The Expertise Economy — Book Review & Quotes

Review

The future of work. Reskilling. Retraining. Practical education. If you’ve spent any time worrying or wondering about these ideas, The Expertise Economy might be one of the most important books you could possibly read. David Blake and Kelly Palmer are both from Degreed, which is a company that has been on my radar for a long time. Not only because a lot of the founders are BYU grads, but Degreed was also a portfolio company of one of the first venture funds that I interned for, Signal Peak Ventures. I remember using the product during college, and even having one of their product managers speak at an EdTech class that I was teaching. I’ve been in and around the philosophy behind this company, but not until I read this book did I understand how deeply their message resonates with me.

Here is the key takeaway for me as I read The Expertise Economy:

“People who value learning and can demonstrate learning agility in the workplace are valuable now and will continue to be in-demand talent in the future.”

One of the biggest difficulties of the job market going forward is that it’s not just about having the right technical skills; the skills you may need in the future may not even exist right now. Instead, it’s about having the ability to learn fluently.

This idea of developing strong employees is going to be a key differentiator in the future:

“If you’re going to employ people anyways, why not make them the differentiator? They’re not a commodity.’ As Apple’s vice president of Retail, Stephanie Fehr, says, ‘It’s just a huge developmental advantage for people here.”

This idea reminds me of a portfolio idea to which I return often: quantifying human capital. Recognizing your labor force as a tangible asset, not simply an expense line-item.

Key Takeaways

As you think about what environment people need to get comfortable with and learn to thrive in, its going to revolve around 4 key concepts:

1. Continuous Learning

“A culture of continuous learning is an environment where learning is part of everyday work, and where learning is more than compliance or required training. It is a culture where employees can learn in their own time and their own way through accessing all types of both formal and informal learning including videos, articles, podcasts, books, and even attending events. But more than just the myriad learning that surrounds us every day that helps us build skills for now and for the future, learning in a continuous-learning culture becomes something that people love to do and want to do, rather than something they dread.”

Key Takeaway #1: You can’t learn anything unless you’re exposing yourself to new information, new principles of the things you’re learning about. That inflow of information is a key starting point.

The majority of people get the bulk of their information from platforms: Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. All of these applications have been designed to keep our consumption to a micro diet of constant consumption, making the content overwhelm us even more aggressively.

“Most experts predict that the size of the digital universe is at least doubling every two years (based on a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020.) As a consequence of this content overload, we have become overwhelmed by the constant surge of information, impatient in our need for information ‘right now,’ and distracted by the never-ending stream of websites, apps, and video clips. We spend so much time trying to sift through information that only a fraction of a typical working week is left over for learning.”

I once had a study journal that included the quote: “He is wise who knows the source of knowledge — who knows who has written and where it is to be found.” (A.A. Hodge) I’ve realized over time that just because we’re immersed in information doesn’t mean that we’re learning anything. The ability to monitor what you’re learning, track progress, and point to particular areas of improvement and development, that is learning. Having a system to track your continuous learning is key.

2. Self-Directed and Self-Motivated Learning

“The workplace of the future is more self-directed and autonomous meaning people can work where, when, and how they want. But, in most companies, there remains a large component of control.”

Think about situations you’ve been in where you were left to your own devices. How often do you fail to keep yourself motivated and productive when you’re outside a specific system of constraints? This begs the question, are people really prepared for this level of flexibility? Remote work is another facet of this autonomous work-life, which leads to the next point.

But beyond what our managers and employers need to do to empower us to be flexible as workers, we need to also consider what we as workers need to do to develop the skillset to make learning an integral part of our life even when there is no tangible structure or requirement to do so.

Key Takeaway #2: To avoid becoming overwhelmed by the exponential explosion of content and information, you need to have a method, a tool, a structure; something that can act as a model for you to organize the things you’re learning.

3. Dynamic Feedback To and From Managers

If managers don’t trust their employees to work remotely, why hire them at all? If managers took the time to discuss goals and deliverables with their teams, then they wouldn’t need to care so much about when and where they worked. But let’s face it, it is harder and more time-consuming to engage with employees on this level. Research shows that managers don’t like to give feedback, especially negative feedback, which leads to lack of engagement with their employees. Instead, many managers measure productivity by how much time their employees spend in the office.”

