Grow or Die - The Case for Education Institutions to Capitalize on the Rapidly Evolving Needs of An Automated Job Market
Approximately 40 million people in the United States will need retraining in the next 10 years due to automation. The opportunity is there for higher/further education institutions to teach more students, but it requires the commitment by institutional leadership to invest in digital transformation in order to capitalize on the $280 billion market.
It’s estimated that 30% of the global workforce[1] will need retraining over the next 10 years — a significant increase from historic trends. Who’s going to conduct that training? This much-needed training encompasses badges, certificates, associates, bachelors, and masters degrees. However, most higher/further education institutions around the world are not properly organized to partner with employers[2], either to process the resulting volume of students or to provide the advanced technical coursework that is timely and cost effective for all involved — including the institution.
In the U.S. alone, more than 40 million people over next 10 years will need retrained with more advanced skills. Such training often demands more advanced technical instruction, imparting the knowledge, method, and tools required to succeed at working with new technologies. But it also needs to be provided at a price and convenience that make sense for employers, students, and schools. These requirements present both significant opportunities and great challenges for the digital transformation in higher education.
My company, HIGHER DIGITAL, recently evaluated efficiency and effectiveness of an institution’s process for addressing local needs for industry training. This institution works closely with local and state-wide employers, who need help retraining employees being displaced by automation but who also have important, unfilled jobs to fill. In the course of our research, we discovered that over 90% of the administrative work was processed manually by 3 full-time staff members to on-board roughly 30 students per work day.
This institution is not prepared organizationally, operationally, and technically to meet the future needs of its current customers and community — and it’s not alone. If left unaddressed, the cost and scale of its manual workforce development processes will make it impossible for the institution to meet the projected demands of employers and students over the next 10 years.
The state where this institution resides is faced with a pressing and immediate challenge: retraining a workforce of between 750,000 to 1.2 million employees by 2030. Employers will be forced to go elsewhere to fulfill their training and education needs if the state or the institutions it’s working with do not prioritize transformation. How fast the institution can get there depends completely on the institutional leadership and its willingness to embrace change and to make a long-term commitment to investing in digital transformation.
As further evidence of this trend, in this year alone Amazon, AT&T Inc., Walmart Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Accenture all announced plans to invest significantly in retraining their employees for more advanced jobs, employees whose current positions no longer provide sufficient value, or are becoming automated.[3]
Starbucks reached an agreement earlier this year with Arizona State University (ASU), a Higher Digital client, whereby ASU provides such retraining for an affordable price, while Starbucks covers the full cost for its employees.[4] Expanding on such corporate partnerships, ASU also announced in July 2019 that it’s expanding its partnership with Uber to include “all eligible drivers and their families… for 80+ online degrees, plus certificates in entrepreneurship and English language learning.”[5]
Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), another Higher Digital client, also announced this summer that Walmart is expanding its “Live Better U program, a program designed to eliminate barriers to college enrollment and graduation. As part of the expansion, Walmart will now offer all of its 1.4 million U.S. associates the opportunity to earn an associate or bachelor’s degree in business, IT or STEM from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) through the University’s partnership with Guild Education, who works with Walmart to administer the program.”[6]
Path-breaking institutions like ASU and SNHU are committed to providing high-quality, affordable, and globally accessible courses and programs, but they do it by committing to digital transformation across all departments. The demand for higher/further education is growing, but the pool of students who need more education and training comprise a broader, more complicated market than the shrinking traditional 4-year degree cohort. If our client institution is unable or unwilling to transform, other institutions will seize upon the opportunity to expand their teaching missions— “to the victor goes the spoils.”
Those of you who understand the challenges in bringing about change within higher education institutions might be thinking that digital transformation sounds almost impossible, given the archaic structures, culture, and belief systems of most institutions. However, simple, incremental steps can have a profound positive impact, while still working within a challenging budgetary environment.
Based on years of experience working with all types of institutions, I recommend considering the following steps:
- Get an independent, agnostic assessment of your institution.
- Conduct an environmental scan of the needs of employers, the interests of students, and the services of competitors.
- Engage with faculty to discover and remove technical barriers from their day-to-day routine — freeing them up to spend more time teaching and engaging students.
- Reconsider how your institution approaches technology. If you view your technology department as only a cost center and service organization, you will need to make adjustments so that technology can become a strategic partner, central to your educational mission.
- Hire/appoint an “Academic Product Manager” to:
- engage with academics to provide curriculum changes and plans and determine how best to map current offerings with future ones
- assess and provide gap analysis on current technical vendors and systems necessary to support growth for more programs, certificate, and degrees
Working closely with software partners who understand your challenges and can help you prioritize your needs and accelerate digital change is vital. The best software vendors prioritize end-user experience and market dynamics, while also being sensitive to the costs and level-of-effort necessary to implement and support technology infrastructure changes. Your relationship with such vendors must be considered strategic and long-term, and include team members who are willing to (a) understand your unique challenges and plans, and (b) and quickly incorporate your needs into a modern solution that will accelerate, not hinder, positive change.
In the United States alone, there will be an estimated $210B opportunity[7] over the next 10 years for institutions to expand their education and credentialing offerings to serve many more students and employers, who will need additional education and training to support upcoming occupational and business transformations. Institutions like Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire University, and others are embracing this opportunity — will your institution?
Change is not easy; it increases anxiety for all of us. However, at Higher Digital we focus on helping institutions transform organizationally, operationally, and technically — innovating how we deliver targeted advice to institutions of any size, more quickly and at a lower cost. Try our free institutional health assessment service today, and see instantly how we assess and benchmark your organizational, operational and technical health against other global institutions: https://searesults.higher.digital/
About HIGHER DIGITAL
HIGHER DIGITAL partners with executives and stakeholders of higher education institutions to help them assess, plan, and transform their digital strategy and execution capabilities through an innovative and ground-breaking method. Higher Digital fully supports and upholds global privacy and security standards.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-14/employers-can-t-retrain-the-u-s-workforce-by-themselves?srnd=premium
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-retrain-a-third-of-its-u-s-workforce-11562841120
[4] https://asunow.asu.edu/20190402-asu-news-starbucks-now-pays-uk-employees-university-degrees
[5] https://asunow.asu.edu/20190807-asu-news-uber-partnership-expands-eligible-drivers-nationwide
[6] https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/2019/06/walmart-selects-snhu-to-offer-more-degree-programs-for-associates
[7] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/11/amazon-invests-700-million-to-retrain-a-third-of-its-u-s-workforce-by-2025/
