Talent – Jay Collier

Can a 20-Minute Test Tell Employers What a College Degree Cannot?

When it comes to hiring, many employers still lean toward graduates from name-brand institutions. Yet … too many graduates “don’t get a shot at the high-value jobs they should be getting,” says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education. “That’s a big deal in a liberal democracy.”… Companies and others spend $1…

There is Work in Digital Tech, Regardless of Background

Stephen O’Grady is co-founder of RedMonk, a Maine consulting firm with global clients. They help “companies understand developers better, and to help developers, period.” “I want [kids] to understand that no matter what their background, what their training, there is a place for them in this industry if they enjoy the work and are willing to…

Why Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education

“Many of the builders of technology today haven’t spent enough time thinking about the implications for the world.”

The Parts of America Most Susceptible to Automation

The authors estimate that almost all large American metropolitan areas may lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs because of automation in the next two decades. “We felt it was really stunning, since we are underestimating the probability of automation,” said Johannes Moenius, the director of the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at…

Bosses Believe Your Work Skills Will Soon Be Useless

Excerpt from the Washington Post — May 2017 Nearly a third of business leaders and technology analysts express “no confidence” that education and job training in the United States will evolve rapidly enough to match the next decade’s labor market demands, a new report from the Pew Research Center finds. About 30 percent of the executives,…

A Skills Gap From College to Career Doesn’t Exist. It’s the Awareness Gap We Need to Fix.

Excerpt from EdSurge — April 2017 A popular narrative in the employment market today is that a “skills gap” exists between the abilities employers seek in candidates and the capabilities that new college graduates gain through postsecondary education. Beyond skills readily demonstrable from college curriculum (primarily cognitive skills and technical skills), employers complain about the lack…

Digital Workplace: How HR Will Change In 2017

Excerpt from CactusSoft Analytics — December 2016 20th century organizational structures (classical hierarchies and top-down management and decision making) are dying – giving rise to devolved decision making by cross functional teams who work in sprints of activity, are funded via micro-budgets and able to deliver at unheard of speeds. Digital transformation is not…

Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace

People seek a holistic life: they want to work with intelligent people on exciting and rewarding projects where they can be creative and left alone to get the job done; values and purpose are as important as money; working for social good is an option; and they want to be a part of ‘the next…

Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)

From McKinsey Quarterly — July 2016 The hardest activities to automate with currently available technologies are those that involve managing and developing people (9 percent automation potential) or that apply expertise to decision making, planning, or creative work (18 percent). These activities, often characterized as knowledge work, can be as varied as coding software, creating…

Aligning the Organization for its Digital Future

Excerpt from the MIT Sloan Review — July 2016 Many companies are responding to an increasingly digital market environment by adding roles with a digital focus or changing traditional roles to have a digital orientation. The list of “digital” business roles and functions is extensive and growing. There are now digital strategists, chief digital officers,…

IDEXX CIO Ken Grady on Nontraditional Career Paths

Ken Grady has always been an animal lover. You can find him traveling across the country to visit farmers and their cows and chickens, or with veterinarians and the puppies, cats, guinea pigs, and all sorts of beloved pets in their care. But while his work involves caring for animals of all shapes and sizes, Grady…

Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers

Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…

These Will Be The Top Jobs In 2025 (And The Skills You’ll Need To Get Them)

It’s no surprise that tech skills will be in demand. However, [Devin Fidler at the Institute of the Future] says that ‘computational thinking’—the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it—will be valued. Related jobs: Software developer jobs will grow…

Do We Have the Grit to Close the Skills Gap?

“Ask any hiring manager what they are looking for in an ideal candidate, and you will quickly hear words like grit, determination, motivation, persistence, adaptability and hard work, characteristics often described as ‘non-cognitive’ skills by academics like the Nobel Prize winner James Heckman.”

How Business and Technology Skills Are Merging to Create High Opportunity Hybrid Jobs

From General Assembly Over the last several years, new tools have made programming and data analysis accessible to users with far less training and technical expertise than ever before. This has had a democratizing effect on these fields, with technical and analytical functions no longer the exclusive domain of “experts” but rather undertaken within a…

How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization?

Excerpt from research by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, University of Oxford — September 2013 We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerization. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerization for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we…