Go back to school — or go obsolete
I recently launched a university that was ranked number 3 on Fast Company’s 2016 list of “Africa’s Most innovative companies”, ahead of Samsung Electronics and behind the Kenyan mobile money phenomenon, mPesa. When we opened admission for the first class of this university, 6,000 young people from 54 countries applied in 60 days for only 180 slots — a 3% acceptance rate — making us more selective than even Harvard University from inception. A whopping 40% of those we admitted dropped out of existing universities to join us.
Let me tell you a secret so you understand why this feels so weird: 3 years ago, I had no clue how to start a university. Yes, I had experienced undergraduate education at Macalester College and had received an MBA at Stanford. But I had very few insights into the inner workings of a university. My prior experience — founding African Leadership Academy — was at the secondary level of education.
So how did I get here? I started by visiting tens of universities to study what they were doing well and what they were not doing so well. My team and I interviewed various experts in tertiary education. We interviewed hundreds of companies to find out what they found frustrating about the graduates they hired from existing universities. We read white papers, blue papers, and yellow papers about university education. We watched TED talks on innovative education given by thought leaders like Ken Robinson. We went to conferences, read books, recruited “volunteer students” for short pilot sessions of our learning model and got student feedback. We thought. We reflected. We synthesized what we had learned. We took all that and re-imagined what the world’s best 21st-century university would look like. Then we set out to build it. 3 years later, it’s working beyond even my wildest imagination.
In short, I reinvented myself. In just 3 years, I went from being an entrepreneur who had built a high school to an “expert” (that still feels weird) who is building 25 brand new, innovative universities to educate 3 million leaders for Africa by 2060.
What I learned from this is that the world is changing so fast that one needs to keep reinventing oneself to remain relevant. Think about it: if you went to university 10 years ago for a computer science degree, you would have learned how to write programs for a world of laptops and PCs, where memory was still stored physically on those devices. But by the time you graduated, the world would have moved on to “mobile-first” and “cloud computing” and your head would have been spinning on your first day at work as you realized those four years of college had done little to prepare you. If you had studied advertising or marketing, you would have learned techniques for a world dominated by radio and TV. But just as you graduated, you would have entered a world of digital advertising with strange terms like “search engine marketing”, “search engine optimization” and “big data” –all things you never knew existed when you received that summa cum laude at your alma mater.
A world of constant change
Its becoming clear that the jobs of the future have not been created yet. And trying to predict them is a futile exercise. Ten years ago, who would have imagined that jobs like ‘Uber driver’, “drone operator”, or “virtual reality producer” would have existed? The growing influence and efficacy of artificial intelligence, digitization and automation means that the pace of such change is getting faster and faster. Robots and machines are increasingly capable of doing what only humans could do a few years ago. We — the workers of today — will become obsolete much faster than our parents did. So how can you prepare for this world?
From “just in case” education to “just in time” education
You have to change the way you learn. Most education today is what some have described as ‘just in case’ education. You spend 4 years in college, completely disconnected from the real world, and your head is crammed with millions of facts, just “in case” some of these facts come in handy sometime in the future. But in reality, 90% of it never does. When I give talks to large audiences, I ask how many people in the audience are currently working in a career that is even remotely related to what they studied in college. The answer is never more than 10%. What you learn in college almost never translates into what you will do for the rest of your life. What you really need if you’re going to be ready for the world of tomorrow is to engage in what I’ll call “just in time” education.
How does “just in time education” work? In the world of ‘just in time’ (JIT) education you still go to a type of university. But three things are different:
1. It never ends. University used to be a one-shot game. You attended it for 4 years and the training you received was supposed to last for the next 40 years of your career. That may have worked 40 years ago. But in the JIT education world, you continue learning for your whole life. Through such lifelong learning, you keep reinventing yourself to stay relevant as the world changes.
2. It focuses far less on facts and figures and instead on learning how to learn. The aim is to make you extremely comfortable with change. The facts and figures you do come across are a means to an end, they are not the end. The ‘end’ is to for you to acquire a set of ‘meta-skills’ like how to work in teams, how to communicate, how to solve problems, how to analyze data, how to think critically, how to lead, and how to think entrepreneurially. These are the skills that will remain relevant even as the world changes.
3. It blurs the lines between “university” and “the real world”, enabling you to apply your learning to solve real problems for organizations and society from day one. You don’t go going away into a bubble for 2 years (for a graduate program) or 4 years (for an undergraduate program). Instead, you constantly rotate in and out of work and university so you are always connected with what is going on in the real world. In the JIT education world, you are taught not only by professors but also by practitioners with real — and recent — experience in the field.
Making it happen
So how exactly do you get this ‘just in time’ education today? You can use the brute force, “DIY” approach, like I did, cobbling together whatever knowledge and skills you need from various sources over 2–3 years. But what if you don’t have access to networks of experts nor the time and money required for such an approach, and you want to get upskilled now?
One of the most exciting ways of acquiring such ‘just in time’ education today is through a new breed of training providers who deliver powerful short courses on various topics. Entities such as General Assembly offer short courses aimed at teaching scarce skills in as short a period as one night, 1 week, or a few weeks. Online providers like Lynda.com and Udacity deliver “badges” and “nano-degrees” in intense bursts of a few weeks. The only downside of these offerings is that they are overly-focused on technology and data science. But we need this model of education in all disciplines. This is why I was inspired to establish the African Leadership University School of Business — an example of JIT education.
A flagship offering at the business school is a pan-African MBA program which blurs the boundaries between the real world and education. Participants do not leave their job and go into an academic bubble for two years. Instead, they stay in their jobs, traveling every four months for a 1-week intensive in-person session in Rwanda, and meet every two weeks with their peers in their home city to work on group projects in teams. While working, participants engage in online curriculum from Harvard Business School (“HBX”), the Drucker Institute, Wharton, and McKinsey Academy. This rotating method allows them to stay connected to the real world, learning a concept one day and applying it the next day at work.
We further blur the boundaries between the real world and education by ensuring that when participants attend their in-person sessions, they learn not only from professors like Catherine Duggan, an award-winning former professor from Harvard Business School (who serves as our Vice Dean), but from an ‘all-star cast’ of African CEOs and executives, who teach them real case studies of doing business in Africa.
We also don’t focus much on teaching facts and figures, but instead on developing the ‘meta-skills’ described earlier. Studies show that as managers progress in their careers, their technical knowledge become less important and their leadership, emotional intelligence, and team management skills become much more critical. As such, participants develop their leadership skills in a ‘live’, real-time setting through frequent, hands-on “leadership labs” and quarterly 360-degree evaluations from their peers and managers at work.
The ALU School of Business also offers short courses (1–2 week programs) for senior executives — another type of ‘just in time’ education that will enable senior African executives to remain relevant and re-invent themselves. I believe that such programs will enable African executives, many of whom went to university 20–30 years ago, to go ‘back to school’ without leaving their jobs, and return with fresh insights, enhanced skills, and renewed energy to take their organizations to new heights.
We see this as the first of many such ‘executive education’ schools we will establish. In the future, for example, we could launch similar ‘just in time’ graduate programs for training public sector officials in Africa (and thereby improve the state of governance on the continent), or perhaps one for public health officials and practitioners. In this way, we will bring the vision of lifelong learning to life in Africa, transforming the public and private sectors across the continent.
The pace of change in the world is accelerating. Technology and globalization is likely to change your job drastically. If you are wondering how you’re going to protect yourself against obsolescence, my advice to you is this: Go back to school or go obsolete.
