Knowledge Management: an expanded role for higher ed in a changing world

In a post back in 2006 entitled What business are we in?, I suggested that a broader definition of the business of higher education might be Knowledge Management. At the time, the pieces were not in place to envisage how such a definition might usefully extend the roles of the university. Some key pieces now seem to be in place. Lifelong post- baccalaureate learning has become a career necessity for an ever-increasing number of workers; employers are struggling to hire and retain employees with skill sets needed to meet challenges and opportunities created by rapidly developing technologies and pressures of globalization; the development of competency based stackable modules has opened up the potential for just-in-time learning that meets career needs of learners and simultaneously fits with knowledge needs of employers; and the centrality of the traditional academic degree hierarchy is being challenged by development of competency-based descriptions of workforce needs. The present COVID -19 upheaval of life in general has upended the job market, and the eventual recovery of the economy can perhaps be facilitated by a universities playing a more expansive role in meeting knowledge needs of industry. This post considers how a Knowledge Management role for universities might be envisaged today.

 

 

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Often when I think of change,  Bob Dylan's great anthem of the 1960's  "The Times They are a-Changing" plays in my head.

Come gather 'round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Bob Dylon: The Times They Are a-Changin

For better or worse, that song has never ceased to be pertinent. In our times, the world is rapidly changing in many important directions simultaneously.  Among the most important drivers of change have been the conflicting forces of globalization and nationalization,  and the explosion of technology in many critical domains. These drivers are having had an enormous impact on the workplace and the workforce globally. While "on average" these drivers have brought significant benefits, there are growing populations for which the impacts have been very negative. Whole categories of jobs have disappeared, and new categories requiring new skills have appeared in response to the opening of opportunities by globalization and technology.

As Dylan might observe in these circumstances, the water has been rising, and more people are having to learn to swim so they don't "sink like a stone". Impacts of this changing job market have been very broadly felt, and an ever increasing fraction of the workforce is having to upskill or reskill: for them, lifelong learning has gone from a fuzzy concept suggesting reading the great books to a reality of sporadic deep immersion in structured learning processes of some type. For employers, there are concomitant  challenges in recruiting and retaining qualified workers in critical fields, and in evolving their workforce in response to developing market opportunities.

Not surprisingly, a large fraction of these individuals needing structured post-baccalaureate learning have families and jobs, and so an extended residential, full time traditional learning process is neither desirable nor possible. Interestingly, at the same time the needs and expectations of employers vis a vis the educational attainments of their employees has been changing in ways that are not always in accord with traditional formal educational offerings. Often, for both individuals and employers the desired education is not for a generic next-step-degree, but rather for a more focused educational experience that fills a specific desired knowledge gap for both in a relatively short time period. That is, an increasing component of lifelong learning can be viewed as a sequence of "just-in-time" learning experiences that have the potential to maximize the overlap between the skills (or competencies) of the learner and the needs of employers.

Data suggest that the rapid growth of lifelong learning, often in the form of just in time approaches, is likely to be the major driver of expansion in higher education in the near future. While higher education has extensive experience in more traditional forms of lifelong learning (especially degree based), experience in providing just-in-time learning that helps match competency needs of learners and employers is generally lacking.  There are serious information asymmetries and lacunae currently hampering provision of effective need-matching lifelong learning, and much of university culture will be stressed by focusing on this sector.  In particular, traditional faculty control of curriculum that focuses on meeting traditional disciplinary definitions of broad competency will meet head on with employer demands of need-based competencies.  Again, Dylan might see a rising tide of change, and say the university must also learn to swim if it does not want to sink like a stone.

The university's role as Knowledge Manager

We in higher education seldom reflect on the broader "role" of higher education - our role is what we do. If we do move up one level of abstraction, we are likely to lean on Clark Kerr's influential formulations.  In 1963, Clark Kerr presented the Godkin Lectures at Harvard, containing the foundation of his singularly insightful and powerful book The Uses of the University  This work gave structure and impetus to the concept of the Knowledge Industry and the central role of the University in that industry.  Kerr's emphasis was on the university's unmatched, historic role in the production of knowledge in all its forms. Most of this knowledge production in the university (research, we call it) leads to knowledge put into the public realm via publications and presentations.

