Learning for “New Collar” Jobs in a Competitive Time
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How can we effectively compete in the field of online professional education during a time of dropping price points and rising competitors?
It is a time of high competition for the professional education market. Udacity has been successful in launching just-in-time Nanodegrees at very competitive price with flexible completion features. EdX continues to expand their MicroMasters programs in professional fields. Coursera specializations and entire master’s degrees at scale are pressing the traditional campus and online professional programs.
It just doesn’t seem fair to the bulk of higher education institutions, hampered by static or dropping budgets; antiquated governance systems that hamper agile responses to market threats; and risk-averse administrations that are loathe to invest in bold moves to grab the market to meet the needs of prospective students. These institutions are frozen in time – in an era that we passed more than half a dozen years ago when the first X-MOOCs were launched. They face a slow death; strangulation through ever-lagging enrollments and lower revenues.
So, what can be done to buy some time to bring about fundamental change in the institution that will foster innovation and competitiveness?
Here are some thoughts:
- Review your operation for efficiency and productivity. Do not cut staff who are productive, but reconfigure the operation in ways that make it more effective while saving dollars. Those dollars might be reinvested in new initiatives.
- Renew your brand awareness, loyalty and reputation for excellence. This is one unique asset that is yours to cultivate and leverage. It is something that many of the newcomers do not have – and some of the big name competitors do not have in your region. You have built that brand over fifty, a hundred, or more years; find ways to use it to bring in additional enrollments.
- Make direct connections with businesses and industries. Start with your region and expand outwards. Listen carefully to their needs. Offer to customize classes or certificates to meet their needs just in time. In return ask for 25, 50, 100 or more students. You may find that other similar businesses will have the very same needs.
- Make sure that you validate your learning outcomes with credentialing through badges, certifications or other relevant evidence of learning.
And, that leads us to the “new-collar” jobs. If you haven’t heard about them yet, new-collar jobs are “positions that require specific skills but not a bachelor’s degree, are in high demand,” according to ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, “….Many new-collar jobs offer the potential for job security, career growth and a large salary increase from other jobs available to those without college degrees. While the median annual salary for someone with some college but no degree is about $40,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, many new-collar jobs offer wages over six figures.”
Many of these new-collar jobs are in tech, but they can be found in health care and most other growing fields. Catering to this group of prospective students with stand-alone classes, mini-certificates and other similar programs with short time commitments can help give a university time to adapt to the new marketplace where price point and relevancy reins.
Have you considered how to make your offerings more responsive to both employers and prospective students? Perhaps now is the time to make some changes.
Of course, I will continue to track the developments in emerging trends, technologies, pedagogies and practices, Continuing and Online Education Update blog by UPCEA. You can have the updates sent directly to your email each morning – no advertising, no spam!
Best,
Ray Schroeder
Founding Director
National Council for Online Education
Ray Schroeder is Professor Emeritus, Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) and Senior Fellow at UPCEA. Each year, Ray publishes and presents nationally on emerging topics in online and technology-enhanced learning. Ray’s social media publications daily reach more than 12,000 professionals. He is the inaugural recipient of the A. Frank Mayadas Online Leadership Award, recipient of the University of Illinois Distinguished Service Award, the United States Distance Learning Association Hall of Fame Award, and the American Journal of Distance Education/University of Wisconsin Wedemeyer Excellence in Distance Education Award 2016.
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