“Do It Yourself” (DIY) Education

May 9th, 12 / 0 Comments

It’s been coming for the last few years. But in the wake of the “single biggest change in education since the printing press“, it seems more than ever that higher education is at a crossroads. The Harvard-MIT collaboration on e-learning that is generating headlines around the world makes us face the question again. Faced with a changing economy (higher prices, more debt, lower starting salaries, fewer standard job positions, etc), do we use this moment to dig deep into all our historical investment in our education system and make sure we are leveraging it properly OR do we embrace new approaches, new technologies, and fundamentally new ways of thinking about what constitutes adult education?

In a punchy interview with Roy Goodman, the host of the University of the District of Columbia’s online TV show “Higher Education Today”, education maven Anya Kamenetz makes a strong case for the latter approach. She is a senior writer at Fast Company magazine and author of DIY U and The Edupunks Guide.

Kamenetz argues that most of what we do “when our eyes are open” is learn about the world, and that the current level of content and networked communication available to all at the click of a button means that “Do It Yourself” (DIY) education has a platform like never before. Thus, there are “wrecking balls coming for the edifice of higher education”. Now that’s a visual. If you are a university administrator, or die-hard academic, I bet that made you wince just a little.

The whole video interview is worth watching as it takes on a range of issues, from how a student can pursue a DIY education to what this will look like in a developing country such as India (both pros and cons), and from the role of public funding in education (and what alternative forms that funding can take) to managing student debt.

But here are a couple of 2-minute sections that particularly stood out for me, and I’ll encourage you to check those out.

Content vs Credentials (from 4:20 to 6:30)

With increasing online and non-formal options available, there has got to be an “unbundling” of the content of education (what you learn) from the credential of education (whichever authority says that you have learned it). And with costs rising faster than income, it’s going to be the only way to enable access to quality education for the majority of students of the future. This is what Harvard and MIT are seemingly trying to do.

Hybrid Learning (from 22:10 to 24:10)

While we will unbundle content from credential, on another level there is actually more bundling happening. Recent research has shown that the best education models combine online and in-person learning. There is a great explosion of new services as well as re-application of existing technologies to help foster this bundling, from open courseware platforms to Quora to Twitter. And thus, time in the classroom should move from a passive learning status quo to more active learning experiences.

 

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. Where do you stand on this issue?

Future of Education

Prove You’re Worth It: Getting a Job in the Social Sector

Apr 16th, 12 / 0 Comments

Last week, I guest-lectured on social entrepreneurship to a group of master’s students at a well-known university in the Washington, DC area. Towards the end, the conversation veered towards the idea behind what we’re doing here at The Amani Institute. When I described a disillusionment amongst employers with certain types of higher education, a few students reacted with annoyance and pique.

“But we do have valuable skills”, they exclaimed. “Don’t you think that its up to employers to figure out how to deploy us? They need to meet us half-way. Isn’t part of the problem that organizations aren’t being creative enough?”

To which I have a simple answer. If you think you’re worth hiring, prove it. Show that you can add value that the organization needs. I often tell the story of the summer intern at Ashoka who led other summer interns in the production of this video, which is now used all around the world by Ashoka staff when presenting the organization. And, surprise, surprise, Ashoka hired this intern as soon as she graduated! Because she had proved she could do something the organization needed.

Marketing guru Seth Godin laid out another way of thinking about this in his blog post, ‘How to get a job with a small company‘. For the words “small company”, substitute “NGO” or “social sector organization” and everything else applies. Everything else.

And he ends with a gem:

 ”Once you demonstrate that you contribute far more than you cost, now it’s merely a matter of figuring out a payment schedule.”

As more people start social businesses (like us), this way of thinking, this way of proving that you’re worth it, is going to become a key to job-getting success. Sadly, most universities’ Career Services centers are still focused on nabbing jobs in the “large companies economy”. This needs to change. But students like the ones I spoke with last week can’t wait around for that change to happen. They need jobs now, and that’s why they need to start showing they are worth it.

