News Type: Expert Explainers

By Kathleen deLaski and Tara Lifland

When we first predicted the “Learner Revolution” in 2014, we talked about it as a trend that might take hold by 2030. The Learner Revolution is a world where the college degree becomes just one option for professional career preparation, where learners might hack their own path to attain skills in shorter courses or micro-degrees. Their credentials might be delivered by a mix of colleges, employers, or experience providers at any point in their lives. By early 2019, to celebrate the Lab’s fifth anniversary, we wrote about how quickly public views on the importance of the college degree had softened as enrollments at two- and four-year colleges, and particularly graduate schools, were declining.

At the start of the new decade, experimentation and attitudes about new models to support the Learner Revolution are dialing up at an even quicker pace. We have identified six developments and trends to keep an eye on as we step into the 2020s.

1.  Employer-Driven Pathways

With 7.4 million U.S. job openings in mid-2019, it’s no wonder employers are getting desperate not just for talent, but talent with skills of the future. Last July, Amazon made waves by pledging over $700 million to upskill more than 100,000 of its U.S. employees, expanding its “Cloud School” training to community colleges in northern California and the state of Virginia (after the announcement of the new headquarters in northern VA). The list of blue chip companies not requiring four-year degrees for professional roles got longer in 2019, with JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon penning a year-end piece in Fortune Magazine called The Future of Work is Skills, So Stop Worrying about Degrees.

At the other end of the spectrum, we see enterprising companies in many states taking matters into their own hands. We are impressed with Sundt Construction Company reaching out to Central Arizona College to co-design stackable pathways for heavy machine operators to move into construction management careers. Sundt couldn’t find the workers—now they’ve got 200+ learners in stackable short-term certification programs ready to work while they pursue an associate’s degree that articulates seamlessly to a bachelor’s from Northern Arizona University. 

2.  Rise of “Education as an Employee Benefit”

They say talent is the new oil, a scarce and valuable resource, and increasingly, employers are providing “education as a benefit” to attract and retain employees. Some employers are approaching this benefit with the help of companies like Guild Education, which shot past a billion dollar valuation last November. Guild helps brand name companies like Chipotle, Disney, and Walmart curate education offerings for employees, tapping into federal or state tuition reimbursement programs.

Hot valuations can be more a sign of hype than reality, but this one signals that employers and employees are buying into “The Weave” model that we are helping colleges consider, making a bet that because 70% of all college learners are also working 15 hours or more, successful models will increasingly blur the lines between work and school, over a lifetime. While many groups are innovating in this space (InStride, Sunlight, Outset) the opportunity is still largely untapped; the 400,000 working adults Guild has helped represent just 3-5% of employees at their partnering companies. 

3.  Competencies, Not Degrees

“Within the decade, all but the most exclusive learning providers, old and new, will compete for students at the competency and experience level rather than at the degree level. That is the principal paradigm shift of the Learner Revolution.”

We made this statement in our 2019 white paper, and have been watching for signs that colleges or other learning providers are shifting their marketing to lead with workforce competencies, rather than degrees. 

So far, we see a lot of four-year colleges pitching experiential learning, opportunities to solve real world problems, and efforts to translate the liberal arts degree. Many community colleges and some four-years are incorporating certifications, such as Google’s IT certification, right into coursework, but not many colleges are breaking out to market their best competency offerings beyond their own students. 

Our favorite example of this is “Sneaker Essentials” school, a genius play by Fashion Institute of Technology to market a short-term program offering specific competencies to get hired into the hip world of footwear design. You can scroll through the videos graduates and wannabes post; many of them accentuate that the learners already have a college degree, but need different competencies to launch their dream career. Online competency courses—the sweet spot for providers like General Assembly for half of the last decade—have been retrofitting college graduates for careers in IT, digital marketing, and UX design. But, it’s newish to see slick offerings coming from colleges in competencies such as footwear design, like the “Sneaker Essentials” course sponsored by pop culture website Complex. The price tag for this course is $1,000, which seems reasonable if employment outcomes are well-established. But one accepted applicant, who calls himself Deadstock Quality on YouTube, resorted to a funding plea from his hospital room, underscoring that, as we start the new decade, federal financial aid does not cover a build-your-own-pathway “competency” approach to postsecondary education.