An equally important role for the university in the Knowledge Industry is education- also a major and extremely visible "product" of the university.  It has often been said that the most efficient form of knowledge transfer is to move an educated person from one place to another.  Thus through teaching, we also play a key role in the first step of knowledge transfer within the Knowledge Industry. 

Thus, our current roles in the Knowledge Industry primarily are to create new knowledge, and help to disseminate that knowledge via publications and presentations. In addition, that new knowledge and the accumulated knowledge of the past is packaged into courses that are taught to students, who are then launched into the world to transfer that knowledge, hopefully somewhere useful.

The discussion above about the growing importance of just in time lifelong learning suggests that the university needs to add an important new competency to its role: that of knowledge manager (KM) . Similarly to the role of a supply chain manager in industry, the knowledge manager would work to assure that needed knowledge is delivered to employers in a smooth and timely way. By  maximizing the overlap between the skills of learner and the needs of the employer, the knowledge manager could become a key player in navigating Dylan's rising waters of change. The KM should become a partner with corporate HR in building the workforce of the future, and with learners as they strive to excel in a rapidly changing workplace.

The knowledge manager must have many skills, but core is the ability to be "matchmaker" between the learner and the employer. The key to that, in my opinion, is contained in Clayton Christensen's Jobs To Be Done approach. That approach suggests that a person does not buy a product for the product's sake, but because the product allows them to accomplish a goal( job) that will move their lives forward. Few people really want to buy a nail per se, but if one's goal is to hang up a picture or build a box, a nail really becomes desirable. In order to iterate the design of a product in order to maximize effectiveness and consequently sales, you need to know the job that customers really want done -which may be very different from what the product seller and even the customers themselves think it is.  A beautiful example of this challenge has been given by Christensen of McDonald's and milkshakes.  Thus a large part of the knowledge manager's job must be to help both learner and employer define what job they really want done, moving the focus away from the product they think they need to buy.

In our case, the learner is interested in buying an educational product from the university in order to attain some life goal; and the employer is interested in employing the university's expertise to build the knowledge capabilities it needs to achieve some corporate goals for the future.In both cases, knowledge of goals can be mapped onto needed competencies and the Knowledge Manager - the university - can create programs leading to those competencies and help connect learner and employer. "Competencies" are clearly the key enablers of the effective Knowledge Manager relationship. By focusing on competencies, which can be gained by many pathways, rather than traditional metrics of "a degree in X and Z years of experience in Y", options for both learner and employer can be enormously broadened.  Future options for the learner will also be broadened if the competency-learning products are presented as components of a stackable program, e.g. may be components of a degree program, or of an advanced certification.

This understanding of job to be done is not trivially obtained, but it does enable the university to initiate and manage numerous virtuous cycles of education and employment which place it at the center of the Knowledge Economy.

Relationships

The university that adopts the KM role will need to redefine its traditional relationships with both its learners and with employers.

Learners: Learners are no longer simply purchasers of university courses: They  are key elements of the knowledge transfer capabilities of the university.  As such, the learner and the university enter into a symbiotic partnership based on the mutually beneficial goal of successful knowledge transfer into an employment setting.  For the university, this means that the education it offers must respond to actual outcome needs of employers (see below), that it be presented in the most educationally effective way possible, and that outcomes be measurable so that a convincing case of employability can be made to employers.  It also means that the university should help its learners be informed consumers, taking courses that will help them achieve their own career goals.  This effort will be facilitated if the learners are assisted in preparing profiles of their own competencies gained through formal education, job and life experiences, etc. Then, by comparing their own existing competencies with the competencies required for desired positions, students can choose learning programs that are most likely to lead to their own desired goals.

This new relationship will be most beneficial to learners and the university if it continues over time. All individuals who have a learning experience with the university should be welcomed into the lifelong alumni family.  If alumni share their competency profiles with the KM university, they can be alerted to job trends that they might exploit with  additional training (which the university might be well placed to provide),  or to openings in university partner employers that fit their current profiles. Thus, the relationship with alumni should be viewed as one with a long term focus on enabling them to attain their own life goals.  As we shall see below, the more alumni with whom the university has such a relationship, the more valuable it will be in its KM relationship with employers.

