A Revolution in Education and Work Awaits

It is hypothesised that after the Covid pandemic crisis abates, a revolution in education and work awaits. Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times Columnist and Pulitzer Prize Winner Author, and Ravi Kumar S, President, Infosys, had a thought-provoking discussion recently, about what the post-pandemic world might hold for us. Will the confluence of cheap capital and the need for companies to transform and innovate lead to largescale structural shifts in our society? How will the pandemic impact the work, workplaces and the workforce? Will long-established institutions, such as universities, disappear, and lifelong radical reskilling become the norm? The discussion threw light on these and many other questions. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts

"AI is going to take away 85 million jobs by 2025, its going to add 97 million jobs by 2025. Half the workforce in the world has to be reskilled. We believe that training infrastructure will create just-in-time learning-hopefully, we get lifelong learners who can adapt to just-in-time learning"

- Ravi Kumar S

Ravi Kumar S:

With the rapid pace at which skills are getting depleted, people are moving from one job to one profession to multiple jobs and multiple professions, in the same life with work getting really modular, disintegrated with the workplaces, much more decomposed and much more hybrid now. The pandemic has taught us how to make hybrid working models work-I would believe that work and education will get intertwined. That is a huge big provocation and I think it is going to double down now. Some of the examples which we have tested-first and foremost, Google set up six certifications. Anybody without a degree and any kind of skill can walk in and do the six certifications and at the end of those certifications we have a consortium of employers including Infosys and Google to hire.

We are going to move to an era of skills versus degrees, and work and education will be intertwined. The second example is what we are doing with Arizona State University (ASU)-we are hiring without degrees, mid-career shifts, community colleges, landing them on digital jobs (I would call them backbone jobs). And then we have a runway from credits if somebody wants to do a degree as they work with us. So, I call it the ‘Learn, Earn and Work’ model-it was very popular in the manufacturing space as an apprenticeship but this is a model which is going to significantly change the way we are going to look at jobs in the future. One of the things we actually figured out as we did this is the people who can navigate through this process, cross finishing line of certifications and what is need. So, we have community-led companies that handhold, as they land on these digital jobs and then Infosys hopes they become lifelong learners and we take them off from there.

So, there are two provocations I had, first and foremost, I think education as a service-the Amazon Prime template as I call it, is a template were we move from buying a thing to buying as a subscription service and now buying a recurring subscription service. That flywheel of options with a recurring model is a perfect model for lifelong learners. So, if you can have an ASU Prime or a Cornell Prime or a Harvard Prime, we could create potentially lifelong learners who can draw learning resources all their life while they subscribe to a lifelong template. So, it’s a powerful template as we get to this world of lifelong learning and I believe universities should adopt it, it will in some ways address the student debt problem. It will in many ways address the inclusivity and diversity problem with education being almost half or one-quarter of a million, you have to pay to go to a private school for undergrad degrees.

The second provocation is we almost think we have a master plan too on the offing. What I mean by that is, in the early 40s the US actually went and helped the entire world which had got impacted by World War II and helped them on economic revival by building physical infrastructure. I think, the US now has this unique opportunity to open the doors with vaccines, and get digital re-skilling and education to the world and make the world a better place. The US can actually start to show generosity to the world about what a great nation the US is. Not only does it need to do it within the US but it can do it outside the US also. Only one million international students come to the US, what happens if the US takes education to the other parts of the world.

These are the two provocations I believe are very apt for the time we are in. Tell us (Thomas) how does this start in K-12 schools? What do K-12 schools need to do?

"Work is going to be separated from job and jobs and work are going to be separated from companies. It’s all going to become much more modular with companies becoming platforms"

- Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman: When I read that story about the person and families in Hollywood who bribed to get their kids into University of Southern California (USC) or some of their schools, I think, I wanted to call some of the parents and say “Excuse me, but if you are going to bribe to get your kid into a school, can I suggest you bribe to get them into IBM’s inhouse university or AT&T’s in-house university or Infosys’s in-house university because these are schools that are not based on just-in-case learning-they will teach just-in-case and there are things we certainly want to teach kids just in case-but they are based on just-in-time learning”. That Infosys, IBM, AT&T, Walmart, are touching the edge of the story and therefore, they need just-in-time learning. So, I don’t think people realise that a company like Infosys-if I am doing a job, I may get an email from the boss that says, you know, we estimate your job will expire in three years 38 days and by the way, you might not know that the other three people doing your job are taking these online courses in our in-house university. So, just want to ask you, you take a minute because I think people would be blown away. Because, I was certainly blown away when I had it demonstrated to me, a year and a half ago, what is Infosys’s own inhouse just-in-time new platform look like.

