UPCEA/Emsi Report - The Race is on for Blockchain Talent: How Higher Education Can Respond

New economies and ecosystems are moving at a rapid pace. Outside of a handful of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) degrees, one could argue that higher education isn’t keeping up with the needs of a fast-moving economy. For some institutions, their response has been moving campus-based master’s degrees online or developing new online professional master’s degrees. For others, it has been investing into more just-in-time learning or the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) initiative. The application of blockchain technologies into a variety of business processes, and its impact on the workforce of the future, offers great opportunity for higher education to partner with business and industry on the leading edge.

Most people understand blockchain as the underlying distributed ledger technology that cryptocurrencies are built upon. So why should higher education care about blockchain? Because there is a boom of other real world blockchain applications that is driving a race for blockchain talent. Employer demand is real and is growing at a meteoric pace. Emsi is a labor market analytics firm that continuously searches millions of job postings across the web. When Emsi searched for the word “blockchain” in those jobs, they found 2,304 jobs in 2016. That number increased to 7,131 jobs in 2017. In January 2018 alone, Emsi found 1,933 blockchain jobs posted. This exponential growth suggests that the market is screaming for new employees or new skills for existing employees.