A big hurdle to enabling more worker flexibility is a lack of established expectations. I sometimes travel for work and am effectively working remotely. Am I as productive as I am when I’m in the office? Not necessarily. But I often lack specific outcomes that I’m working towards and therefore find myself sometimes drifting when left to my own devices. Though that drift is just as likely to happen in the office as out of it.

On the topic of feedback, I have noticed a common struggle in the professional world. We need a culture of humility and a hunger for constructive criticism. I spent two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As part of that experience, each missionary believes that it is not just a logistical question of how we can knock on as many doors as possible, but a spiritual exercise where we can be led to the people who we can help. If you are not humble, if you are not being a good person, you don’t have the same spiritual sensitivity. As a result, there is often (not always) an attitude among missionaries of eagerness when it comes to correction. We often want to be told what we can be doing better in hopes that we experience an increase of spiritual sensitivity and ultimately see more success.

Work doesn’t need to be a spiritual experience, but it ought to be pursued with an attitude of self-improvement. I have often seen situations where I’ve offered feedback to my colleagues, or interns that I’ve managed, and in response to that feedback they feel obligated to defend their actions or accuse me of not giving enough information. Granted, the feedback needs to flow both ways, but we should have an attitude of eager humility as we seek to get better and learn more fully.

Key Takeaway #3: While it is key to identify new principles, and develop a method for learning, it is the role of others that solidifies that learning, both through feedback regarding our skills and pushback regarding our ideas. Those relationships act as a system of accountability.

4. Well Developed Sense of Self-Evaluation

“Self-reflection is the ability to ultimately know yourself or be willing to get to know yourself better. Being able to self-reflect can also positively impact our work performance. A study focused on call centers shows that people who spent 15 minutes at the end of each day over the course of 10 days reflecting on what they had learned performed their work 23 percent better than those who did not self-reflect.”

The simple act of pausing to consider your learning can provide incremental growth. But developing a life-long habit of constantly evaluating your own learning and development can lead to quantum leaps in your growth.

“When self-reflection is applied to learning, especially in the context of ‘learning how to learn’ or in demonstrating learning agility, it provides the foundation for understanding our own strengths and weaknesses, keeping an open mind, accepting constructive criticism, and applying those insights to something more productive. One of the many benefits of peer-to-peer learning is that it gives us the opportunity to reflect on our own work. It also gives us the space to think more deeply about the work of others to provide thoughtful feedback. As management expert Peter Drucker once said, ‘Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.’”

Key Takeaway #4: As you stop to ponder your progress, you’ll notice patterns in your successes and your failures. Going forward, you can use those patterns to try and increase the % of time you succeed. You can even anchor specific metrics to develop a system of measurement that lets you say “when I do XYZ more often, I am successful.”

These four key principles have to begin and end with reflection, but what The Expertise Economy points us towards is a way of living deliberately. As we more carefully evaluate our learning process we can exponentially increase the rate at which we achieve our potential. For more thoughts on these concepts, check out my website for Intrinsic Value where this is just getting started.

Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book

“Companies that don’t reinvent themselves, don’t think about digital disruption, and don’t think about retraining and ups killing their workforce will be part of that churn.”

“Because historically we’ve only experienced these kinds of workforce transitions over decades, if not centuries, we are in unchartered territory, especially in terms of how quickly things are changing: ’There are few precedents in which societies have successfully retrained such large numbers of people.’”

“He added that people who dedicate less than an ideal 5–10 hours a week to learning ‘will obsolete themselves with the technology.’ This includes articles and books, podcasts, videos, etc. People are learning a lot more than they think but don’t always categorize it as learning.”

“No one knows for sure what skills are going to be needed for the future, so we need a shift in our thinking about learning and skill building too. This means companies need to create an environment where employees are continuously learning new skills: ups killing and respelling themselves at the same rate that things are changing. Companies can encourage employees to learn every day — learning should be built into the work that they already have, not something that they do separate from work.”

“Today, we know more than ever about how the human brain works and how people learn most effectively — whether they are trying to gain new knowledge, builds a new skill, or change a behavior.”

