Much of the political disruption being seen around the world at the moment seems to be a response to the rapid pace of change that is classified by the World Economic Forum as the 4th Industrial Revolution.
The pace of change should (although I suspect it has not) focused the attention of policy makers on helping adults retrain so that they can move as smoothly as possible from one career to the next. It’s a topic I’ve covered a few times before, not least in the role MOOCs and their ilk could play in delivering this tuition at scale.
Of course, most MOOC courses are of an academic variety rather than anything more vocational, but that might be changing, thanks in no small part to one of the pioneers of the MOOC itself.
Vocational MOOCs
Sebastien Thrun, founder of Udacity, has teamed up with a number of employers, including Facebook and Amazon, to offer vocational qualifications that have been crafted by the employers themselves.
The courses are very much a partnership, with the employer highlighting the skills they require, and then working with Udacity to craft a course that meets those needs. To date, around 30 companies have signed up, and Thrun believes that the offering will fill a gap not adequately filled by the more college style courses that typically fill MOOC platforms.
“There’s growing mismatch between people’s educational needs and this idea of once-in-a-lifetime education at college,” he says. “That made sense when people had one job for life. Now technology moves fast and people are forced into new jobs quickly.”
Suffice to say, the breadth of subjects available via this route is narrow at the moment, with Thrun himself saying that they have no plans to expand beyond the tech sphere. That leaves a significant gap in the market for other vocational style MOOCs.
A number of MOOC providers are attempting to work more closely with job centers to help people get back into the workforce. For instance, French platform OpenClassrooms recently launched a partnership with ANAPEC, the job center network in Morocco.
The partnership will give job seekers with free, unlimited access to the courses on the platform for the duration of their job search. This equates to around 1,000 courses, each offering certification at the end of the course.
Thus far, the approach has been popular, with 1,700 job seekers signing up to courses in the first week. Whilst OpenClassrooms also has a high number of courses in the digital field, this is as much driven by demand as any preference on behalf of the providers. In Morocco, for instance, digital skills fill each of the top three most sought after skills in the labor market.
It’s clear that more needs to be done to help people adapt to the changes brought by the 4th Industrial Revolution, but it seems clear that there are some tentative steps being made in the right direction.