4. Hacking Pathways

More than ever, learners today are embracing the do-it-yourself mindset and hacking together their education. A survey from Pearson found that 84% of learners look for more self-service education as they get older, looking for learning resources that are just-in-time and just-in-place. An organic support and guidance community, illustrated by this example from a Google IT certificate earner, has sprung up on YouTube, where learners are helping each other make sense of the proliferating choices. Massive open online courses (more popularly known as MOOCs) were heavily criticized for most of the last decade, but they continue to build as the backbone of the hacked competency pathway model. While college and university enrollments in the U.S. dropped the past eight straight years, over the same period, through 2018, total cumulative enrollments in MOOCs grew to 101 million. 2019’s most popular Coursera MOOC that learners completed: artificial intelligence.

And, for learners who need help hacking their own future, we particularly like models like this one of our own that is seeing early success with Goodwill San Antonio (San Antonio, TX). We are currently designing and managing a pilot with an advanced logistics certificate micro-pathway, co-designed with Alamo Colleges District and funded by Walmart, that embeds the Lab’s 21st Century Skills Badges to help incumbent workers build collaboration, creative problem solving, and resilience skills. Employees get time off the retail or warehouse floor to upskill.

5. Employers Are Coming to the Credential Translation Table

With more targeted, skills-based hiring on the rise, we’re starting to see evidence that employers are willing to hire based upon these one-off courses disconnected from the degree. In our own efforts to build proof points at the Lab, we asked dozens of employers last fall from our three BadgedToHire regions (San Jose, CA; Albuquerque, NM; and the state of Maine) which hiring tools they expect to leverage the most in the future (3-5 years out). The college degree didn’t make it into the top five, but digital micro-credentials did. And employers in the Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s T3 Innovation Network are translating job descriptions to be usable in the increasingly dominant search engines that they use to find candidates. 

Another area we’re paying attention to: the movement in HR from talent management to talent experience platforms that give employers a way to share and track competency maps. This shift will allow employers to understand company-wide skills gaps and publish routes to promotion. For competencies to be a meaningful currency within an organization, they need to be broken down well beyond the degree level. Here’s a look at how some of these platforms think about displaying competencies (note, no sign of degrees). As 2019 neared its close, a leader in the talent experience marketplace, Degreed, acquired Adepto, a company that specializes in talent management for gigwork.

6. Data to the Rescue?

The more data we have on careers and credentials, the less dependent we are on the bachelor’s degree as a proxy. Where all pathways used to end with a bachelor’s or associate’s, we are beginning to have competency-level data that can tell a job seeker the precise skills they need for a specific role so they can “stop out” or try to combine the degree path and a better paying job. In 2019, we ramped up our use of market-level data to help colleges build “opportunity occupation” pathways, to borrow the phrase coined by the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia and Cleveland in their report last spring. We’ll be doing a lot more of this work in 2020.  

Of course, we are all concerned about too much data and too many sneaker schools pitching to learners. Credential Engine is tracking credentials for a national registry, their count doubled in just the last year, up to 738,000 discrete credentials. They have not tackled the difficult and important work of recommending “stacks” based on employer feedback or validation, yet. It’s hard for a nationwide directory to bite off that level of high quality social good, but we hope curation and employer validation platforms will emerge early in this next decade and not be owned by one of the big tech players. While they could scale quickly, we are concerned about privacy and transparency of data. One path to scale is to start at the city and state level. Colorado announced a holiday present for us all just before Christmas, am ambitious project called C-Lab, which gives us one model.  