“According to Saxberg, ‘Learning is very context sensitive to what’s already in your head. You have to understand the cognitive aspects, like what have you already mastered? What is already in your long-term memory? What are your areas of expertise?’ When you realize there is something new you need to learn, Saxberg explains, ‘you need to start, persist, and put in mental effort. That’s when the brain changes. It’s like a muscle, and the brain actually changes as a result of learning.’ Motivation also plays a big part in effective learning. According to Saxberg, four things can go wrong with learning motivation:

• You don’t value what you are doing or how you are doing it
• You don’t believe you are capable of learning a complex subject
• You blame environmental circumstances (‘I just don’t have time to learn.’)
• You struggle with negative emotional states that distract you from learning — like anger, depression, or distraction

“That means if you expect people to learn, then you need to know what makes them tick from both a cognitive and motivational perspective.”

“Neuromyths about learning. Myth #3: People have an optimal channel (visual, auditory, etc.) through which they learn. Reality: People actually use as many channels to learn as they can access. Neuroscientist David Eagleman agrees, and adds that learning is most effective when all of the senses are combined into the learning experience (audio, visual, touch). He reinforces the idea that people learn best when they have to teach someone else how to do something.”

“However, the research shows that in education there is absolutely no correlation between learning fast and being smart. None.”

“An adult’s strongest motivators are internal (intrinsic) rather than external (extrinsic). Intrinsic motivators are those that come from within and satisfy our natural desire to want to do something; while extrinsic motivation drives us to do something for external rewards, such as money, perks, praise, and so on.”

“What today’s employees want is the ability to have an impact in their work, the flexibility of when and where to do their work, to see their work connected to a bigger purpose, and to have the opportunity to learn and grow in their careers. Compensation is a key external motivator, but recent studies have shown that people, particularly millennials, will take less pay for more flexibility and more opportunities to learn and advance in their careers.”

“When companies are mission-driven and employees are purpose-driven, the combination fosters ‘developmental engagement where a company aims to activate and develop more fully its employees (and the firm in general) to produce greater value for business and society.”

“As Dweck says, the difference between being told we have failed something and ’not yet’ is significant: “…if you get a failing grade, you think, I’m nothing, I’m nowhere. But if you get the grade ’Not yet,’ you understand that you’re on a learning curve. It gives you a path to the future.”

“People who value learning and can demonstrate learning agility in the workplace are valuable now and will continue to be in-demand talent in the future.”

“Some companies assume that the easiest way to resolve a problem is to run a training session rather than take the time to analyze the actual issue.”

“Companies have taken this training approach from the university model, but instead of expert professors imparting knowledge through lectures, we have trainers instructing a group or team in the workplace. In school, the students take notes, then use those notes to study for exams, but once the exam is over, for most people, the need to know has passed and a large amount of the knowledge is lost. Students may have gained sufficient knowledge to pass the exam and achieve high scores, but few acquire the necessary skills to apply this knowledge in a practical way. When this model is applied at work, we get similar results. Employees largely forget most of what they learned and rarely apply classroom knowledge to their work on the job.”

“Reflecting on what you learn is beneficial for so many reasons. It not only creates the environment where you take time to think about your experiences to gain greater insight, but also helps with problem-solving, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence (three of the most important skills for the workplace).”

“According to business professor Dorothy Leonard, you can ask the following questions to help navigate:

• Who is really good at what you want to do?
• Which experts are held in high regard by their peers and immediate supervisors?
• Whom do you want to emulate?”

“People really crave autonomy. If you want to provide an environment where employees can be autonomous, it’s important to focus more on what work gets done, not how it gets done.”

“Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said, ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’”

“Deloitte shows that high-impact learning organizations (HILOs) achieve three times the profit growth over a four-year period than companies that do not follow a similar approach.”

• “Am I aligned with the company’s vision and mission?
• Am I aligned with the company’s values?
• Do I enjoy going to work every day?
• Is the work rewarding and challenging? Can I have an impact?
• Do I enjoy working with my boss and co-workers?
• Do I have the opportunity to learn new skills and develop my career?
• Am I compensated fairly?”

“If you’re going to employ people anyways,’ she says, ‘why not make them the differentiator? They’re not a commodity.’ As Apple’s vice president of Retail, Stephanie Fehr, says, ‘It’s just a huge developmental advantage for people here.” (Compare to the idea of quantifying human capital)

“Interestingly, studies show that 30 percent of acquisitions fail because of a mismatch in cultures and difficulty integrating the talent.”

