A new skills based learning system for the ‘working learner’

The source of this essay comes from two aha moments. First, the vision laid out by Michelle Weise in her book ‘Long Life Learning’. And second, the ease, convenience and frictionless experience of the Indian digital payments system. 

The future of work and learning: a 100 year career

The future of work is very much here, and it’s inextricably tied to the future of learning. It's being dubbed the 100 year career. Experts on aging suggest that we can expect to live longer and that human life spans will extend decades longer than we had ever anticipated. The simple extension of our life span suddenly forces us to consider the dramatic lengthening of our work lives. With this new time horizon, it becomes hard to imagine a straight line from education to work and retirement. Gone are the days of retiring at age 65 and living on a guaranteed pension from one or a few employers that defined a person’s career. Rather, the number of job transitions will only increase with time, as people confront longer and more turbulent work lives. 

With technology’s transformation of nearly every facet of our economy, we will all need to develop new skills (human + tech) and knowledge at a pace and scale never seen before, and prepare for jobs that don’t even exist yet. In a 100 year work life, we will find ourselves in a state of continuous pivots with 20 to 30 job transitions. We will transition to becoming ‘working learners’ always flexing between working and learning, or juggling both at the same time. Education and training will be more important than ever. 

Limitations of the current learning infrastructure

Our default mental model has been that education is largely a one and done formal expensive experience situated at the front end of our development through young childhood. In this model colleges employ faculty and spend a lot of money building labs and other capital infrastructure to offer the same teaching experience to all students in a brick and mortar institution. With the ‘course’ as the educational unit, ‘learning outcomes’ are measured and communicated to employers in grades / credit hours telling them how long a student sat in a particular class but not what the student actually learned.

In a 100 year worklife,  two, four or six years of college font loaded at the beginning suddenly seem deeply inadequate. While the future of work focuses on the skills needed for the 20 or 30 job transitions to come, higher education appears to be stuck persevering on just that first transition from young adulthood to workforce. This infrastructure cannot cater to the adult ‘working learner’ who will need a convenient, personalised and cost effective way to combine learning into ‘working outcomes’ that are agile and adaptable to the changing labor market. 

A skills based learning system for the ‘working learner’
In the new system for adult education, skills will become the medium of convergence for learning, training and hiring. With this, there will be a place for both formal and informal experiences to contribute towards learning. 

A skill is defined as the ability to get something done at work - a working outcome. 

Let’s look at an example.

Skill: Data Visualisation.

Working outcome: using charts, graphs, maps, and other visual representations of data to help present findings in an easy to understand way.

Ways of learning this skill: Taking an online course from an edtech company (formal learning experience), attending a weekend bootcamp at a university, executing a project at work or as a passion (informal learning experience), having a conversation with a mentor in a cafe, or teaching a group over zoom.

Ways of assessing this skill: a scenario / performance based task that is time based with a prompt and an accompanying set of documents - to measure what the learner ‘can do’ vs. what the learner ‘knows’.

Ways of communicating this skill: a skill profile in which learners showcase how they’ve learnt the skill, proof of work across different experiences, and current level of mastery on the skill - demonstrated via assessment scores.

Ways of recruiting for this skill: employers break down a job into individual skills and then easily and visually filter hiring candidates based on their skill profile. 

To bring this system to life, all stakeholders (learners, education / training providers and employers) will have to agree and understand a common skills taxonomy. Further, a robust learning infrastructure will have to be built around this taxonomy. While this can seem very complex, we can turn to the world of the Indian UPI and digital payments infrastructure for inspiration.  

Creating an Open Learning Infrastructure: Taking inspiration from UPI

UPI (unified payments interface) is the golden child of digital payments in India, and the fastest growing most advanced payment systems in the world. UPI has become an integral component of India’s move towards Open Banking. It was a standard designed for radical interoperability between money custodians (banks), payment rails (card networks like Visa) and front end customer experiences (apps like Google pay). 

A simplified version of how the UPI works is here.

To create an open learning infrastructure like UPI, a National Learning Corporation (NLC), in partnership with employers, will have to create a continuously evolving skills taxonomy that covers all industries. The NLC can then accredit education and training companies as Learning Service Providers (LSPs). These providers use a Unified Learning Interface (ULI) to define a common standard for creating a learning experience. This could include name of skill, time spent, type of learning activity, proof of work outcome and assessment score.

Every adult learner is identified using a combination of phone number and a Virtual Learning Address (VLA). Learners can use third party apps to create LifeLong Learning Accounts (LILAs) and engage with LSPs along with a community of other adult learners. Past learning history gets captured inside the LILA, and a network of AI coaches and learning managers can use this data to guide learners towards personalised learning pathways as they navigate multiple job transitions. Individual learners can also become accredited LSPs based on their LILA data and demonstrated mastery over specific skills. This paves the path for a decentralised learning system where every adult learner can learn from everyone else.  

There’s even an opportunity for the NLC to use a ‘Learnchain’ - a blockchain for learning to enhance security in which case employers can seamlessly pull verified skill profiles of learners while hiring for new jobs. 

You can read more about the ‘Learnchain’ here.

In a 100 year career, workers will have to continuously keep up with the emerging demands of the economy. The needs of adult learners will have to be put front and centre by seamlessly weaving learning and work. A new skills based open learning system will ensure that generations of learners build career mobility and are equipped with the relevant skills to thrive in the jobs of tomorrow.