Ravi: Infosys has been a lifelong learning company for 40 years. We spoke about lifelong learning way before everybody else in the world did. We knew that the digital age is going to shrink the life of skills at some point in time. As much as we did that way back in India for many years, in the United States for the last few years we’ve been on this reskilling journey. We hire from schools and colleges, around four and half thousand, a year. We are building the largest corporate training university in Indianapolis and we are not only using that university as a feeder for our employees, we believe reskilling is needed for all large incumbent companies, our clients, so they would reskill their workforce more than what we need and that is going to be the future for the world.

AI is going to take away 85 million jobs by 2025, it is going to add 97 million jobs by 2025. Half the workforce in the world has to be reskilled and we believe that training infrastructure will create just-in-time learning-hopefully, we get lifelong learners who can adapt to just-in-time learning and we think that’s the way forward. Equally, as we progressed in the last year, we started to believe that it’s not just about going to undergrad schools to find lifelong learners. We could actually go to mid-career shift professionals, somebody who is working in a teller of a bank, or somebody who is working at a check-in counter of a hotel. In fact, you nicely wrote in your column as to, how do we do radical re-skilling? How do we bring them on a digital backbone job, land them on a job and give them a runway for prosperity?

Thomas: How do we take someone’s working as a hotel clerk and turn them into cyber security engineers, that’s radical?

Ravi: Yes, we have tried that in the last four quarters of remote hybrid work. We experimented with it and it has worked. What we essentially do is we look for learnability as a skill, which essentially means somebody has the aptitude to learn and we use techniques, in fact, we use AI software as well to look for learnability as a skill. Then we create immersive templates and we use these community players to hand-hold and do on-the-job training. So, if you do not know certain technology, that’s fine as long as you have the learnability quotient. We will land you on the job, hand-hold you and we will convert you into an apprentice, as you move forward. One of the learnings for us as we went through that journey is that we need some more academic interventions. This problem is not going to be solved by corporations themselves, it has to be solved by corporations and academia. The academia has to pivot from business to individual runner, I call it from business to individual runner to business to businesses-that’s where the future is and that to me is what is going to help us in the short run. But in the long run, we have to build lifelong learners in K-12 schools and that’s the reason why I said the K-12 schools is where the foundation for the long run is. In the short run, we can create these finishing schools to adapt to this rapid change in skills.

Thomas: My daughter last year started her own school in San Francisco, it’s called Red Bridge (redbridgesf.org) and her whole model is based on student agency-instilling in their students’ willingness to learn on their own. And that kind of agency is going to have to come to all education. At early school, you don’t move up by grade or by turning older, you move up by independence level. Your ability to be an independent learner starting in kindergarten, identifying those capacities and all the way through high school. I think that is going to be the way K-12 education has to really change.

Now there is one part of it again, there is so much embedded in what you said that I want you to walk people through. You said, basically, work is going to be separated from job and jobs and work are going to be separated from companies. It’s all going to become much more modular with companies becoming platforms. The whole thing has become modulised and disaggregated. I think you should talk about where that is going because then the jobs will have to meet up with that reformed and reconstituted nature of work.

Ravi: First and foremost, we discussed problem-finders. Over the last 50 years or so, workplaces have been built for problem-solvers. I think we are going to create a space for problem-finders. Problem-finders will be the new human endeavour. Problem-solvers will be progressively moved to machines i.e. AI software. So, if we can get this right we will create more jobs, we will create more diversity of jobs, more cognitive diversity. In fact, we spoke about learning from human behaviour nature and technology. We think these workplaces will be flooded with more anthropologists, more people with liberal arts, science, sociology and all of that.

Thomas: Tell people what is the problem finder-the ultimate problem finder. So, he knew you wanted an iPhone before you ever thought you wanted an iPhone. He knew you wanted an iPod before you imagined you wanted an iPod. That’s what you mean.

Ravi: In fact, problem-finders are the ones who actually look for human desire, what is the human potential and identify things of the future, which can actually create the world a much better place. I keep saying that software has not got embedded into healthcare, education and housing-those are the only three industries that stayed behind, where every other industry has progressed. In fact, I also believe that AI and technology will have a 15 trillion dollar increase and there is a reference report which talks about this. In the next ten years, by 2030, that is going to come by higher productivity and higher consumption. The 40 per cent of that 26 per cent increase in global GDP is going to come from higher productivity and higher consumption. Higher consumption is going to come from the fact that we are going to build products and services for human desire. And that’s going to come because problem-finders are going to be big in the workplace.

"My personal belief is it’s not going to be humans + machines, it’s going to be gig workers + full-time workers + machines. Gig workers are today in only the right sharing economy and in the economy of delivering at your door"

- Ravi Kumar S

Thomas: How do you teach someone to be a problem-finder or does that come naturally?

Ravi: There are a bunch of things about building a pool of problem-finders in your organisation, creating innovation infrastructure, allowing people to fail, creating distributed organisational structures, driving the diversity of cognition in a workplace so that you find people who are not like you. I also believe the problem finding is also about creating a blend of skills with diverse combinations. We have never seen it that way but the future is all about creating solutions on the intersection and edge, i.e. mathematics and medicine, arts and data sciences, computers and anthropology, computers and art. I think these are the intersections in which you will find more problems, which will create the human endeavour of being a better place.