And then companies and organizations will not only meet them half-way, but will in fact begin to pursue them.

Careers

How to Create a Tribe – Experiences at THNK: The Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership

Mar 31st, 12 / 0 Comments

(All photos courtesy THNK)

Blood tests on your smart phone. Clothes made of LED lights that turn you into walking social media. Powering your kitchen from your own poop. Avatars. Swarms of robots where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The Internet of Things. And perhaps wildest of all: movable, electronic tattoos.

These are some of the technologies – or in other words, the way the world is about to change – that we were given sneak previews of at THNK. The Amsterdam School for Creative Leadership, in which I (and the The Amani Institute) have been chosen to participate in the founding class.

Walking on Water

Having just returned from Amsterdam after the first session of the program, I’m struck by the sensation that things may never be the same. One of my classmates, Ben Keene, wrote an evocative blog post about the way the week was structured, and I won’t attempt to match his chronicle, but do check it out. Ben was struck by the constant refrain at THNK, “having your head in the clouds and feet on the ground”.

And yes, we did start off by walking on water too. For 11 km on Day 1 of the program, we hiked across the UNESCO World Heritage portion of the North Sea. It was a trek as laden with leadership metaphors (“make your own path because stepping into others’ footsteps bogs you down” or “if you stop moving forward, you start sinking”) as were we with our backpacks filled with food and warm clothing. We ate lunch standing upright on a little island of mussel rocks with land blurry behind us on the horizon – also a first.

Over the course of the week, we learnt and practiced so much that will help us become better agents of change: how to know the difference between the form of your passion (which changes) and the essence of it (which endures); how to think before acting (Socratic Dialogue = left brain workout) and how to act before thinking (Improv Comedy = right brain workout); and how to take a problem and stand it on its end (“Re-frame the brief!”) to arrive at truly innovative solutions.

We confronted mind-bending statements such as “It’s not just that the rate of change is accelerating, but the rate at which the ‘rate of change is accelerating’ is itself accelerating.”

Yeah. Take a minute to digest that little chestnut.

Yet what I’ve been thinking about most since I left Amsterdam was what I felt was a central tension in the course – one which is far greater than our little group, and which underpins the next decade, with implications not just for leadership but for education, business, governing, and the quest to leave the planet a little better than we found it.

The World is Ending VS. We Can Be Gods

Two of the most compelling speakers came from the school of thought that we’re destroying the planet, sleep-walking into economic and ecological catastrophe. They were balanced by others who showed how future technologies  – like the ones I listed at the start – are going to solve all these problems and forever change the world and how we interact with it.

These competing visions are shaping an era of tension between scarcity of resources (whether financial or material) on one hand and technological abundance on the other. They also bring up serious questions about the ethics of leadership. If we can indeed be Gods and create alternative life forms – e.g. swarms of robots – won’t we inevitably harness that technology for war? We already have individual flying robots (aka drones) causing havoc with civilian casualties – what happens when there’s an army of drones that blocks out the sun? Didn’t we learn anything from the development of the nuclear weapon? Will we never learn that none of us are as cruel as all of us?

This is just one set of questions; there are others, mystical ones that are perhaps even more important: when we become a “quantified self”, don’t we lose some of the spiritual and ethereal parts of us that can never be reduced to mere data, the things that actually make us human? Yet, who can possibly argue with the revolutionary potential of conducting a blood test, and thus diagnosing disease, through your cell phone?

Apart from the gravity of these questions, it was also amusing to see the two camps cross the aisle at certain times, when the dystopians declared utopian dreams such as “ending the nation-state in the next decade” and the utopians revealed dystopian pessimism when, for instance, bemoaning the First World’s inability to keep up with Third World innovation because of “sunk costs in infrastructure”, which could also just be code for that pesky notion of being accountable to your citizens.