C-Lab’s employer, learning institution, and policy partners are testing the “learning economy protocol,” that is a map of all the competency types in the state of Colorado to leverage blockchain technology, which allows all existing units of learning (online courses, work experience, LMS data, all nodes in the graphic below) to connect to one another to help a learner tell their competency story via one package. 

It’s a precursor to exciting work. Many players are working to develop a learner records “backpack,” where the learner owns and stores all of their records of competencies and certifications. For the Learner Revolution that we predicted five years ago, a self-sovereign tool to own and display your learning, from all parts of your life, where you can choose to make all or part of it digitally discoverable to increase your networks and opportunities, is essential. If we can get it right, it will help address the problems that the Lab was created to tackle: making learning more accessible, portable, visible, and relevant.   

Faculty members from Jarvis Christian College and Florida Memorial University work on bettering their respective campus pilots to improve career outcomes for their students.

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were founded with the principal mission to educate African-Americans, providing pathways to opportunities for a population that was systematically excluded from active participation in higher education. 

These institutions have been steadfast in their support of Black students, despite resource constraints due to a lifetime of underfunding compared to their predominantly White counterparts. At the Lab, we believe that if we can both enable traditionally under-resourced institutions to reimagine their programming and co-design with them new models to enhance career outcomes, we can scale these initiatives to positively impact all learners across the higher education ecosystem. In other words, designing for resource-constrained institutions and underserved learners—in human-centered design, we might say “extreme users”—will address the needs of the many. 

HBCUs are incredibly diverse: public and private, two-year and four-year, small and large, some religiously affiliated, liberal arts and research universities. Given this diversity, they are known for their rich institutional cultures and family environments. A 2015 Gallup study revealed that Black students who attend HBCUs are twice as likely to recall experiencing support measures than Black students who attend non-HBCUs. These support measures include having a professor who cared about them as a person, having a professor who made them excited about learning, and having a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams. 

And, the payoffs are evident. The Thurgood Marshall College Fund notes that HBCUs are responsible for large percentages of African-Americans in prominent roles: 40% of Black doctors, 50% of Black engineers, 50% of Black lawyers, and  80% of Black judges are HBCU graduates.

Gallup USA- Funds Minority College Graduates Report, 2015: Black students who attend HBCUs are twice as likely to recall experiencing support measures than Black students who attend non-HBCUs.

Despite HBCUs’ successes in connecting Black students with opportunities, Black students still experience many barriers on the pathway from college to career. In ACE’s recent Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education Report, researchers found that Black students are among the most likely to receive financial aid, the most likely to borrow money to fund their education, and the least likely to complete their undergraduate education. Just last May, billionaire Robert F. Smith pledged to satisfy all student loans for all 400 members of Morehouse College’s Class of 2019, an attempt to best position graduates to start their careers without the financial strain of paying off college debt. For Black graduates, unemployment rates were also among the highest, and median annual earnings for bachelors’ earners age 25 and older were among the lowest. To address these long-standing opportunity gaps, the UNCF Career Pathways Initiative (UNCF CPI), launched in December 2015 and funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, partnered with 24 HBCUs and predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs) to develop sustainable programming to improve career outcomes for graduates. 

Over the past year and a half, the Lab has served as a technical assistance provider for a cohort of 14 institutions out of the UNCF CPI 24, leveraging human-centered design to prototype and test one pilot on each campus. The goal? Transformational impact on career outcomes for graduates. The pilots vary in size and scope, from actively engaging industry leaders in the curriculum design process at Tougaloo College to using the Lab’s 21st Century Skills Badges to convert traditional work-study jobs to “micro-internships” at Oakwood University.

Many of these initiatives are not new to higher ed. However, each pilot is designed and tested with the learner at the center—a co-design and iterative process that allows these initiatives to better address the learner needs on each campus. To these HBCUs, we’ve brought (and are still bringing!) our tools, design process, and expertise in education-to-work models to support this cohort of 14 institutions in engineering new approaches that will enhance career outcomes for their students.

