Hey supply, meet demand
Welcome to the “prove it” economy. Where codified skills, not Ivy League degrees, are the new currency.
According to the Department of Labor, US employers are currently looking for nearly 7 million workers, all no doubt requiring ’21st century skills’. Education itself is exploding as a job category with 20,000 more ‘educational services’ job openings in June than the prior month, wrestling with the changing landscape from early childhood to lifelong learning and competing in a global market tracking to $10 Trillion by 2030.
There has never been a louder debate about the relevance of a college degree or a more fierce conversation for re-imagining vocational training. Students and employers are screaming for rapid, relevant and ROI driven skills acquisition and new fast-moving, micro-credential driven platforms are racing to challenge their ‘formal’ peers for the role.
All this got us thinking that mapping the global education market (aka ‘the supply side’) would not be enough. If we are going to help power the growth and innovation of education leaders around the world, we need to map the entire spectrum of ‘supply and demand’ from learning to work. So last month we fired up our jobs engine to start indexing millions of online job openings capturing the companies, job titles, skills, keywords and other insights into what employers are looking for in their hiring process.
This month, we started digging into the data and it is pretty obvious there is a lot we can learn about the design and delivery of high impact post-secondary education by looking at job openings, where supply (learners and workers) meets demand (jobs). Universities, Colleges, Trade Schools and Bootcamps around the world are challenged with developing meaningful curricula that enhance students’ employability but sadly not enough is ‘demand driven’. There is a deafening call from learners and industry for timely, narrow credentials that mirror the skills employers are seeking and labor market analytics will prove essential information for building innovative, cutting edge programs.
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