Birthing a Tribe   

So, these then are the questions at the heart of the THNK program – and ones I’m looking forward to grappling with over the next six months, alongside a truly tremendous group of classmates, staff, and faculty. The Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership is unabashed about declaring that they have set out consciously to create a tribe of accelerated global leaders. And on the last day of the session, when we closed down a nightclub at 4am and still had most of the group (including faculty) awake and ready to keep partying, there was no doubt that the tribe had been born.

 

Boundaryless World, Future of Education

Seven Tips for Working in International Development

Mar 8th, 12 / 3 Comments

Springtime in Washington DC is also career-planning time for the thousands of students in this college-and-government town. This is when universities scour the beltway’s networks to find people who hold jobs their students want to have, and invite them to provide been-there-done-that wisdom and share professional scar tissue with students soon to hit the workforce.

In the last two weeks, I’ve attended one such panel on careers in international development at Georgetown University’s new Master’s in Global Human Development Program, and spoken at another at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Across both panels, I was struck by how much professionals across diverse organizations agree on what students can do to best position themselves for fulfilling employment after graduation.

The speakers on both panels represented the following organizations:

  • The World Bank
  • USAID
  • Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI)
  • CDC Development Solutions
  • Strategic Social
  • The US Trade and Development Agency
  • Ashoka

What’s noticeable about this list is the wide representation across the international development sector: government agencies, multi-lateral entities, private sector development firms, and nonprofits. Here are some of the suggestions the panels offered to those seeking careers in these types of organizations, all of which induced nods of agreement across the rest of the panelists:

1) If you’re a young person graduating today, you should have mastered social media by the time you graduate because it’s a skill that you can bring to the table (of the organizations you want to work at).

2) Some of the other essential skills for the next decade are collaboration and working in teams, mobility across cultures, a global mindset and ability to connect dots across borders, in addition to specific technical and functional skills.

Can you take one look at this photo and know what's going on?

3) Develop a robust understanding of how the world works, learn to love operating in different cultures, and be adaptable across different tasks. This means that you need to spend time abroad and it almost doesn’t matter if you spend it in a dive boat on the Great Barrier Reef or backpacking across the Sahel – both are more valuable than a Master’s degree if you want to do international work.

4) Do what you can to get your foot in the door – volunteering is better than nothing.

5) Know that a career in international development involves a lot of time socializing with colleagues; in a sense you’re always working, whether in a pristine rainforest or in a sketchy nightclub.

6) The better you are at Excel, the easier you will find your job.

7) There are lots of different ways to get where you want to go. It is almost impossible to make a wrong career choice in your 20s – follow your gut, keep an open-mind, take risks, and you will find your way.

 

International development professionals, does this sound like a good list? What other advice do you have for students seeking careers in international development?

Students, what further questions do you have for those who already work in the field you want to work in?

 

 

Careers

Larry Summers and the Future of Education

Mar 1st, 12 / 0 Comments

Whether you like or loathe Larry Summers (and sometimes its easier to make a case for the latter), the former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, President of Harvard University, senior economic advisor to President Obama and currently one of the leading contenders to take over as head of the World Bank…it is impossible to ignore him.

A few weeks ago, Summers wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that should be required reading for every university President, faculty member, administrator – and student. I encourage you to read the whole article, but its core thesis is that in a world that is changing very rapidly, the sector of society tasked with preparing young people for this world is not changing anywhere near fast enough to keep up with the times.

He specifically lists several areas in which universities and high schools need to evolve to help their students be prepared to thrive in the modern world. Here are the highlights:

  1. Mastery of facts and information is much less important than knowing how to process and use them.
  2. For most of the workforce, university is the last time you are evaluated based on individual performance.
  3. Watching lectures on video is increasingly a more effective way to learn than watching them in person.
  4. Learning environments need to move from facilitating passive acquisition of knowledge to active or dynamic ways of absorbing and deploying knowledge.
  5. Counterintuitively, as the world becomes more open, and translation technologies improve, the need to master any language other than English will decline. Yet having several international experiences will be critical.
  6. In high school, the need to study trigonometry is fast being replaced by the need to study probability and decision-analysis.

