[Adpated from a talk I gave to Harvard Business Review Conference in Dubai, 5 November, 2017.]
So the university is in trouble. Serious trouble.
Student debt and tuition are out of control. Half of all students who start college drop out. In some parts of the world, a degree will actually decrease your chances of employment. Student satisfaction is on the decline.
The distress is a function of a deeper underlying inadequacy — the failure of higher education to respond to the needs of the 4th Industrial Revolution.
That gap — the lack of soft skills, applied problem solving, autonomous learning ability, creative cognition and market-ready technical skills — has also caused HR departments to reappraise their stock in degrees. Google could now care less if you have a degree. 10–15% of IBM’s new hires are degree-less. In fact a range of industries are dispensing with the requirement for even their senior positions.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so the better, faster, stronger, non-university to the rescue. MOOC enrollment increased 60% from 2014–2015. We now live in an era where you can curate your own ‘degree’ entirely from YouTube videos.
Specialized career accelerators are proliferating. Apprenticeship aggregators, next level vocational programs, the high school shop class on steroids, tech Chautauquas, the reimagined internship, Outward Bound meets Dale Carnegie…all rushing to fill the void.
The hack is an active, dynamic, hands-on, ground-up, constructive, agile approach to skill acquisition. One focused more on non-technical skills and that takes an MVP approach toward the technical. Makes sense given 70% of what most of us do is learned on the job.
In place of the baccalaureate: Nano-degrees. Self-accreditation. Certificates. Badges. An online portfolio. A body of work. A digital trail. Blog posts. A GitHub repository. AirBnB reviews. Quora responses. Retweets. Stuff talent scouts can sink their teeth in to. Be your own credential.
Remember your favorite college professor? Right now there is someone way better on YouTube.
No need to spend 4 years getting to your destination. Or 2 years or one year even. 3 months can get you there. Better, stronger, faster. Zero to hero…poverty to prosperity during spring training camp. Reboot your career. Triple your earning potential. Massive ROI. 12 weeks to a 6 digit salary. Able to do in 3 months what universities can’t do in 4 years.
The Rise Of The Code Bootcamp
Attempts to upstage the university model are not new but none have been as powerful as the code bootcamp.
Step back to 2011. Silicon Valley was beginning to recover from the global recession caused by overly-creative insurance men. Entry level software developers were in high demand. Stanford grads were great at designing algorithms and analyzing complexity but had no clue how to connect to an API. Both start-ups and legacy companies needed folks who, working together, could push code.
So in an attempt to rapidly skill up developers, a few clever educators decided to test a product development methodology proposed way back in a HBR article in 1986. This idea had matured into Agile / Scrum — a cross-functional team approach to software development that was fast replacing the previous waterfall method and has been applied to everything from selling girl scout cookies to training for the olympic marathon.
The designers of what would become a new education methodology started in a traditional way: break down a complex body of knowledge such as Ruby on Rails into bite-sized chunks and formulate into problems — pretty standard PBL. The twist was to apply agile techniques — pair students, time box the activity and carefully modulate the skill-delta between partners. By trading off the heavy mental lifting using a method called driver / navigator, students were able to sustain arousal levels much longer. And the frequent ‘rests’ allowed students to assimilate the subject matter more efficiently. The whole process was guided not by an instructor but by a team of subject matter experts.
The first few attempts were messy but successful. Graduates readily found work as junior developers. But an unexpected dividend occurred — there were marked increases in social intelligence, autonomous learning ability and applied problem solving. Baked into the experience of trying to solve a complex problem with another was the need to tune-up one’s interpersonal skills like supportive communication, active-listening, conflict resolution and constructive criticism. It turned out these non-techncial qualities were as valuable to industry as mere technical chops.
Today code bootcamps are a $250 million a year business and have become the go-to source for junior engineers. Tens of thousands of bootcamp grads are employed in industry yielding placement outcomes far higher than universities.
Programs vary widely and the pedagogy is constantly being refined. Given increased competition, accelerators are starting to diversify, focusing on data science, machine learning, IoT, blockchain and other more specialized tech disciplines.
Organizations like RBK have even ported the technology to producing digital technicans for a dozen other industries including architecture & engineering, industrial arts, medical arts, graphic arts, automotive repair, appliance repair and audio / visual engineering.
Some accelerators have taken a more proactive approach to non-technical skill building adding mindfulness training, yoga, meditation, talking circles, role playing, group therapy and ‘hard’ soft skills training.
The combination of all this — agile / scrum, problem / project-based learning, fail-based learning, generous psycho-social support, temperature monitoring, data-driven throttling and self-awareness training have coalesced into an entirely new form of education technology dubbed eXtreme Learning.
The diagram above shows the typical company structure that produces either a product or service. At the tip of the apex, the leaders. Just below are the executives, VPs and chief lieutenants who operationalize the leader’s directives. The apex structure can span the spectrum from completely hierarchical to somewhat flat but it is important to note there is a clear division between management and the rank-and-file — the producers of the product or service.
Below the apex, labor. Managers reside at the upper part of trapezoid, pure production workers at the bottom — coders, mechanics, draftsman, machine operators, nurse assistants, admins, carpenters, lab techs, bookkeepers…drummers. Embedded within the production base are a few unique specialists or technicians that keep the parts oiled.
With the exception of the education industry, universities are geared to produce graduates to fill the apex, the upper trapezoid and those embedded specialists. 4 years of walking the walk reinforce this expectation. Upon graduation, the reality is quite different.
First, senior positions are generally filled with tenured juniors. Second, entry level positions generally reside near the base. This is true even in support departments like finance, marketing or HR. Third, because universities are focusing primarily on foundational knowledge, students are left to their own devices to learn the technical tools of their profession.
Whether it’s learning a drafting / modeling program, electronic medical record software, a video imaging software, a programming language framework, a pharmacy robot or a CRM platform, students are expected to acquire technical proficiency independently. Many don’t and discover that post graduation, another 3–4 months of intense training is required to master a digital tool necessary for entry into their chosen profession.
Moreover, because these tools are so closely knitted into the production process, it is often difficult for fresh grads to translate higher-order problem-solving into real world solutions. Digital tools are generally the compilers that translate the conceptual into the practical. Without a solid understanding of how to use these tools, there is little value a degree holder can bring to an organization.
The Degree Is (Mostly) Dead
For disciplines that rely heavily on technical skills like engineering, the creative arts, languages and the medical arts, universities are not in a position to compete with the far more expedient and cost efficient eXtreme Learning accelerators.
Graduate degrees will remain useful given the need for universities to self-perpetuate, however, as all but the most hallowed of institutions atrophy, the value of the academic degree will continue to diminish.
A few predictions. By 2025:
- Traditional universities will have lost 30% of their market share to leaner, cleaner alternatives — immersive technical bootcamps and other career accelerators.
- eXtreme Learning will be the primary delivery mechanism for entry level workers in any technical industry.
- eXtreme Learning will transform traditional university pedagogies. Those who resist adaptation will perish.
The world is changing FAST. Up to 65% of the jobs a generation from now don’t even exit today. Entire industries have yet to be imagined.
Who is better prepared to skill up workers for these jobs? The heavy, tradition-laden, slow-turning, university freighter or the lightweight, turn-on-a-dime, market-driven eXtreme Learning speedboat?
