MOOCs and Employment – Development

Well my kids return to school in a few short hours, which means it’s time to return to a full schedule here at Degree of Freedom.  The newsletter will return on Monday with a review of Coursera’s English Common Law course that just completed (you can sign up over to the right).  And this Friday we’ll be joined on the podcast by some folks who can shed light on an aspect of this week’s theme which is MOOCs and employment.

I was actually interviewed in August by the author of this piece which looks at the three aspects of the employment cycle most likely to be affected by MOOCs in the years to come: recruitment, screening and employee development.

I’d like to take those three subjects on in reverse order this week, starting with development.

While most people tuned into this site tend to think of education primarily in terms of what takes place inside a school (either K-12 or higher ed), job-related training constitutes its own multi-billion dollar educational industry that impacts millions of employees annually.

When the Personnel Department changed its name to “Human Resources,” corporate training took on the more benevolent label of Development, signaling an understanding that people had supplanted machinery, raw materials and capital as a company’s prized asset, especially as employees in every industry transformed into information workers whose skills needed constant updating.

If you look at the web site of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), you can see the breadth and scope of topics that fall under the category of corporate education.

Most people who work in management (as I did for a couple of decades) can tell war stories of day-long or week-long training programs they took in areas such as HR rules and regulations, leadership, time management and team building.  Over the years, there have been attempts to lower costs and increase efficiency by moving some of this training online and letting managers take it when they like.   But because management training (like sales training) is largely about developing interpersonal skills, there will always be a huge space for such education to take place in group settings (even if that takes time away from the work week).

Where online training has made greater inroads is in the area of hard skills development.  Back when I first got into business, training on computer software (such as desktop applications), for instance, involved pulling workers into an in-house or external training facilities for week-long bootcamps in the latest version of Microsoft Office.

Such training long ago moved online with companies such as SkillSoft selling huge libraries of e-learning titles for companies to install on their network, allowing employees to take courses when they like and work at their own pace.

I knew some folks who worked for a SkillSoft competitor that has long ago passed from the scene who told me the biggest challenge in their industry was selling a product that few people actually used, indicating that there continues to be a lack of motivation for employees to take time away from their jobs to take a full-fledge course (vs. just learning something on their own via trial and error).  Which creates an interesting opening for MOOC classes, especially if graduation from a MOOC can be tied to some form of recognition by employers (an easier hurdle than getting a college to award credit to a MOOC graduate).

Another advantage of MOOCs is their freeness, an appealing price point for executives who tend to talk a good game with regard to the importance of employee development, but who always seem to target the training budget first whenever times turn lean.

Now corporate training tends to be more vocational than academic, which means managers may not have much interest in courses on the liberal arts topics I’ve been studying.  But within existing MOOC portfolios there exist a solid number of classes on subjects such as finance, entrepreneurship and computer programming that managers could turn into development choices for employees by simply communicating their existence and rewarding completion.

I even have data points (well, one anyway) of a grassroots project within a major corporation where a local manager (a MOOC enthusiast) has created a culture whereby his team members join together to take MOOC classes in a wide range of subjects under the belief that workers who are dedicated to their own education will also be more committed to their work.

In all the hubbub surrounding the impact of MOOCs on the traditional college campus, there has been very little talk about what MOOCs mean for huge educational niches such as employee development.  But given that more than half of MOOC students already have a college degree (which makes it likely they are already balancing their online learning with a job), it will be interesting to see how much those two aspects of their lives are already blended, or can be blended further in the future.

Next – MOOCs and Screening