“At its core, a culture of learning aligns employee development with organizational goals. Often, the learning is ‘event-driven,’ meaning that people are taken out of their jobs to learn new skills, or a company will use a blended approach where they learn both through more structured learning and also on the job.”

“A culture of continuous learning is an environment where learning is part of everyday work, and where learning is more than compliance or required training. It is a culture where employees can learn in their own time and their own way through accessing all types of both formal and informal learning including videos, articles, podcasts, books, and even attending events. But more than just the myriad learning that surrounds us every day that helps us build skills for now and for the future, learning in a continuous-learning culture becomes something that people love to do and want to do, rather than something they dread.”

“In contrast, if you are a manger who views all employees as professionals, as people you hired to get a job done (but you don’t really care how they get it done), you are a power manager.”

“The workplace of the future is more self-directed and autonomous meaning people can work where, when, and how they want. But, in most companies, there remains a large component of control.” — begs the question, are people really prepared for this level of flexibility?

“The secret to performance and satisfaction — at work, at school, and at home — is the deeply human need to direct our lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. (Daniel Pink)”

“Autonomy is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice — which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others” (Daniel Pink). — learning in an unstructured way is what allows you to thrive in an unstructured environment (e.g. autonomy)

“Autonomy and flexibility only work if managers frequently connect with their employees to discuss tasks, set goals, set expectations, and provide feedback. If a remote-working situation isn’t working out, surely the manager should take accountability for the employee’s failure to deliver. Then they have a choice to make: either have a proper discussion to ascertain the reasons why they are struggling, or fire the employee. After all, if managers don’t trust their employees to work remotely, why hire them at all? If managers took the time to discuss goals and deliverables with their teams, then they wouldn’t need to care so much about when and where they worked. But let’s face it, it is harder and more time-consuming to engage with employees on this level. Research shows that managers don’t like to give feedback, especially negative feedback, which leads to lack of engagement with their employees. Instead, many managers measure productivity by how much time their employees spend in the office.” — we need a culture of humility and a hunger for constructive criticism.

“Show support by giving them dedicated time during the working day to learn. It’s no use expecting employees to learn new skills when they are constantly at the mercy of their daily tasks.”

“Without this follow-up, employees will likely forget what they’ve learned after a few months and consequently fail to apply their knowledge on the job.”

“Corporate training is often modeled on the notion of the “standard” or “average” person; but, according to Rose, there is no such thing as an average person, an average education, or even a standard way that people learn. Companies need to move away from the one-size-fits-all, standardized learning model and personalize every single employee’s experience. For learning to succeed, it hast to take place on the individual level.”

“Kelly embraced new challenges and opportunities and emphasized that the road to the right career often involves many detours along the way. It’s the rare person who has a standard career path.”

“You could argue that self-motivated employees take learning into their own hands even without managerial support or personalized technology to help them. But if you ask most people what they learned last year, not many could answer that question. That’s where personalized learning records or profiles come in — to help people keep track of all the valuable learning they do every day. Ultimately, you want learning to count for something towards your goals.”

“Overall, for personalized learning to work, the learner must be the person driving the goal, the manager should support it, and a mentor can help guide progress and provide feedback.”

“It is impossible for any meaningful learning to take place without that initial self-drive and self-motivation, and there is no better way to learn than applying new skills directly to real work.”

“A unique component of this strategy is enabling employees to keep their current role while taking time to work on a different project for a set time. For example, say an employee learned project management as a new skill. They can go onto the career marketplace and find a project to apply that skill and gain important real-work experience.”

“The biggest challenges to education are disinterest and apathy.”

“Once employees have a good sense of what skills they want to focus on, they can create a personalized learning or skill plan based on self-knowledge and their learning and career goals. It’s motivating for employees to know what they need to focus on and to chart their progress toward their goals. This is different from a development plan that is part of a performance review, which almost seems punitive. Instead, learning plans are a good way to create an inspiring career vision that will motivate your employees to want to learn new skills.”

“Most experts predict that the size of the digital universe is at least doubling every two years (based on a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020.) As a consequence of this content overload, we have become overwhelmed by the constant surge of information, impatient in our need for information ‘right now,’ and distracted by the never-ending stream of websites, apps, and video clips. We spend so much time trying to sift through information that only a fraction of a typical working week is left over for learning.” — Our apps have been designed to keep our consumption to a micro diet, making the overwhelm even worse.

