It’s the Skills, Stupid!

Long before COVID-19 upended our lives, it was clear that traditional colleges were failing to deliver the goods. Last year, in a study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 83 percent of U.S. human resources professionals reported difficulty recruiting, and three quarters of them said it was because of a lack of necessary skills. More than half blamed the education system.

The U.S. skills gap is commonly viewed as primarily a crisis for tech — too many coding vacancies, not enough coders — which is still true. The new 2020 Coursera Global Skills Index puts America way behind on tech skills— we are ranked #37 behind such tech giants as Thailand and Romania.

But this belies the full extent of the problem. In the SHRM study, participants reported shortages of so-called “soft” skills (like critical thinking and communication) and technical skills (like IT and healthcare) in comparable numbers. Data suggests that, as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner puts it, “The biggest skills gap in the United States is soft skills. Written communication, oral communication, team building, people leadership, collaboration.”

In the past, there was no alternative to the traditional college degree. You either spent two to four years on a college campus or you got no degree at all. But in a world rife with higher ed credentials of all shapes and sizes, that model of the college degree is no longer a given. Already, we have seen big businesses voting with their feet and turning to alternative sources for the skills they seek. For example, Microsoft, Linux, Amazon, and others have partnered with the online course provider edX to create credentials more relevant to their needs. In some industries, skill-focused “bootcamps” and workplace apprenticeships are replacing bachelor’s degrees as companies’ preferred entry-level qualification.

This trend — away from monolithic college degrees, toward learning more focused on workplace-relevant skills — will only accelerate in the wake of COVID-19, with its concomitant explosion of remote learning. Higher education institutions that fail to respond risk irrelevance.

For colleges, the strong temptation is to take an existing degree and chop it up into little pieces, each with its own associated micro-credential. That is a mistake; salami-slicing an irrelevant degree only multiplies irrelevance. Instead, colleges must take a more demanding but ultimately more rewarding path: they must start with the skills themselves.

What, then, is a skill? On the most fundamental level, it is a collection of neural pathways in a human brain, developed through practice. It could be as general as critical thinking or as specific as how to operate Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000V. Looked at another way, a skill is an aptitude that is susceptible to “mastery” as defined by the writer George Leonard in his book of the same name. The purpose of any given credential, then, should be to equip students to achieve mastery of a skill or set of skills. Put another way, “It’s the Mastery, Stupid.”

A lot of existing credentials fall down at this point; rather than mastery of skills, they are about exposure to information. Students listen to lectures and read books; at the end of the course, they regurgitate what they have learned in a final exam or paper. That is fine if the goal is mere edification, as with many MOOCs (massive open online courses); but if the aim is to equip students for a competitive workplace, this approach is simply not good enough.

Already, some colleges are breaking the mold here. For example, Western Governors University, an online institution set up in the late 1990s, has made itself the standard-bearer for a system called “competency-based education” (CBE), under which students advance along the degree track when and only when they are able to show mastery of a particular skill. While CBEs models don’t always get it right, they are focused on the right thing — skills.

Which skills should higher ed focus on? Naturally, the ones employers are looking for in job candidates. Does this mean every liberal arts institution must fire its Classics faculty and become a coding bootcamp? Far from it; as we have seen, employers are looking for a range of aptitudes, not just technical ones. But it does mean that when colleges choose to teach the life and works of Cicero, they should be clear about what workplace-relevant skills the course develops. With Cicero, the list might include persuasion, adaptability, and emotional intelligence — all among the top five most in-demand soft skills, according to LinkedIn Learning.

Many big employers are eager to partner with colleges. The non-profit Education Design Lab has been working with businesses to identify the matrix of technical and soft skills required for particular jobs, and then pairing employers with colleges to help design courses that develop those skills in students. More and more institutions are partnering in productive ways with tech companies like Salesforce to build entry — level skills while in school.

The highest hurdle may be one with which anyone who has worked in academia will be depressingly familiar: inertia. On many campuses, big decisions have a nasty habit of getting lost in a labyrinth of committees. Even before COVID-19, colleges needed to act fast to stay relevant. The post-pandemic, remote-everything world leaves no margin for delay at all. They must be as nimble as a startup — and as comfortable with risk. Today, the only feasible approach is to create a product as quickly as possible, get it to market, and fine-tune it on the fly based on experience. (This is the approach business guru Eric Ries calls the “minimum viable product.”)

Even here, there is hope. By partnering with Microsoft and edX, Eastern Washington University was able to develop and pilot a new degree program in data analytics within less than a year. By the standards of higher ed, that is light-speed. But it can be done.

None of this will be easy; big change never is. But every institution of higher learning owes its students a curriculum that will materially help them in their lives. The window of opportunity is closing. Higher ed must act before it slams shut completely.