Do read the whole article – Summers is a lot more eloquent than this synopsis conveys. But, alas, my education focused more on acquiring than synthesizing knowledge.

 

Future of Education

Fostering Human Capital Development in our Organizations

Feb 22nd, 12 / 0 Comments

Typically at The Amani Institute, we examine the world from the perspective of the social sector professional, in particular how the changing nature of education and the workplace is affecting the way these future leaders must prepare for their careers. This week, however, we turn our focus to the employers of these practitioners, and the way in which organizations and the people who run them can set up the infrastructure to provide an appealing environment for their employees.

In this vein, we’re delighted to present a recent study from one of our Board Members, Dr. K. C. Soares who has co-authored a white paper examining the nature of human capital development and its relationship to organizational growth in the fast-growing impact investing industry. Please click here for the executive summary of the study, which identifies nine key discussion points that are worth pondering for all of us with an interest both in working in top-tier organizations as well as leading those organizations. And you can also read the full study here.
News and Updates

Mighty is the Mongrel

Feb 15th, 12 / 0 Comments

Mighty is the Mongrel is the title of a brilliant 2007 essay by G. Pascal Zachary in Fast Company magazine. I urge you to read it. And not just because it could also be the rallying call for The Amani Institute.

Zachary argues that embracing diversity (ethnic, intellectual, life-history) and heterogeneity is going to be critical to the success of organizations this century because “the conditions for creating wealth have changed in ways that play to the strengths of hybrid individuals, organizations, and nations”, and because such mongrelization is “the only antidote to stagnation, the only durable source of innovation, the only viable way to preserve…tradition while embracing change.”

This is not new, of course. Nor are the types of stories Zachary tells of how companies like Hewlett-Packard, Phillips, McKinsey, and Schering AG came to this realization and how they have re-tooled their hiring practices and organizational structures to incentivize and promote diversity across the organization. The world’s leading corporations have always retained a keen nose for sensing which way the wind blows.

What’s more interesting is Zachary’s explicit encouragement for boundary-crossing as a key to individual and organizational success. When people go out of their comfort zones into new countries and workplaces, they become invaluable as the stranger who is more likely to question conventional wisdom, or the misfit whose prior experience makes her more likely to articulate a creative solution. They also become more likely to contribute not just their mind but their whole being.

As boundaries between nations, between the classroom and the world outside, between working for a living and working for meaning, all become less meaningful, we must remember that our roots matter too – for both individual and organizational sustenance. This is not a call for the dissolution of individual identity, but for allowing for the development of “both roots and wings” in our employees, our students, our children.

Boundaryless World

Deciphering the Jobs Paradox: Part III

Feb 8th, 12 / 2 Comments

In Part I and Part II of this series, I described some of the structural paradoxes in the jobs economy and the university industry, that are contributing to the puzzling phenomena of simultaneous high unemployment and unmet demand for talent. In this concluding part, I mine The Economist’s Special Report for some suggestions for how emerging professionals can position themselves to navigate these paradoxes for successful careers in the social sector.

Society is the Classroom: How to Become What Employers Are Searching For

The September 2011 Economist Report on Jobs

Economist Special Report Cover, September 2011

The best answers come from the article “My Big Fat Career”, the central argument of which is that individuals must stop handing their employer institutions the responsibility for managing their careers. The article quotes London Business School’s Lynda Gratton, who argues in her book The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, that:

The pleasures of the traditional working role were the certainty of a parent-child relationship. You could leave it in the hands of the corporation to make the big decisions about your working life… Now the world is moving towards an “adult-adult” relationship, which will require each one of us to take a more thoughtful, determined and energetic approach to exercising the choices available to us”.