“Leaders should ask themselves, ‘When I want to learn something, how do I learn?’ It is only by truly understanding how each of us learns that we will be able to build a learning platform that works for each and every employee.”

“Companies are reluctant to invest in talent that may end up learning to work for the competition. On the flip side, employees see further learning as an investment in themselves and their future.”

“Many companies spend most of their learning budgets on leaders, managers, or high-performing employees, and then leave the rest of their employees to fend for themselves. Having a digital strategy helps reach all employees, and it provides the company with a competitive advantage: employees are more likely to stay in a company that invests in skill building and further learning.”

“When you think about creating content, find out if that content already exists either at your company or free on the internet. If you do this, you can then spend time creating content that is specific to your company or your expertise rather than duplicating content that is already high quality and serves the purpose.”

“What if employees could develop their expertise by tapping into their desire to learn from and collaborate with their peers? What if learning was integrated into work, and collaboration with coworkers was the prominent form of learning in the workplace?”

“Most organizations still depend on outdated learning management systems, training courses delivered through PowerPoint presentations by someone in HR, or outsourced vendor programs. Over $130 billion is spent this way on corporate training in the US, with organizations struggling to see the benefits.”

“The point is that learning cannot be ordered up like a burger in a fast food restaurant. There is no quick fix. Learning is about gaining new skills and knowledge from the people around us; in fact, studies have shown that even the act of learning itself is a major contributor to job satisfaction.”

“The other dynamic to peer learning is reciprocity. People received feedback from the group for their own work, and they tend to put more time and energy into providing meaningful feedback on their peers’ work as well. That simply doesn’t happen when the boss is delivering one-way feedback to employees.”

“Jaime Casap, education evangelist at Google, believes that peer-to-peer learning does not come naturally to us. ’The problem is we’re not open to peer-to-peer learning as a society. And what I mean by that is we talk about collaboration in education, but we don’t mean it. We teach kids to be individuals and to value individual accomplishments.’” — How do you create a culture of humility? Or seeking out constructive criticism? LDS missionaries are often pretty good at this.

Self-Reflection Skills

• “Self-reflection is the ability to ultimately know yourself or be willing to get to know yourself better. Being able to self-reflect can also positively impact our work performance. A study focused on call centers shows that people who spent 15 minutes at the end of each day over the course of 10 days reflecting on what they had learned performed their work 23 percent better than those who did not self-reflect.”
• “When self-reflection is applied to learning, especially in the context of ‘learning how to learn’ or in demonstrating learning agility, it provides the foundation for understanding our own strengths and weaknesses, keeping an open mind, accepting constructive criticism, and applying those insights to something more productive. One of the many benefits of peer-to-peer learning is that it gives us the opportunity to reflect on our own work. It also gives us the space to think more deeply about the work of others to provide thoughtful feedback. As management expert Peter Drucker once said, ‘Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.’”

Critical-Thinking Skills

• “Critical thinking is the ability to use our knowledge and intellect to analyze information or situations without judgement or bias to make balanced, thoughtful, evidence-based decisions and resolutions.”
• “During the past 10 years, critical thinking has become one of the most highly sought traits in employees, and it is still an important skill for the future. A recent report called ’The Future of Jobs’ by the World Economic Forum shows that critical-thinking skills will rise in demand as organizations rush to deal with an ever-increasing variety of complex problems.”

“Giving honest feedback, listening, and being able to receive feedback may be some of the most important skills of all.”

“In an ideal world, everyone would successfully learn something of value, and then focus on self-reflection, critical thinking, and providing and accepting thoughtful feedback. In the corporate world it is rare that the four-step learning loop is completed. Often, learning comes to a halt after the “gaining knowledge” stage.”

