Education Crisis, Workforce Preparedness, & Covid-19

This is my most academic publication, and one I had the privilege of co-authoring with Dr. Raghu Krishnamoorthy, former Chief Human Resources Officer at GE and former Director of the Chief Learning Officer Doctoral Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Published as a peer-reviewed piece in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, we examined the collision between education systems, workforce preparedness, and COVID-19.

The pandemic didn't create the gap between what education produces and what the workforce requires. That gap had been widening for years, and plenty of us had written about it. What COVID did was compress a decade of pressure into a few months and make the consequences impossible to ignore.

What drew us to write it in an academic venue rather than a trade one is that the debate about skills and employability is usually conducted with strong opinions and weak evidence. We wanted to make the argument somewhere it would be scrutinized properly.

The question underneath is one I keep returning to from different angles. If formal education can't move fast enough to keep pace with how work is changing, and structurally it can't, then who is responsible for the gap? Employers, through the learning function? Individuals, on their own time? Public policy? The honest answer is some combination, and almost nobody is coordinating it.

For readers who want the research foundation rather than the trade-press version.