However, as we have discussed, our education systems aren’t set up to prepare us for this type of continual learning. So how do we do that, exactly? Gratton lays out a three-point plan for developing one’s personal account of “social capital”, which includes:

  1. Building a “posse” of people in your field you can turn to for emerging opportunities when you need them
  2. Building a “big ideas crowd” to keep you mentally fresh, the types of people you often find at future-of-the-world conferences like TED and DLD.
  3. Cultivating a “regenerative community”, family and friends who can keep you centered and relaxed.

None of these are specific skills or abilities that will stand out on your resume in our constrained and thus highly competitive jobs economy, present and future. However, as nearly everyone who has been employed for more than five years will tell you, its not what you know but who you know (and how you know them) that will get you the foot-in-the-door of a job you want. These people will also tell you that they typically learned more on the job than they ever did in a classroom.

In today’s “make a job, not take a job” world, it is limiting to rely only on our campus career centers (which aren’t designed for the new economy) to help us find a job when we graduate. To be what employers are looking for, we need to build the types of communities Gratton describes. But to be in the position to build them in the first place, we need to work, relentlessly and purposefully, to meld our academic learning with what we encounter in the real world when we try to get things done.

The separation of classroom and society needs to end. Society, and how we operate inside it, is the new classroom.

Careers, Future of Education

Deciphering the Jobs Paradox: Part II

Jan 17th, 12 / 0 Comments

In Part I of this blog series, I described the paradox laid out in The Economist’s special report on jobs last September. However, our interest at The Amani Institute is on the supply side of this paradox: how can we better prepare young professionals interested in the social sector with the skills they need to be competitive amongst leading employers?

The Life of the Mind Belongs in the Real World

As Anya Kamenetz and many others have noted, universities were never meant to become the gateway to the workforce they now are. As a result, the incentives in university structures are geared towards academic research while the vast majority of students, perhaps over 90% of them, do not go on to become academics. Universities are stuck in the unenviable position of being expected to do a job they were never meant to do in the first place.

As a result, graduates interested in the social sector emerge without a realistic understanding of the problems they have trained to address. Even as they enter the professional world, diplomas in hand, they have a secret fear that they still don’t actually know how to do anything. In their wonderful book, The Heart of Higher Education, Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc put it forcefully:

 This form of education [breeds] “educated” people whose knowledge of the world is so abstract that they cannot engage the world morally: disengaged forms of learning are likely to lead toward disengaged lives. What students learn about poverty from reading texts is almost always less compelling than what they learn by doing that reading while volunteering in a community where the sights, sounds, smells of poverty are inescapable elements of the educational experience.

To develop models for “engaged learning” will require us to go beyond the tired debate of learning-for-its-own-sake versus vocational training. The ‘life of the mind’ is perfectly compatible with a sustained and real-time engagement with the problems of society. In fact, the only way to ensure that both critical thought and reflective study are relevant is to place them in the cauldron of the world around us, so that they can be strengthened by the challenges they face outside the comfort of the university halls.

This is by no means a eulogy for the traditional university, which remains essential to society. We must, rather, help universities evolve so that they can play both their traditional (academic research) and newly shouldered (preparing future practitioners) roles effectively. The core question at stake, to go back again to Palmer and Zajonc, is:

How can higher education become a more multidimensional enterprise, one that draws on the full range of human capacities for knowing, teaching, and learning; that bridges the gaps between the disciplines; that forges stronger links between knowing the world and living creatively in it, in solitude and in community?

In fact, those students who are interested in a social sector career have an advantage over the traditional private sector employee. As Mr. Manyika of the McKinsey Global Institute says, in The Economist article Winners and Losers, “there are three main types of work: transformational (typically involving physical activity); transactional (routine jobs in call centers or banks); and interactional (relying on knowledge, expertise and collaboration with others). Of these three types of work, interactional work is the least likely to be affected by modern forces such as outsourcing and technology. This is why all the pundits of labor markets are encouraging future graduates to be skilled in “knowledge worker” type jobs.