One other big shift is low code software. Software is going to be written by AI, which essentially means you will find more cognitive diverse developers in the workplace and that will allow the software to be written for better human endeavour. And finally, diversity and inclusivity of workplaces are going to be much better if we get this right because work is modular. As you said it’s going to get distributed to different parts of the world, distributed out of rich urban settings. It’s going to go to the homes of people who want to do this part-time.

Thomas: How will work get broken up, the thing that works will get separated from jobs and jobs and work from companies?

Ravi: I will give one example to make a point. I have a client who said to me that the 35,000 customer service agents that they have who were physically in a workplace before the pandemic are now going to be distributed across the country, working out of their homes, and only 5000 will come back to do physical work after the pandemic. And that’s because we enabled a digital platform, we enabled work to be modular in nature, we created gig work in packets and disconnected those jobs into work and the work can actually come together synchronously as all jobs get delivered. Now what this means is somebody who is available for three hours of work, somebody who has adult care to be done at home, somebody who has a disability and cannot come to a physical workplace, they all have access to work. As long as we can enable this on a digital platform where people can log in and start to form virtual teams and start to take up work and come together in a very unified way. And if we can make this much more inclusive, I think we will be in a much better place.

My personal belief is it’s not going to be humans + machines, it’s going to be gig workers + full-time workers + machines. Gig workers, today, are in only the right sharing economy and in the economy of delivering at your door. They are going to do real work in corporations. This whole myth of having a full-time worker in a corporation, I think is going to be only a small percentage of the workforce. Gig work is what the new demographics are looking for. In fact the new generation is looking for gig work. What’s happening with Robinhood, what’s happening with Roblox, what’s happening with all other industries, where gig workers are going to come in force.

Thomas: How the government is going to be part of that ecosystem to provide a different social safety net? How do people get healthcare? How do they get retirement when work gets separated from jobs and when working gets separated from people?

Ravi: If we can channel the curiosity of learners into this gig work, we could create a force multiplier in the space. The key is how does the government play a role in creating a regulation, protecting the worker’s insurance for healthcare, safety for employees, when you are a gig worker. I think it is what has to be determined and that’s what’s going to drive how well this is adapted in workplaces. I don’t think the governments have got it right.

Regarding the role of government in these consortiums as we go forward, what do you think governments should do because I always had this belief that governments are actually built for the first 20 years of citizens’ lives and in the last 20 years of citizens’ lives, but really the change is happening in the middle? How do governments help in this massive reskilling effort needed for large corporations?

Thomas: The role of the government becomes the convenor of ecosystems-the convenor, the supporter, the enabler. Let me give an example, I was in Israel before the pandemic, in February-March 2019, and I ran into the founder of Mobileye, Amnon Shashua, the Israeli autonomous driving company that was bought by Intel for 18 billion dollars because Intel wants to be a car company. So, the founder said to me, have you ever driven in a self-driving car? I said as a matter of fact I have, I was at Google’s Waymo, a couple of weeks earlier. He said that’s a grid, try driving in a self-driven car in Jerusalem, where there are no two parallel streets. I said I like to do that-it was an amazing experience.

The founder of Mobileye, Amnon, told me something interesting that to test and develop a self-driving car you are constantly got to be driving, iterating constantly, learning and learning. But to do that you need an insurance protocol that governs what is safe self-driving, otherwise, anything you hit or anyone hits you, you would get sued. A lot of allies who run Jerusalem didn’t know a lot about self-driving cars. Basically, Mobileye convened an ecosystem, and Volkswagen their power supplier, Mobileye and those in the Israeli Ministry of Transportation, all of them together collaboratively wrote a law to govern safe self-driving that would be good for pedestrians, citizens and the innovators. Now, it’s an issue that only comes up in a fast-fused, deep and open world. So, the Israeli law was so good that young people started testing their self-driving cars in Israel. And China just took the whole Israeli law and translated it into Chinese and made it their own law. So, governments have to be participants and the wisest conveners of this ecosystem. But the wisest governments in my view will be very pragmatic. They will test, they will be very experimental-a lot of stuff is not obvious but if you come at it with a dogmatic point of view whether from the left or the right, I think you will be slowed down in your ability to adapt.

Ravi: It’s a very different structure and I think the systems, the mindset and the construct of government frameworks have to be very different in the future.

Thomas: We have a structural problem, which is Infosys is simply moving so much faster than the government and it’s true of all these leading edge-tech companies. We saw that graphically when Senator Orrin Hatch, a few years ago was questioning Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and basically asked Mr Zuckerberg if you give your product away for free, how do you make money? And Zuckerberg said stifling a laugh, “Senator, we sell ads”. So, the regulator had no clue what the innovator was even doing because the innovator is so deep now. So, there is a mismatch there and therefore, the only way you can get governance is by collaboration.