Through this work thus far, we have identified four key learnings:

1. The thirst for demonstrating 21st Century skills is real.
Each of our design sprints with the 14 institutions made one thing clear: campus leaders have deep interest in ways to further develop their students’ 21st century skills. This interest among higher ed leadership is not new. Contrary to popular belief, however, students on our HBCU & PBI campuses understand and see a need for better developing these skill sets. At the University of West Alabama (UWA), a PBI, the Lab is supporting UWA’s core team to actualize UWA 201, an online second-year co-curricular experience. As part of the intake process for the new program, students were asked to identify which skills they most need to develop in order to be successful in their desired careers. Without prompting, students named communication, problem solving, and collaboration—the exact 21st century skills that employers are asking for.

2. Strengthening student employability starts with understanding the world of work.
HBCUs, like all colleges and universities, are mission-driven institutions focused on preparing students to become active and engaged citizens. If we are to redesign the models at each of our 14 CPI institutions to improve career outcomes, we need to create a collective understanding of the world of work that students are entering, now and in the future. To build this understanding, we turned to our gallery walk tool—a curated series of artifacts, journal articles, infographics, and other data sources—to inform campus leaders of the challenges that their graduates will face post-graduation. The result? Institutions identified key needs to build social capital, provide access to networks, develop skills, and promote career exploration as important cornerstones of improving student employability.

3. To enhance career outcomes, faculty and business leaders need to connect early and often.
Coming into this work, the entirety of our 14 institutions understood the importance of employer partnerships in addressing opportunity gaps. Together, we are actively exploring how these new relationships can be built and sustained over time at each campus. Tougaloo College, for example, is creating an employer resource council to foster regular communication between business leaders and faculty. This initiative has the potential to both directly connect students to jobs and build buy-in among faculty. 

Employer-institution partnerships are deepened when faculty are actively engaged in the process and can incorporate their learnings about employer needs into the classroom. Although learners on campus are the primary users in each pilot, faculty and employers must be considered as secondary users. Initiatives dependent on strong employer partnerships need to be responsive to employer needs so that they can, in turn, be responsive to learner needs.

4. Leveraging existing resources and institutional champions go a long way.
Addressing available resources is critical, especially for HBCUs that have been traditionally under-resourced and underfunded. To guide prototype development, we often turn to our Napkin Pitch tool. The Napkin Pitch acts as a guide for taking a big idea and narrowing in on who it serves and how we will know that it’s working. To confront historical disparities, we developed a second iteration of the tool: adding a “bring/build/buy” map to help teams narrow in on how their institution might leverage existing and new resources.

Our Napkin Pitch in action: LeMoyne-Owen College’s first iteration of their prototype for an online program focused on 21st century skills development.

In the same vein, building on-campus champions that leverage existing human capital is critical for designing new programs. Often, campus representatives were one or two staff members who were charged with advancing most of the CPI initiatives on their campus. As a result, when points of contact transitioned out of the institution, the work had to be restarted or stalled while new team members were onboarded. To promote continuity and build institutional support, we are working with each of our HBCU teams on capturing concepts and building champions that can advocate for projects from the design stages through implementation. At Xavier University, for instance, a partnership between the CPI director, Career Services, and faculty creates a shared approach to program implementation that spreads the responsibility across multiple stakeholders rather than focusing on the talents of one person.

Through our work with this cohort of 14 institutions, we have deepened our understanding of how human-centered design can be used to build innovation capacity and put learners at the center at institutions that are historically under-resourced. Despite their constraints, HBCUs have been a pathway to success for so many Black students and continue to provide safe, nurturing environments. By both enabling these institutions to rethink their programming and co-designing with them new models to enhance career outcomes, the consequences for all of higher ed are clear: positive impact for all learners across the higher education ecosystem. Our work over the last year and a half with UNCF Career Pathways Initiative has helped us to learn about how diverse the needs are at each institution. We look forward to sharing more lessons learned in a forthcoming white paper to be released in May 2020.

To learn more about the Lab’s work on UNCF’s Career Pathways Initiative, visit our project page.