How A Non-Formal Education Network Can Impact Economic Growth
“The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings” — Alfred Marshall.
New technologies mean new jobs and new skills, and because of it, jobs go unfilled. In the USA alone, there are currently 6.6 million unfilled high-paying jobs, mostly because there just aren’t enough workers with the right skills.
These “right skills” generally means hybrid training of technical skills and another field — and that doesn’t happen with a college degree. Young people try to meet these needs with multiple degrees, but they are also starting to realize the quality of education is more important than the quantity of schooling. This distinction not only impacts personal economic growth but also the global economy.
Where are the jobs
Generally speaking, these new hybrid jobs have emerged in the digital sectors our economy. Platform business models such as Google, Facebook, Salesforce, and iOS have created huge networked economies around themselves.
But this is just the beginning of the changes to our global jobs marketplace. The pace of technological innovations has accelerated and its impacting all of our global industries. Employer are becoming increasingly frustrated with the rigid nature and disorganization of the formal education economy. Employers are looking for more than knowledge — they want skills, hybrid skills. Even top-tier tech companies such as Google, Apple, and IBM, no longer require a college education.
While some college programs are trying to get better aligned with the market, colleges are notoriously bad at collaborating with each other to respond to the changing economy. Of the 600 or so colleges trying new education models, none are collaborating with any other.
Despite the disconnect, individual college programs in the formal education marketplace have thrived over the last few decades. Economically. Instead of offering quality education, in response to the changes in the job marketplace, college programs have been charging a prestige price. They have been selling a type of insurance policy for the job marketplace. But the time/cost efficient of these degrees has significantly declined. Now, students have amassed more than $1.5 trillion of student loan debt and many of these debts should be considered bad investments.
A Collaborative Networked Solution
Networks make everything more efficient, and most networks exist within interdependent economies where collaboration is crucial for creative, innovative solutions. Ironically, students, universities, and employers are one larger and highly interdependent networked economies globally but don’t collaborate well at all. Sharing network information is key tenet of market efficiencies, and information asymmetries is what gives College programs a competitive advantage.
Collaboration is always formed around a “shared purpose”, which formal education simply lacks. As technological is transforming the workplace, this lack of collaboration has left the formal education economy in disorganization.
Blockchain and Sharing Networks
There’s a new idea that could transform the failing models, and that, of course, is blockchain. If you are familiar, you already know the question is not Does my business need blockchain? but How can blockchain enhance my business? The “readable ledger” of blockchain promises to allow companies to redefine the nature of their network and business and create new alignments around a shared purpose and the decentralization of network information.
With blockchain, the information on the network becomes fortified, and thus more valuable through decentralization, making the network itself more transparent to decision makers. This logical next step for companies in the emerging P2P commons of the sharing economy is what we call the Collaborative Networked Economy.
The Collaborative Networked Economy
The Collaborative Networked Economy could be highly transformative in how it can bring data insights, learning, and collaboration to every corner of an organization. It enables a collective effort and individual thinking at the same time.
We are approaching a future where students can find the hybrid skills employers want. The blockchain behind our project, and the transparency it guarantees, means our mission and core purpose will be more than words. It will be action.
Our purpose is to create positive global employment outcomes through non-formal education.
Economic Impact
Our shared purpose is directly related to the problems of the current world economy, at least in terms of jobs. Which is substantial and reflected in the numbers. The underemployment rate hit 12.5% in 2017, despite the massive number of open high-paying jobs. There is also an underlying trend of students foregoing college altogether. For many, there’s is now a powerful economic impetus to develop the right skills to join a more productive workforce.
Numbers like this play out in every country around the world, and we believe it the free flow of information and collaboration between students, training programs, and employers can go a long way toward solving it.
Non-formal education is a way to build the professional networks that you need to launch your career.. Check us out at https://tapyournetwork.com/
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