to get from point A to point B, highlighting the hazards you might encounter along the way in real time, could educational institutions use technology to track the skills and help route students through the various possible programs?
“All of us have an app in our pocket that’s free, that we can use to make informed decisions about where we’re going to drive,” he said. “But for the most consequential financial decision that the young person will make with their life — which is, what should I learn and study? — we don’t have anything.”
The University of Virginia formed a partnership with a small startup company called 1Mentor (also recently acquired by QS Quacquarelli Symonds) to build such a tool, which is still under development. (Jona and the company’s founders were as much soliciting advice and suggestions from the session’s attendees as they were describing their work.) A student can upload a résumé to the university’s CareerConnect tool, which uses AI and technology similar to common applicant-tracking systems to parse the résumé and highlight the skills it seems to convey. Students can check the results against their perceptions of their own abilities — which might help a student alter a résumé to be more competitive.
The tool will also show a student how the résumé skills match up to the skills required in a desired occupation; how to acquire some of the missing skills and experiential learning for that occupational goal; and whether a student’s existing skills would feed into other occupations that the student might not yet see, in the hidden job market.
Jona said that his university has even tested the system with doctoral students who are reconsidering entering academe, given the extremely competitive environment. CareerConnect often points those graduate students to roles in consulting, which demand advanced experience in research, writing, and analysis.
“Even at what we call the upper end of the academic spectrum,” Jona said, “we’re still serving students who really need to broaden their horizons and try out different roles that they might not have thought about.” Using the tool and its integration with an experiential-learning platform, those graduate students can seek experiences in fields outside academe without informing their faculty adviser. (Many graduate students don’t want to tell their advisers about their doubts about academe, Jona said, as it might signal a lack of commitment to the discipline.)
Even with this kind of automation, students will still need to interact with advisers and faculty members to help revise résumés and draw out the interests of students.
“We’re not here to say this is the silver-bullet piece of technology that’s going to solve everybody’s problems,” Jona said, “but that it can clue you in to where you might need to do some work or ask the questions.”
Answers to the quiz:
How many employed persons are there in the world?
c.) 3 billion — actually, 3.3 billion, said Brothers.
How much money has been committed globally to upskilling and re-skilling initiatives in the last year?
d.) $500 billion — much of it spent on adaptation to AI.
What percentage of students have reconsidered their course choice due to AI?
c.) 36%
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This column was supported by a grant from the Strada Education Foundation.