Partner employers:  As noted above, the goal is for the university to be viewed as a trusted partner in building the corporation's workforce of the future. The goal obviously cannot and should not be to create an exclusive partner relationship. Rather, the goal should be to create the strongest possible relationship that is focused on meeting the specific knowledge goals of the corporation: the relationship should be "bespoke" rather than "generic". Often, this may entail helping the corporation to define the competencies that it needs to achieve its goals.  Once the goals of the corporation are defined, the university can offer suggestions as to how best to achieve those goals given existing conditions, e.g. through up-training existing employees, external hiring, providing co-op or postdoctoral students in hard- to-hire fields, etc.  Where training is needed, the KM should be able to offer educational programs that will lead to the desired competencies, and where external hiring is the choice, the KM should be able to suggest to HR candidates from among its alumni who have the desired competencies and have signified interest in the position. Obviously, the more alumni that share with the university their competency profiles, the more useful the university can be to the corporate partners when openings are being filled.

In some cases, the university's strength in knowledge production (i.e. research) can also become a key component of the KM relationship.  Where there are overlaps in areas of corporate need for new knowledge and faculty interest, there will be possibilities of corporate sponsored research contracts, and there may be opportunities where joint university, corporate research partnerships would be able to attract external government funding. All such mutually beneficial activities would greatly strengthen the "bespoke" KM relationship.

Competencies

Competencies are obviously the key to providing a closer fit between educational offerings and specific needs of students and employers. Unfortunately, competencies are still a developing concept only grudgingly accepted by most faculty and educational gatekeepers such as accreditors. Many competencies used in defining jobs are exceedingly broad e.g. able to communicate - so broad they don't define what is really needed to achieve the specific goals of the employer. Universally recognized definitions of specific competencies are generally lacking, making it difficult to make "competencies" certifiable and thus transportable and useful. However, the potential benefits of a competency-based approach are obvious to many on both the educational and employer sides, and numerous groups are working to bring the field to maturity. The KM University,  with a foot in both camps, could  and should play a leadership role in the process.

COVID -19

 It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future

(attributed to various and many)

Obviously, the present COVID -19 pandemic has fundamentally shaken large parts of the world. Economies worldwide have been subjected to unexpected strains that have revealed unanticipated fault lines. An often-expressed overarching theme in predictions of the future is that current trends will be accelerated by the crisis, but with some redirections. Globalization will not disappear (despite the wishes of some political leaders) because it has shown it can lead to higher quality products at lower price ( a wish of some of those same leaders). However, global supply chains will be restructured with more focus on resiliency, less on lowest cost. This probably will imply less dependence on single source providers, and single country providers (e.g. China).  Components of some supply chains will be brought back to the US, but primarily in areas where expensive human labor can be replaced in significant part by AI and robots. The shut-down of face -to-face business around the globe and the subsequent necessary move to the web has shown that place is not so important as had been assumed in many situations.  The existing trend of moving operations to the web will be accelerated, and many business models (and personnel requirements) will be transformed by the process. Larger companies will in general be better able to recover from the current shut downs than smaller companies, and thus in the relatively near future will have numerous opportunities to buy valuable IP and talented employees at relatively low cost. Greater concentration of activities in larger companies will lead to even more rapid creation and centralization of valuable data, and concomitant growing demand for people who can analyze big data. Many companies that do survive the downturn and have laid off significant numbers of employees may take advantage of the moment to rethink and redirect their business models with the result that new hires will not be simple replacements of the former employees.

All in all, most predictions would suggest  that the need for serious, effective and directed lifelong learning will be even larger in the future than it has been in the recent past. As destructive as these times are, they do provide an entrepreneurial university with an opportunity to explore ways in which it can help employers navigate these difficult times by becoming a thought partner, a provider of responsive, effective educational offerings, and a source of qualified job candidates - in other words, a Knowledge Manager.