Conversation with Craig Vezina, May 12, 2020

David Blake: One of the things that the pandemic has done and it’s taken a lot of people past this psychological barrier of what education looks like. We tend to think of education as a teacher, classroom, four walls, textbook, student cohort. And while online education has been growing it’s now everyone is experiencing education that way. So it just took everyone past that sort of barrier into that new frontier. Now that’s going to do a lot of things. All of a sudden you begin to pull apart the pieces of education and you realize that the tuition I was paying for university, is that price tag worth it when all I’m experiencing now is myself on a Slack, on Zoom when I don’t have my peers next to me, when I’m not in the same room as a TA, when I’m not in the same room as a professor, when I’m not in the dorms. And you begin to realize that education is really many parts. And I think what it’ll do is make us question what parts of it do we value most, what parts of it help people most, which parts of it should be scaled, which parts of it should be thought of differently and I think that’s healthy. It’ll begin to really pull us apart, allow us to be thoughtful and innovate on pieces of it.

Allow us to be conscientious of the cost of the different pieces of it and hopefully put it back together in a way that scales better, that is more accessible, that is more equitable, that is more lifelong and now allows us to begin to rethink of it in ways that better help us meet the needs of today’s world.

There are moments in human history technology advanced out in front of the capabilities of society, of individuals, of employees, of humans, of our skills and of our knowledge. So technology raced out in front and humanity had to catch up. What we’re experiencing right now is fundamentally different than even those moments and that’s because not only has technology gotten out in front of us but now with the internet and globalization the technology can scale at such an exponential rate. And what that has done is left us in a world where technology is scaling faster than humanity can learn. And so each day that goes by the gap between the requirements technology is putting on us as employees, onto our businesses, is growing at a slope that is much steeper than the rates at which humanity is learning.

So the skills gap is growing bigger and bigger and bigger every single day. And that is putting massive pressure into organizations. Skill is putting massive pressure on individuals for lifelong learning. And yet when you go back to how much of this is beginning to happen – not nearly enough. We have to be able to scale, learning, education, skilling at a rate far above what we are doing today. When we talk about automation we tend to talk about it in terms that is going to displace workers. I really believe that as we move into the future that we are going to require more individuals per company rather than less. And the reason for that is that technology is scaling faster than humanity can learn. That is putting an immense pressure for us as individuals to continue to be reskilling. The workforce historically has not built in the capacity required for that continuous upskilling. A little bit, sure, but not nearly at the order of magnitude that is going to be required. So as AI, as automation continues to advance the amount of training, skilling, learning that has to be built into every organization is going to also scale with it.

So that’s going to require a workforce 2X, 3X the size of today’s workforce for any one company because you are going to constantly have to have people working on productivity and constantly have people dedicated to the task of upskilling themselves and learning.

I’ve got three kids and when I think about the education I want for them versus the education I got, I think there’s two things that I prioritize. One is the liberal arts and the second is building. I think that critical thinking, that developing the ability to question, the humanity side of it. Our most human of skills are going to be the ones that are most persistent and valuable in this context. And then building. When we talk about automation, when we talk about AI we think about humanity’s role about employment as diminishing, but really the problems in the world are accelerating which means there is more than enough work for all of us to do. But we have to redefine what that looks like. I think the best way of helping children develop the skills adapting to a world that they’re unlikely to have a label put to very many of their jobs is to really just help them take the mindset of what am I building, to what end, to what goal.

And I believe we need a liberal arts apprenticeship based hybrid system and that’s what I would hope for for my children. We’ve been operating in our concept of education from two poles. One was the full time student and then the other was the full time employee, the full time worker. And 40 years ago you were one or the other and there were very few who were sort of anything but a full time student or a full time worker. And as the cost of education continued to rise we sort of by necessity introduced this student worker. The amount of work required to pay tuition went up and up and up and so you now had this student worker. Thirty years ago we introduced a sort of executive education that popularized and so you introduce this concept of being able to be a full time worker but give meaningful amounts of time to education. And then we sort of got stuck at those bookends. And I think really where the future is taking us is those are going to continue to learn to meet in the middle.

As we walk into the future with the need for continuous lifelong education, material amounts of reskilling and upskilling over the entirety of our careers we are just going to have to get to a point closer and closer to the middle where we are always learning, always in an environment where we can apply that and be productive and where those come to just be joined at the hip side-by-side, equal in equal parts.