Michelle R. Weise - Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 5
4. Chapter 7
5. Chapter 9

Long-Life Learning is a lifeboat for those of us swimming in the sea of confusingand often contradictingnarratives about the future of learning, working, and living. Throughout, Michelle brings thoughtful and diverse evidence to bear on a host of pressing challenges facing not just schools but all of society and offers a deeply integrative set of insights from her years as a student of disruptive innovation to chart a better way forwardrobots and all.

Brian Fleming, Vice President of Innovation and Strategy, Southern New Hampshire University

Without handwringing about the rise of automation, or finger-pointing at our current systems of education and employment, Long-Life Learning advances a vision of the future that puts the needs of workers at the center. Recasting us all as working learners, Michelle Weise illustrates not just the value of repeated returns to learning, but the critical importance of seamlessly interweaving education and work throughout our careers.

Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO, Futuro Health

In Long-Life Learning, Michelle Weise articulates the critical need for adults to access an ever-evolving menu of learning and workforce skills development to remain relevant in the future economy and a 100-year work life.

Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner, GSV Ventures

MICHELLE R. WEISE

STRADA EDUCATION NETWORK, INC.

Copyright 2021 Michelle R. Weise. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Weise, Michelle R., author.

Title: Long life learning : preparing for jobs that don't even exist yet / Michelle R. Weise.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020030474 (print) | LCCN 2020030475 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119597483 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119597513 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119597520 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: EmployeesTraining of. | Career education. | Occupational training. | Vocational education. | Manpower planning.

Classification: LCC HF5549.5.T7 W3879 2021 (print) | LCC HF5549.5.T7 (ebook) | DDC 650.1/3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030474

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030475

Cover image: Maria_Galybina/Getty Images

Cover design: Wiley

For Mike, Noe, and Logan, the loves of my life,
and for the risk takers, innovators, and coalition builders,
this book is for you.

One of the great privileges of my life was working with Clayton Christensen, the godfather of the theories of disruptive innovation. I coauthored a few pieces with him, including a short book on disruption in postsecondary education.

After his much-too-early death in January 2020, I've reflected a great deal on how his theories have given me the foundation for a more hopeful stance toward the future. This, to me, is the most profound takeaway of disruption. It is not, as so many assume, the key to doomsday predictions about an industry. Instead, the theories of disruption are powerful because they provide a constructive and positive lens through which to analyze the unknown and the nascent.

Clay's theories give us pause as soon as we start to dismiss something that smacks of low quality, because it is precisely at that moment that we should wonder if there's something we should be paying attention tosomething that might be just good enough (his words) to gain traction with people whose alternative is nothing at all. He called this population nonconsumers.

Prior to the pandemic, my team of education and workforce researchers at Strada Education Network's Institute for the Future of Work was focused on these nonconsumers, the people being left behind by the great deficiencies of our American education and workforce infrastructure. Over the course of more than 100 hour-long interviews, we listened to working-age adults displaced by the 2008 financial crisis who were unable to recover while the top 1 percent of the American labor market captured 85 percent of the income growth in the years following the recession. Throughout this book, you will hear from many of these displaced workers.

They include a high school graduate who was promised opportunities for growth at her local pharmacy but never saw those promotions come to pass due to the constant churn in staff and managers. They are also the people whose caregiving responsibilitiesfor young children, aging parents, or family members with disabilitiesmake it impossible to fit into the one-size-fits-all structure of many educational institutions.

Their personal experiences reveal how ill-suited our current postsecondary education and workforce systems are at facilitating seamless, flexible, and cost-effective learning pathways for people to keep up with the emerging demands of the economy. If students don't follow the typical two- or four-year college experience, our systems do not make it easy for them to return and retrain in the future. Learners are left to force-fit nonlinear realities into a rigidly linear system.