When a mid-flight professional fails to receive the guidance they need to shift gears or advance, a deadweight void grows even larger, which hinders the worker, universities, and the community at large.
Australia is increasingly reliant on professional expertise, with prosperity flowing from keeping people moving with higher learning.
This will not come from longer initial degrees, more masters, a melange of executive education, or even massifying the doctorate. This is all simply more of the same peddled in increasingly competitive and often muddled markets, yielding evermore diminishing returns.
The key is shifting from education products to learning experiences. People need a credential at the start of their career to get going. But for those down the track, another credential can be almost the last thing they need, eclipsed only by the failure to engage in careerlong learning overall.
This shift turns on knowing what skills are needed, and clarifying these for people at the start, not just during or at the end of their learning. This means switching assessment from focusing on the curriculum which is taught, to focusing on what learners know and can do. Insights can shape the packaging of relevant learning experiences, and for universities a whole lot more friends and prosperity than any marcom can buy.
Australian universities have almost everything they need to make this jump – all the education kit, most of the tech, and an abundance of expertise. Most could be done tomorrow, creating extra wealth for so many. So, what’s getting in the way?
Most innovation thrives outside the Anglosphere boundaries which mark out where Australian innovation plays. National regulation which standardises qualifications and adjectives is surely a hinderance. Huge tech lock-ins to the enterprise status quo are another. Likewise, endless governance committees work like treacle to stymy agility. The endless overflow of young credential seekers and thirst for research glory, sideline education. Australia has yet to get a platform to clear this market, though coding fingers are tapping. Many of the solutions are too local, with regions likely playing a huge role in forging needed partnerships.
Things change gradually, then suddenly. Commercial firms have tunnelled into this market to reveal the lucrative returns which flow from keeping professionals moving. Large foreign firms have started sharpening their PowerPoints.
There is no time like the present for a bold university president to dine with a regional chief executive and fire up the movement. New regulations, funding and roles can be kicked into gear to thin the treacle and keep the country moving.
Hamish Coates is Professor of Public Policy and director of the Higher Education Futures Lab
