Education: Who's the Real Customer from a Jobs-to-be-Done Perspective?
Perspective Matters
Why do we go to school? Or is the question “why is an education offered to us?” A K-12 education has been provided to us and is considered the norm. Then we’re asked to invest in our own future by going off to college, and sometimes beyond. If we don’t, our career prospects are diminished; unless you start your own business.
Prepare for a Career
From the student’s vantage point, Universities are offering a service. The students hire these schools to teach them what they need to know to be competitive in the market place of employees. The means by which they consume the service is irrelevant. Well, unless you’re a University with a sports program that brings in more revenue than tuition.
Remote learning may have a serious impact on these other revenue models as the on-campus population shrinks. We will see if COVID19 accelerates our acceptance of non-traditional degrees. If that happens, other revenue models - for instance sports programs - could be greatly impacted. At this time, it appears that the 2020 college football season will not happen.
Whatever the predominant delivery channel becomes, education is provided to a customer, the student…who pays for it. Currently. Given the ridiculously high cost of tuition, which somehow outpaces the growth of our economy, I can envision a fast-approaching time where people begin to question the benefits.
What happens when the net present value of a students career investment becomes less than zero? Has this already happened?
Who are the Beneficiaries of Education
From a personal perspective, we each consider ourselves to be the beneficiaries of our education. The degree(s) we have historically earned serve to differentiate us from other prospects competing for the same job. This allows us to gain employment that pays us what we need to pay our bills, achieve social acceptance, and save for the future…in a perfect world.
Is our investment in ourselves giving us the benefits that we are seeking? The cost of tuition is increasing rapidly, to the point where many students need to finance their education. This can make the investment even more questionable; especially when there is no guaranty that the jobs you are studying for will exist in ten or fifteen years.
An argument can be made that most University students are not studying for a specific job
The return on investment vs. income potential research I’ve seen are about as predictable as the stock market. There is just no good answer; especially in a time when the markets (as traditionally defined) are changing so rapidly.
Currently, the most significant beneficiary of our higher education system appears to be the higher education system. People are noticing.
Prepare an Employee for their Role
Institutions of higher education provide the academic frameworks that theoretically work when all things are not equal. Yet these methods demand that all things be equal in order to work. In other words, don’t bother us with variables or constraints, we’re professionals!
When companies hire employees, they are actually hiring a service, which was prepared and configured by another service - higher education. Unfortunately, companies feel the need to provide additional education - formal or coaching - in order to prepare employees to perform their jobs effectively. This deficit either comes from gaps in education / curriculum, or methods that are outdated and cannot be adapted to a evolving competitive business environment.
We see this commonly in processes. When one part of a process is optimized without taking the entire process into consideration, the whole process tends to become sub-optimized. So what is the entire process with regard to education, and who is the beneficiary?
The Value of Degrees
Unless your learning path is related to highly specific professions which require advanced certification, a Degree could potentially lose its relevance. I won’t get into the relevance of certain degrees except to say that you won’t find any job titles such as Director of English Literature unless you are employed by [checks notes] a University.
As employers begin to realize the investment they must make, they will begin to question the value of the service providers (employee prospects) available to them. Should they pay a premium for a four-year degreed English major, or should they recruit less costly candidates right out of high school and train these resources themselves?
In case you weren’t paying attention, this is actually a thing. And it’s going to get bigger!
Spending vs. Getting Paid to Learn
Switching back to the student/employee side, the scenario I just mentioned has some serious benefits. Imagine not having to spend gobs of money on higher education, or worse financing it, and still being able to get your dream job. Imagine actually getting paid while learning on the job through a corporate university.
You might start off earning a little less, but since you don’t have to invest in your education, the returns begin to look much better - and you’re getting at least a four year head start.
This isn’t a new concept. The military has invested in programs that allow people to attend college, and got to medical and law school, in exchange for a commitment to serve. While they hired the traditional higher education vehicles to do this (these are advanced highly certified fields), it has been a thing for many many years.
Anticipating Market Disruption Requires a New Lens
Just yesterday I heard someone make the major leap from a University calling students, students…to calling students, customers. Quite a breakthrough given the fact that higher education hasn’t adapted to the needs of their customers for so many years, only their own.
However, I’m gonna go one better. Students are actually service providers that must prepare themselves, and finance it themselves, in order to provide a service through employment. It’s really much a like a business that provides a service, such as installing, maintaining and repairing your HVAC system. These professional have to get the training they need to do the job effectively. They are actually part of the consumption chain of the product for which they provide a service. So is an employee.
While a person is Preparing for a Career - which seems like a big job - companies have a single step within their set of core objectives to Prepare an employee for their Role. Just because someone has a degree in philosophy, doesn’t mean they’ll be able to handle inbound calls in a technical support operation. Nor does it mean they have the skills required to rise up the ladder to run that entire operation one day.
Companies value this, but Universities don’t necessarily teach it
In reality, the proper lens is to view the company as the customer, since they are the ones hiring, and paying for, the service (the employee). It’s the next logical level of market abstraction. If you had been looking through this lens, it would’ve been much easier to see that there are alternatives for preparing employees for their role. Far less costly, and for more focused alternatives. And there are benefits to both sides.
If you are a University, or potential student with societal norms pressing upon you, it’s far more difficult to see this as an option. Only recently has digital learning been seen as a disruptor. It’s actually been around for 30 years. For a long time those degrees were considered to be less valuable. Now we know that learning can take place online very effectively. But, this obfuscates the fact that they teach the same curriculum as on-campus learners.
Online learning as a medium will be the future. However, the ownership will shift from degreed University programs to Corporate Universities, where the curriculum will be specifically tuned to the role an employee is expected to play, and the progression that they are expected to make. It’s inevitable. You’ve just been programmed not to see it.