However, if you are interested in a social sector career, interactional jobs are all there is. Nearly every type of work in the social sector relies on high-touch human interaction, facilitation, collaboration, synthesis-making, or strategic analysis. None of these are easily outsourced or replaced by technology. Indeed, technology in these jobs typically serves only to enhance human capability, extending its reach like never before. And furthermore, as the lines between the private, public, and social sectors get fuzzier by the day, those professionals with a core social motivation behind what they do should only have increasing opportunities for meaningful and stable work in all sectors of society.

The Economist report points not just to this blurring of sector boundaries but to the underlying societal shift that will magnify it. In “My Big Fat Career”, they note that “Surveys consistently find that many of today’s under-30s in rich countries want to spend their working day trying to make the world a better place as well as being properly paid, and turn down jobs that do not offer such satisfaction. Employers have cottoned on to this and now often mention a “social purpose” in their recruitment advertisements.”

How, then, can future leaders and professionals in the social sector best position themselves to overcome the inherent disadvantages of their education and, in fact, take advantage of these new opportunities? That will be the subject of Part III of this series.

 

Boundaryless World, Careers, Future of Education

Deciphering the Jobs Paradox: Part I

Jan 11th, 12 / 2 Comments

This is the first in a three-part blog series about the growing jobs paradox, wherein motivated graduates are unable to find jobs while leading organizations are unable to find the right talent for open positions.

There’s Somethin’ Happenin’ Here

The September 2011 Economist Report on Jobs

The Economist Special Report Cover, September 2011

In September 2011, The Economist published a special report on the future of jobs called “The Great Mismatch”. The cover of the report (see picture) indicated the paradox of the current jobs economy: as unemployment seems to be rising, more and more employers are complaining they can’t find the talent they need. Indeed, in the article “Got Talent?” we learn that, according to the global HR firm Manpower, “46% of senior human-resources executives surveyed in [their] latest global annual survey said that the talent gap was making it harder for their firm to implement its business strategy. Only 27% said they felt their business had the talent it needed.” On the other hand, those lucky enough to have jobs are not counting their blessings either: in the same article, we learnt that “about four out of five employees would leave their current job if they could, but most think they would have trouble finding another one at the moment.”

Although The Economist report focused on the private sector, the same concerns echo across the social sector too. The thousands of graduates of international relations, conflict resolution, international development, public policy, and other degrees targeted more at the social than business sector are finding it ever harder to be employed upon graduation. Washington DC, where I live, is notorious for freshly minted graduates remaining in internships for long periods of time, adding to their already-high debt burdens or rapidly depleting their parents’ goodwill. But they just can’t find a full-time job. At the same time, many employers of these interns complain they can’t find the right set of people whom they would gladly hire.

When asked what the biggest constraint was to achieving his mission (related to promoting peace education in American schools), one of America’s most well-known social entrepreneurs, with offices on both coasts, reflected that while most of his senior management team would respond “fundraising”, he believed it was “inability to hire the right talent we need to become a world-changing organization”.

There are many factors contributing to this mismatch. The economic challenges faced by nations, corporations, and civil society organizations alike are certainly the primary ones. But what accounts for the supply side of the problem? Why are employers of social sector organizations finding it hard to hire from these masses of well-educated, socially motivated graduates? It’s not as if they possess nothing of value. Most graduates of well-reputed schools are able to think critically, write well enough, and have seen some of the world. And many of them understand better than older generations “the biggest innovation of the day, namely social media.”

Buried in a paragraph well into “The Great Mismatch”, the lead article in the report, was a casual mention of the underlying problem on the supply side: One of the structural reforms society needs is “changing education to ensure that people enter work equipped with the sort of skills firms are willing to fight over.”

To do this effectively will require us to go beyond the tired debate of education-for-its-own-sake vs. vocational training. This will be the subject of Part II of this blog series.

And students will have to place themselves in learning environments that enable them to keep learning and developing their skills long after their formal credentialing. This will be the subject of Part III of this series.

 

Careers