A Revolution in Education and Work Awaits

We continue in this second part, with the thought-provoking discussion between Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times Columnist and Pulitzer Prize Winner Author, and Ravi Kumar S., President, Infosys about what the post-pandemic world might hold for us and after the Covid pandemic crisis abates, is there a revolution in education and work that awaits. The discussion enlightens us on these and many other questions. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts

"We are on the cusp of the greatest period of creative destruction, in the Schumpeterian sense, that the world has ever seen. I just want to see this show live long. I am optimistic about where it is going to end"

- Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman: I just want to say something which is relevant in this age of cyber and ransomware-back in 1999, I found cyberspace as a realm where we are all connected but no one’s in charge. Well, China in 2007, said, no, there will be no realm in China where we are all connected and no one’s in charge and China created a ministry of cyberspace and projected its Chinese communist values into cyberspace. They said if you want to be on Sina Weibo (their Facebook and Twitter) you can’t be there anonymously. They said you can’t have encrypted apps like Telegram or Signal, and that you certainly can’t have your own currency called Bitcoin. So, for better or worse, China said we are going to project our communist values into Chinese cyberspace. One of the great fails of the West so far is that we have not actually projected our values into cyberspace and therefore, we spent a lot of time saying please do the right thing because we haven’t found a way to democratically project our values there and that’s another thing that’s really slowing us down.

Ravi Kumar S: Universities today are built for exclusion and exclusivity. It’s the only industry where you are proud you are excluding so many people-there is no other industry. They need to go from exclusivity and exclusion to inclusivity and expansiveness. The digital platform helps them blended learning synchronously as well as community learning and stackable micro-credential and personalisation of individual learners, and this whole thing gives them a chance to use the digital platform to be more expansive and therefore, they could be cheaper and more accessible. These templates of workplace education also give them a chance to be expansive. So, do you think the universities will get it or because the audience believes the universities will get it because they are under tremendous pressure to innovate?

Thomas: I have a rule of life-one of my rules of life is wherever there is a war there is always trouble, wherever there is oil there is trouble. Wherever you have an exogenous resource that you can stick a pipe in the ground and draw out that resource, adaptation happens slower. We know the countries and the parts of the world where that is true. And universities with endowments, have oil and that’s why they have been in my view, very slow to adapt. A couple of things I find really fascinating-because when I met Infosys in 2004, you were an outsourcing company. So, that was the whole world flat moment. Companies in America or Europe were saying well, I have this thing called technology and I think because the world is flat now and we’re all connected, I think I can take this technology thing and outsource it to a company called Infosys in Bengaluru and they will do my technology. And then basically what happened since then and now is that through digitisation, technology has infused everything in these companies. And therefore, to outsource their technology would be to outsource their whole business and therefore, we have this very funny situation-I am interviewing the president of Infosys and he is sitting in America. Now you can explain (Ravi) what are you doing in America because you are doing insourcing now and not outsourcing.

Therefore, this company in India-what are you doing with the education campus in Indianapolis, can you explain that to people?

Ravi: This is very pivotal to the education topic we have and reskilling topic we have. I did speak that universities have to actually play a role in reskilling. They will go from individual learners to reskilling in enterprises. As you rightly said, technology is core for every industry and every business. In fact, technology is a lever to crisscross industries. Walmart wants to go into financial services and healthcare because they have this renewed confidence in their digital story. I think technology will be more insourced than outsourced. And it will always be outsourced as well as part of it will be insourced because you have to reskill half of the workforce on core technology skills because every function, every job is embedded with technology. Every product is embedded with technology. In fact, for the first time in history, the number of developers hired in the non-tech industries is higher than the number of developers hired in the tech industry. So, you can very well imagine how much technology is embedded into industries.

It’s just unbelievable that we’ve got into the deflection point. So, companies like Infosys which led human capital for transformation in enterprises will now lend the value chain of human capital, which is capability building and training-hand-holding and reskilling, so that those enterprises are self-served and we become a partner in the co-creation of the future. That is what we are up to and we have very quickly realised this for the last 4/5 years-we have been building this massive training infrastructure in the United States. We know the universities can’t do it themselves, we know the governments can’t do it themselves. So, we are building these consortiums in six states, across the US. Interestingly these six states don’t have technical skills, they have a good academic ecosystem. So, we think we have to build the capabilities rather than lending them from the market. I think our business is going to change in the future. Technology will get insourced and as it gets insourced, we become a partner for the co-creation and we actually define the future for them. That’s probably how we are seeing it.

Thomas: You become part of an ecosystem, very different, you are not outside now. Now you are part of what I say, this ecosystem solution because only a complex adaptive coalition between a company like Infosys and another partner company and education institution can work.

Ravi: I will give you one example, with Purdue University, we have created 2000 cyber security professionals and the Government of Indiana has helped us on it but Purdue University partnered with us. We hired from schools across the US, we sent them to Purdue University and then in 8 to 12 weeks of training, they were ready for it. Why is this consortium helpful-we created experiential learning, we hand-hold, we apprenticeship and finally, we now got to a point where we don’t need a degree and we could create cybersecurity professionals.

Thomas: Infosys still has a business may be doing a higher end of that stuff.

Ravi: As we reskill the workforce of our clients, re-imagination of human capital is what is going to determine how much you could digitise yourself. We go up the chain, we define the future and it’s a constant evolution in a virtuous positive cycle.

