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If I am turning to the Gig Economy, if I am looking to be hired on an activity or a project, I have to be prepared to do that specific job today. Whoever is hiring me is not looking at my potential to learn, is looking at what I can do right now.
Particularly in cognitive jobs, jobs that are rooted in knowledge, the problem is that knowledge is fleeting, its values decreases over time, as new knowledge becomes available. Hence the need to remain up-to-date, a major challenge for a future that is already present i some areas.
The need for continuous education is well reflected by the number of MOOCs (offer) available, that has increased by almost 20% from 2017 to 2018, with some 11.4k MOOCs available in 2018, of which 2000 were brand new, with over 900 universities involved worldwide, attracting over 100 million students. Given the growth in the number of MOOCs, the attendance per single MOOC has decreased. What is interesting, however, is to notice an increase in the number of MOOCs being paid. This is a clear sign of a growing need for education. Coursera, the largest MOOCs provider has reaped 140 million $ in 2018, a significant figure if we think that MOOCs started as “education for free”.
The Digital Transformation, with its lowering of entrance barriers, is heating competition and this is reflected on the professional education:
- professionals need to be up-to-date to find jobs, since they have to keep moving from one job to the next as freelance;
- companies are less interested than in the past to pay for their employees continuous education, Given the churn why should I invest money to educate one of my employee knowing that she will most likely leave the company for another job? Also, given a market that is very dynamic, it is probably more effective to hire a person with the knowledge I need for a new project, rather than training one of my current employees.
These two factors are reinforcing one another in a spiral forcing individuals to invest autonomously on their education and companies to seek competence from the job market.
From the education point of view we are seeing a “perfect storm”:
- the Digital transformation is transforming processes and business, thus obliterating jobs -and the affected people need to update their knowledge to become appealing to the market as they seek for a new job, or/and changing existing jobs, thus requiring employees to learn new skills and knowledge;
- the Automation is decreasing jobs, thus increasing the number of people looking for a job and increasing competition on jobs that is fought on the bases of competences and skill;
- the continuous increase in knowledge decreases the value of the knowledge owned by a person, forcing that person to learn the very latest to remain competitive.
Clearly, for a company, hiring is a time consuming and costly activity and there is an interest in reducing the churn, but only if the present workforce can remain up-to-date, otherwise the company will be forced to look on the job market to get the needed skills and competences. We are seeing a few companies offering perks to their workforce in terms not of salary (that can easily be matched by a competing company) but in terms of environment (something that is much more difficult to replicate).
Yet we are entering into an era of knowledge explosion where it will be impossible, for companies and for professionals, to remain up-to-date. A new approach to knowledge is needed, accepting that knowledge is distributed and cannot be “owned”.
I’ll discuss this in the next post.
