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Rebuilding the learning ecosystem for the future of work

A conversation with Michelle Weise, author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet
By Ramona Schindelheim
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The way we work is constantly changing. Technology is eliminating many of the more repetitive skills in all our jobs. There’s more emphasis being placed on cognitive—human—skills. And, we’re all working longer than we probably thought we would when we first entered the workforce.

“Most of our workforce is actually staying in for much longer than, historically, we’ve ever seen. People are going well into their 60s and 70s, and having and facing way more job transitions than they ever imagined.”

Michelle Weise has spent the past decade studying how work is changing and helping educators, business leaders, and policy makers rethink how we prepare the workforce for all these changes, including the shift in the skills we all need.

She’s currently entrepreneur-in-residence and senior advisor at Imaginable Futures, and also the former chief innovation officer of the Strada Education Networks Institute for the Future of Work.

Weise’s put all that knowledge and experience into a new book—out today—Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet. She’s my guest on this week’s Work in Progress podcast.

The book focuses on the need for lifelong learning—or long life learning, as she describes it—and the importance of shifting the way we think about education in this country.

“When you think about a longer work life, and this idea of long life learning, it really upends all of our working assumptions about education and work. And this was also happening at the same time where we were starting to realize that the transition from education to work and retirement was just not as simple as it used to be,” says Weise.

“Even early Baby Boomers who are now retiring are experiencing approximately 12 job changes by the time they retire. So it’s not just the millennials who are switching jobs pretty frequently. Even if you extend the work life of an individual five, 10, 15 years, we can only extrapolate that the number of job transitions we might anticipate might reach 20 or 30 over a lifetime.”

These projections lead to a lot of questions: How am I actually going to remain competitive in the workforce? How am I going to stay relevant? It’s going to require some sort of retooling and re-skilling, or up-skilling over time, but where am I going to actually go to attain that extra learning?

Weise says those questions lead her to think about how we go from just talking about lifelong learning to actually changing our behavior and rebuilding the learning ecosystem for the future.

In the book, she outlines the solutions to the shortcomings in the current education system, from wraparound supports for workers to targeted education, all aimed at helping fulfil the needs of a new generation of workers.

We discuss these solutions in this podcast. You can listen here, or download it wherever you get your podcasts.

Look for Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet at your favorite book retailer.

Episode 156: Michelle Weise, author, Long Life Learning:
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.

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