Thomas: I am just fascinated by you as pioneers on this edge. And the fact that you have two leaders Nandan Nilekani and yourself, you are great translators from English to English. One more point, my friend who runs a great online learning platform (Audacity), I quoted him in my last book who says, “When Google put up a program for machine learning (Tensorflow) and his platform had a course-up online, on Tensorflow in 30 days. And was there any university who did that, any computer science, probably not many”. The last time I talked to him, he said, when Google put up Tensorflow 3.0, his platform coursed up the same day because they actually co-produced it with Google. That’s how fast this learning process is now going in non-university settings. That is not sustainable for universities.

Ravi: I think the edutech companies have very nicely unbundled the university education system into micro-credentials and stackable micro-credentials and given it access to individual learners. The gap between what is needed to what the universities have or the edutech companies have is, can I get a learner who doesn’t know how to navigate. A radical reskilled learner from a hotel check-in counter or an airline check-in counter to navigate that learning and land on a job and land on apprenticeship, so that somebody gives them a job, that is the need of the hour. Audacity and Coursera, all the new edutech companies have done a phenomenal job of unbundling it and micro-credentialing it and giving it to an individual learner. I think, individual learners can upskill but the pivot now needed is, can they pivot to the businesses so that businesses, education universities and governments come together for this massive upskilling needed. That is why we need these community players who do the heavy lifting. So, they do the hand-holding that’s needed. Corporations like Google, Infosys and all have to jump into it and create the apprenticeship model and bet on it.

Many companies today still hire for degrees-degrees and skills are needed together. In fact, degrees are not as valuable as it was in the past because of the short life of skills. Now it’s a little bit of racket-people who go to the schools go to the corporations, they hire the same set of people, so everybody else is left out. In fact, employers have outsourced their HR to the universities because of the university has done the due diligence-you can hire very confidently without being worried about it. How to break this deadlock because unless we do that skills are not going to outpace degrees and lifelong learners are not going to get a chance. You will still go back to the best schools to hire. It seems to be a deadlock-the corporations have come out to give that cataclysm to this wonderful concept which is going to create an inclusive world we all want to live in.

Thomas: My friend who started an NGO called Opportunity Network, precisely to overcome that problem to enable people with skills but not a degree, to get into a job. And remember once I wrote about this, I was talking to Byron, we were talking about someone who may have a secretary, who doesn’t have a BA but is actually doing the job fantastically. And he/she retires and the bosses say, “Would you write-up an ad for your skills”. And that person writes up an ad and the boss adds to it BA required. So, in other words, you are being asked basically to write an ad to demand skills for a job you are already doing without those skills. That’s just a habit of saying BA required. What you really be putting it there, you have already alluded to this is learnability required, self-motivation required, curiosity required. If you can demonstrate those then that’s what you want as your personal assistant. But the idea that a BA in Sociology is going to make you a better personal assistant, to any person or manager in any company, is ludicrous and what we are doing is actually humiliating a lot of people. We are just saying you are not worthy because you don’t have a college degree, but we are also depriving ourselves and these people of opportunities for rapid advancement.

Ravi: I have an argument around the assessment process as well, today, assessment process really doesn’t look for hardship. I don’t know how to solve this, it’s a problem right up there but assessments and credentialing without degrees is going to be the future. But companies have to break the deadlock. Companies have to take the lead and say, we will hire on skills, we will not outsource it. If they don’t do that, I am guessing this is going to be slower progress than what we are all expecting.

"For the first time in history, the number of developers hired in the non-tech industries is higher than the number of developers hired in the tech industry. So, you can very well imagine how much technology is embedded into industries"

- Ravi Kumar S

Thomas: If people can see Infosys online learning portal, what would they see? Why do you have a node at Arizona State University-what is Infosys doing with a company node in the middle of the ASU campus?

Ravi: We have something called Reskill and Restart platform, which is a programme we started with various state governments in the US. The idea is that if you want a job in technology, land on Reskill and Restart as a platform, you can test your learnability. We have AI software attached to it based on past learners. Once you finish it we will tell you which pathway you fit in. Then we have content available online and then we have content that is available for classrooms, and we also have experiential learning, also, we have a marketplace for jobs. I would say the future of learning will be of four pivots-it’s the stackable micro community-led, so you have to be at your own pace like an agency, but it’s community-led, it’s personalised for an individual learner. So, if you see an Infosys wingspan, which is what our learning platform is, which is our clients use and we use, it’s very personalised to the individual learners and it has customised pathways and finally, it is blended synchronous, so that you take it at your own pace. That’s the future I would say is what we are excited about and I am quite sure the world will progress into a hybrid blended model.

Why ASU? ASU has the philosophy of being expansive, they are the largest public university in the US and they are also very inclusive in their style. We said, even if it is symbolic, let us house ourselves inside ASU to drive home the point that work and education are intertwined. So, we have these pathways with ASU for people who want to get credits as they learn and work with us and they come without a degree. If you happen to have a degree, well and good but if you don’t have one so be it, as long as you have skills and learnability index.

Thomas: We are on the cusp of the greatest period of creative destruction, in the Schumpeterian sense, that the world has ever seen. Nevermore, people had cheap digital tools of creativity. Never have these tools been connected to the cloud with the most powerful computing facility available to them. Never has money been cheaper with low-interest rates and never have there been more problems to solve. I just want to see this show live long enough to write about it because I am so excited about this moment. It is going to be a bumpy ride but I am optimistic about where it is going to end.