Voice from the Industry
Education Publishing’s Own 21st Century Skills Gap – Change Begins At-Home Edition
by Lee Wilson, President and CEO, PCI Education — Friday, March 04, 2011
Lost in all the blather about 21st century skills in schools is the dearth of critical new skills in our own industry. We all know the buzzwords— blended learning, digital transformation, hyper-linked content, open source, etc. — but very few companies have the right roster to build compelling and competitive products.
Yet!
Here is my take on the skills education companies will need to reach the other side of the digital transformation.
These jobs address one or more of three broad themes.
First, we need to publish in multiple media, which includes software, print, crowd-sourced social content, and enterprise systems for reporting and analysis.
Second, agile development business models are beating traditional top-down, process-oriented behemoths. This is not just for iPhone Apps—print has much to learn from this transformation.
Third, globalization is happening right now in education publishing. If you are not playing everywhere, your competition will have more resources and opportunities to innovate.
Let’s take a stroll through the process of building, selling, and supporting education products and get a taste of what new skills are in short supply in this new world.
Build It – Product Development
Multiple Media Producers – By this, I mean print and software, not just QuickTime movies. These are business heads who quarterback specific projects much like a movie producer. They must understand and be able to integrate radically different development processes for the different media. Layering print process on software and vice versa does not work.
Fun Architects – Raph Koster, in his seminal A Theory of Fun, makes the point that engagement comes from learning and learning in a game-based environment is challenging and your choices have consequences. While much of what is built today is challenging, we do not offer much in the way of choice or consequences for applying what is being taught.
Multi-National Content Directors – Think of these people as Cross-Cultural Social Compliance Officers. They will allow you to develop once and deploy in many countries. Barriers to global deployment rest on simple things like street signs in artwork or phrases that mean radically different things within the same language (e.g., napkin). Global launches are in our future just like movies and trade books.
Designing Coder or Coding Designer – For agile development, need to be able to conceptualize and rapidly prototype elegant code and beautiful layouts (xml driven, of course).
Talent Wrangler – Remote work and teams in different continents are becoming the norm.
Sell It – Sales and Marketing
Network Aggregators – Reps who are skilled at building, nurturing, and reaping the rewards of social networks are the future in sales. Many reps today have built big networks, but they invest almost nothing in the communities and, as a result, do not get much of a return. The truism that you reap what you sow applies in spades to the online world. Oh … and these networks need to be global.
Data Miners – In a world of channels that are disaggregating and recombining in interesting ways, agility matters a great deal. Getting rapid feedback on marketing programs to make sure resources are targeted and that fresh approaches are always being tested is going to be critical. What are you testing today? Tomorrow? Next week?
Content Marines – The U.S. Marines were first used in the war against the Barbary Pirates (“from the halls of Tripoli”). In the era of digital content, we need intrepid and well-trained web warriors who can find pirated content and shut it down or knock it out anywhere in the world.
Support It – Customer Support
Online Receptionists – How many sites have you joined where you got a personal welcome and a small amount of handholding? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? One of the surest ways to make people come back and become participants in online communities is investing in active membership management with a personal touch. Yes, this costs money for something you could automate — but the value is in the engagement, not in the raw numbers.
Content Curators – We are going to be in competition with our customers as more user-generated content is available. Rather than fighting this, companies can do what they have always done by adding value to the process through content “curation.” Your customers will benefit from this, and you will gain valuable insights into where demand is shifting BEFORE you invest.
Language Police – When we create online social environments, we cannot lose sight of our responsibility to schools to maintain community standards. Language is alive, particularly so among teens, and you will see extremely creative approaches to new slang. Whyville.net, arguably the most successful learning community ever, encourages kids to communicate openly but has a team of people who do nothing but manage an ever-growing blacklist database of slang and euphemisms for inappropriate material.
Run It – Business Roles
Business Intelligence Designers – Agility is the name of the game, and rapid deployment of web-based business metrics that support quick decision making in a dynamic environment is essential today. Teasing the story out of the numbers and presenting it in a way that enhances organizational intelligence is a rare skill.
Advertising Reps – What!? “We sell to education—we do not sell advertising.” Before you dismiss this outright, consider that one way to compete with “low-quality free” is to provide sponsored high-quality content. Companies like uBoost and Whyville are already doing this, and cash-strapped schools have already paved the way with their sports programs.
Shibboleth Hunters – We need executives who are willing to root out outdated ways of doing things and drive second-order change — see Tom Greaves’ article from a few weeks ago. Do you block employees from social media at work? Do you require six to eight months of analysis and approvals before you start a project? Your competition will be done before you start.
Conclusion
I am fairly certain I have most of this wrong, so please tweet using @EdNETBiz to suggest additional skills. I am also fairly certain that companies that do not start thinking about these challenges will find themselves on the receiving end of disruptive change.
As they used to say on KFOG in San Francisco: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”
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Here are two of Lee Wilson's recent blog posts on how to find a job in education publishing:
Part 1 http://www.educationbusinessblog.com/2011/02/job_search_tips_for_education.html
Part 2 http://www.educationbusinessblog.com/2011/02/how_to_find_a_job_in_education.html
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Lee Wilson is President and CEO of PCI Education in San Antonio (www.pcieducation.com). His perspective is informed by 21 years in education, with stops in supplemental publishing, instructional software, enterprise systems, and computer hardware. He blogs regularly at www.education-business-blog.com and is the author of the K12 Decision Support Systems Market Report on Student Information Systems and Data Warehouses www.k12-decision-support.com. Prior to joining PCI, Lee served as an executive at Harcourt Achieve, Pearson Learning Group, and Chancery Software. He also spent time at Apple Computer in a variety of marketing and sales positions. Lee earned a master’s of business administration degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Princeton University. He may be reached at info@headwaystrategies.com.