“Receiving feedback involves keeping an open mind and appreciating that the other person has taken the time to think about how you can be better or do something better. Ideally, feedback should be perceived as a generous gesture that should be met with gratitude, rather than defensiveness. While Google’s Casap believes that exchanging honest feedback is a key part of peer-to-peer learning, he acknowledges it’s not an easy concept to apply: ’There is an old saying ‘be careful when someone asks you for feedback, because what they are really looking for is validation.’ So if you show me an article you are writing for a magazine and you ask me to review it for you, I’m usually going to give it back to you with some statements like ‘it was well written,’ or ‘don’t take it personally,’ or, ‘I just have a couple of edits.’ I might not even dive deep because I don’t want to offend you or make you feel bad about what you wrote versus really giving you feedback and really giving you assessments. So, this idea of peer-to-peer starts at this level with an understanding and appreciation that real collaboration is the ability to ask good questions, the ability to give good feedback and take good feedback, the ability to assess someone and be assessed, the ability to influence and to build consensus. Those types of things we really need to build and we’re not doing that in education.”

“The findings led Google researchers to conclude that psychological safety, or a shared belief that team members feel safe enough to express themselves honestly and openly without fear of judgment or retribution, was the key ingredient in binding team members together.”

“As Google discovered, showing empathy, listening to each other, being sensitive to feelings and needs, and engaging in emotional conversations normally shied away from in the workplace are key to productive working relationships among peers.”

“‘The feedback is honest,’ he says, ‘and could be perceived as a bit harsh, but for me it is invaluable. Besides, all the designers on Dribble follow the same code: ‘Don’t take it personally, you are not your design.’”

“People tend not to engage in self-reflection for several reasons. They either don’t understand how it works, or they don’t like the thought of taking the necessary time out from their busy day, or they don’t like the idea of assessing their own actions and potential areas of weakness.” — sometimes doing nothing is actually the biggest something.

“What would I do if I could do anything?”

“What he learned by working at two tech startups was that the issue at nonprofits was partly about money, but more importantly, it was about not having access to the same talent. To really scale a company, Hurst believed in hiring ahead of its needs; nonprofits were always hiring way behind their needs.”

“I believe that high-stakes testing, like the ACT or the SAT, doesn’t have anything to do with who you are or what your potential is. In fact, it’s strongly correlated simply with your socioeconomic status at the time of taking the test. The education system incentivizes people to master test taking, not how to learn.”

“I started to think about the ways our formal education is not representative of who we are or what we can do. More importantly, I realized that it should be our skills, irrespective of how or where we develop them, that should be what determines our opportunities.”

“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings” (Laszlo Bock)

“Core skills taught in the liberal arts like critical thinking, problem solving, and communications are in high demand today in every industry.”

“The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.” (Peter Senge)

“Skills are not only becoming the currency of learning, but also an economic indicator, and the very language of workforce analytics.” (Maksim Ovsyannikov)

“Are people learning? One of the most important attributes people can have regardless of where they work, is learning agility and the desire to continuously learn.”

“Especially for data-driven leaders, if someone can point out errors in the data you show, you won’t get to tell the story behind the data. It just won’t be credible.”

“If you were to ask someone about their health and they told you that they ran a marathon 20 years ago, what would you think? Similarly, when someone asks you, “Tell me about your education,” how do you answer? Most of us immediately think about our formal education — the degrees or certificates we have earned. You might mention the university, college, or school you graduated from. Or you’ll respond that you didn’t go to college, or you haven’t finished your degree. Whether you’re 20 years into your career or 20 months, you’ll answer the question about your education through the lens of formal schooling. Which is absurd.”

“You don’t stop learning once you finish school. We learn the entirety of our lives, everywhere we go. But most of the time you are likely not very intentional about what you learn and how you acquire new knowledge. Instead, learning happens in an organic way: you learn a new skill by watching a peer give a presentation, or because you picked up a book or stumbled onto a TED talk. In the expertise economy, it’s not important how you gain your expertise, just that you did. The challenge we are left with is how we make expertise count in meaningful ways, so we can use it to secure jobs, advance careers, and change the world.”

“We are all trying to keep up with what we need to learn. Accelerations in technology and science are outpacing the capacity of humans and society to adapt.”

“Being able to understand the expertise economy on a holistic basis — your country’s skills, your industry’s skills, your company’s skills, as well as the skills you have as an individual — is the currency of the future.”

“But, for some reason, companies have forgotten some of the most important business management principles. Greenblatt’s philosophy is ’they do well, we do well; we do well, they do well. That’s the deal.’”

