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Reskilling: The determinant factor in a successful life and career

Opinion: GSV founder on lifelong learning
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Michael Moe, Founder of GSV, CEO of GSV Asset Management (Photo: GSV)

The Internet Age is 25 years old and the changes it has catalyzed are hard to comprehend. In 1995, General Electric was the world’s largest company by market cap, while Amazon was just one year old, and Facebook wasn’t even born.

Can you imagine what your life would be without Amazon or Facebook? Not to mention email? Salesforce? Netflix? Pinterest? Spotify? Lyft?

Moore’s Law—now over 50 years old—is alive and well with computing power doubling every couple of years. The result of this is that in just the last 20 years the cost of computing has dropped 99 percent and digital storage capacity is basically infinite and free.

And change has been accelerating. It took electricity 75 years to reach 50 million people. It took cell phones 12 years.The Internet seven years. Twitter two years. Pokémon Go 19 days!

The Future of Work, A.D.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the future has been accelerated to the present and we have gone from a B.C. world to an A.D. world—Before Corona to After Disease. What this means is that most of the trends that were in place are getting stronger and vulnerable businesses that were becoming less relevant by the day have been made irrelevant or are literally gone.

Today that means two radical shifts for the future of work: 1) information and education, once scarce and inaccessible, is now abundant and accessible and 2) technology can now scale faster than human beings can learn.

The results of those shifts are that the half-life of your knowledge and skills is getting shorter and shorter, which has led to a massive global skills gap and created an immense pressure on companies and individuals to be continuously learning and upskilling.

In that economy, your education and skills make the difference for an individual, a company, and, for that matter, a country. The higher the education level you have, statistically, the more money you make and, for countries, there is a direct correlation between the level of educational attainment and GDP per capita.

But going back to school two or four years at a time is not a model that is efficient over a lifetime of learning, or one that can move fast enough to satiate the demands that companies have for talent.

Keeping Up with the Need to Learn New Skills

The challenge for business is that: 1) to compete, they need an educated and skilled workforce or be crushed; 2) change is happening so fast that they need to either fire their old workforce and replace it with employees with contemporary skills or reskill the employees they have; 3) the average millennial stays at a company 2.5 years.

Reacting to all of this, millennials rank providing training as the number one issue they are looking for in an employer. They sense, as we all must, that our ability to learn and gain skills is now the determinant factor in a successful life and career.

The good news is that companies are responding, and entrepreneurs are heeding the call. Companies like AT&T, JPMorgan Chase, Amazon, and PwC have all announce employee upskilling initiatives of hundreds-of-millions of dollars.

Startups like Coursera have democratized education to be something accessible on-demand over our lifetimes and companies like Degreed are leading the way, helping companies and their employees navigate this new world where our lifelong learning and skills are the currency of work.

Companies like InStride and Guild are leading on helping companies extend online university degrees to all employees as a benefit, reflecting the increased demand from employees for education.

Entrepreneurs solve problems—the greater the problem, the greater the opportunity. I’m optimistic we are going to see some transformational models emerge in this important space.

Michael Moe is the founder of GSV and the CEO of GSV Asset Management.

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.