“It’s not easy to talk about skills as a currency because there is no standard language around skills.” (e.g. no exchange rate, no comparable model)

“When we hire people, from within a company or externally, the question we should be answering is ‘Can this person do the job and how well?’”

“For us to solve the labor market problems we have in this economy, we must begin speaking the language of skills and stop caring about pedigrees, logos, time spent learning, test-taking ability, interviewing skills, or anything else. The first step to speaking this language is to think of your company as its own labor market.”

“If you could have a Harvard education OR a Harvard degree, but not both, which would you choose?” — Maybe one of the most insightful comments about how we feel regarding education that I’ve seen.

“The Lumina Foundation’s Connecting Credentials rubric is a popular eight-level rubric that is applicable to any skill and serves as a useful way to set standards and measure mastery.”

“Once these skills have been measured, then you can start to leverage the information to create a new dynamic in the company. We propose using a new standard we call the Skills Quotient or SQ. The SQ is the skills you have divided by the skills you need (then multiplied by 100).”

“The goal of the SQ is twofold: first, to measure how well-equipped a person is to perform at potential, that is to say, to measure the complete abilities of a body of workers against the work to be done; and second, to signal the potential threats and opportunities within an organization.”

“People want to grow and to be challenged, but they need to have enough of a baseline to succeed as well as enough context to get to the right answers if they work hard.”

“Anyone with an SQ above 90 gets flagged for immediate review. Why? Because these high performers will likely look for their next growth opportunity elsewhere if they aren’t given one within the company.”

“A prestigious technical university has identified a critical set of skills and skill levels that they want all graduates of their supply chain management master’s program to achieve. To accomplish this goal, all graduates go through a rigorous skill measurement process for each of these critical skills as part o their last semester before graduation. Those skills that have the lowest actual levels relative to their expected levels get extra attention, with relevant projects incorporated into several core courses. Over time, the university calculates the skills quotient of each graduate against the target skill set to track as program quality improves.”

“If you have kids who are younger than five, 65 percent of them are likely to end up in jobs and careers that haven’t yet been invented. So when we think about the skills of the future, it’s difficult to predict exactly what people will need. Because of that, we have to think less about the traditional view of careers as job roles and job descriptions and more about the skills people will need to solve the world’s most pressing problems. This is why learning and continuously building skills are so important. It’s why employees need to be agile learners to keep up with, and be prepared for, what’s new and how technology is advancing in the world. Skills are currency in the expertise economy, and the most successful companies are already thinking about this and putting strategies in place — these will be the companies that will thrive in an uncertain future.”

“A highly motivated person is now able to pursue an education and unlock career opportunities previously impossible to imagine with the constraints of finance and geography.”

“Universities are typically subject-based and not career-based. Students can major in math or computer science, marketing or public relations, and it gives them a solid foundation for a career. But they still need professional development along the way. Colleges tend to say goodbye to students as they graduate and, typically, only get back in touch for alumni group participation or for donations. But students’ education doesn’t end when they graduate. In fact, it’s just beginning, especially given that most people could be in the workforce for 50 or 60 years.

So, what happens to graduates who want to learn more during their careers? Jaime Casap, education evangelist at Google, says “…people don’t go back to their university when they need professional development. Instead, they turn to their company or to other solutions like Degreed or Khan Academy. So, if you spent four or more years in higher education, a place that influenced the direction of your life, those schools should be a place you feel connected to and want to get more from.”

Casap tells the story of his daughter, Elaine. She graduated from college two years ago, and she hasn’t been contacted by her university since. Casap wonders why she isn’t gettin an email a year later asking, ‘Hey Elaine, what are you doing today? Oh, you’re working in video production at the New York Times. We just scanned through your transcript and there are some updates to the skills you learned since you graduated, and here’s a refresher course on production skills.’ Or, ‘We noticed that you didn’t take journalism and are now in that field, so here’s a journalism class you might want to take. Oh, and by the way, there are nine other people in your university that live in New York, and they are also interested in taking a journalism class, why don’t you all take the program together?’ While this might seem like a big shift, helping universities stay connected to graduates throughout their careers benefits both parties.”

— Compare this to some universities who have started to offer lifetime access to their courses for life to their alumni

“Bored and complacent people don’t innovate; they get disrupted.”

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.” (Eric Hoffer)