Is your college or university preparing you for today’s challenges?

Published on October 24, 2019

Arsenio Pagliarini

Co-Founder and CEO at InterGroup Education Technology

A few days ago, marketing consulting company Interbrand released its ranking of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. Out of curiosity, I decided to count how many of them are tech companies. Of the 10 highest-ranked brands, 6 have a "digital DNA" or are in media; the top 4 are renowned tech giants - Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Also, in the top 10 were Samsung (#6) and Disney (#10).

Others appearing in the top 100 are eBay (#44), Netflix (#65), Salesforce (#70) and PayPal (#72), all founded between 1995 and 1998; as well as Uber (#87), Spotify (#92) and LinkedIn (#98), which were established between 2002 and 2009. I counted at least 15 other companies rooted in the tech sector, including IBM (#12), Intel (#13), Cisco (#15), Oracle (#18) and SAP (#20).

Notably, of the 100 top organizations, 28 are technology companies; 3 of which were founded less than 18 years ago, and one of them in the last decade (Uber).

4 companies have not even completed their 25th year of operation. None of them are Brazilian.

What does this all mean?

Quite a lot, actually.

These numbers indicate that our world has undergone, and will continue to undergo, radical transformations generated by new technological advances in years to come. This means that in order to be competitive, those looking to enter the workforce today or in the near future will need to learn skills and subjects that go beyond the core curricula of most colleges and universities.

Furthermore, considering the constant and frenetic transformations reshaping the world, those who wish to stay relevant on the job market will need to constantly adapt and update themselves as "students for life."

So I ask myself: are our educational institutions prepared to educate this new type of professional?

Are modern curricula aligned with the demands of industry 4.0 and all the changes it has wrought in the global economy?

Will Brazil be able to retain its competitiveness in a market increasingly characterized by innovation?

According to a research study conducted by Thomson Reuters, 63% of Brazilian companies invest in the technological training of their employees; 80% of the executives interviewed believe that it will be virtually impossible to stay competitive within the next 3 years without adopting new technologies.

There is, however, a warning sign flashing: only 17% believe their employees are prepared to use these skills.

Keeping up with the speed of these changes poses a challenge to traditional universities that still insist on using the "chalk, chalkboard, saliva" format for passing on knowledge. They also fail to understand that knowledge entails more than what happens within the four walls of the classroom.

Professors are undoubtedly best prepared to act as a bridge for educating students, however, their role is no longer limited to teaching but to mentoring.

This new approach opens a window for teachers and market professionals to work together towards professional training, merging pedagogical strategy with new courses designed by those who understand the challenges of finding and recruiting top talent prepared to make a difference, especially in organizations confronted daily by new technologies and disruptive models with the power to attract customers away from competitors who have long enjoyed a 'supposedly untouchable comfort zone'.

In the same that several sectors have been shaken by the digitalization of businesses ranging from financial, urban mobility, real-estate and entertainment sectors, to name just a few, education will also need to absorb new formats that facilitate the access and exchange of knowledge generated within corporations themselves.

There are so many things to learn and new skills to acquire, especially outside the university.

So why not create a connection between the academic and corporate worlds?

The good news is that things are converging in this direction.

The public-speaking market, for example, is growing rapidly and has been attracting the interest of companies seeking “market people” presentations as a way of bringing and sharing experiences and visions about the present and the future to keep their employees in tune with the latest trends.

Just as the evolution of fintechs, foodtechs, agritechs, lawtechs, retailtechs has been very noticeable, we will also see a geometric growth of edtechs.

The integration of technologies into the educational processes will be key in bridging universities and the market.

EdTech: a 252 billion dollar market

According to the EdTechX Global Report the global EdTech market will reach 252 billion dollars in the coming year. In Brazil, the Edtechs map 2018 , produced by the Brazilian Association of Startups (abstartups) in partnership with the Center for Innovation for Brazilian Education (CIEB), identified a total of 364 Edtechs, 43% of which are located in the state of São Paulo alone. One figure stands out: only 8% operate within the higher education market, which highlights a slower rate of technology adoption among universities.

According to a study conducted by HolonIQ , VC investments in education globally amounted to US$8.2 billion last year, almost double the 2017 total of US$ 4.4 billion.

The largest global investments in educational technologies, according to HolonIQ , will be in Augmented Reality and VR, jumping to US$12.6 billion by 2025 compared to US$ 1.8 billion in 2018; AI, from US$ 0.8 billion to US$ 6.1 billion; Robotics, from US$ 1.3 billion to US$ 3.1 billion; and Blockchain, from US$ 0.1 billion to US$ 0.6 billion over the same period.

Stop and think about this for a moment.

Have you ever wondered how much of what you have learned and continue to learn throughout your career could help others grow? What if you could communicate all this knowledge through a digital platform from home from the best universities in Brazil and the world?

You can become a "knowledge provider" to open and traditional universities which will be of great value in what they have to convey to students who, by the end of the day, will want to be ready to face real-world challenges. In addition to teaching, you also have much to learn from interacting with this generation.

The integration of universities and companies also presents limitless opportunities for corporate training. A study titled “O panorama do treinamento no Brasil” (an outlook on training in Brazil), compiled by the Brazilian Association for Training and Professional Development (ABTD), Integração Escola de Negócios, and Carvalho e Mello Consultoria Organizacional shows that the annual investment per contributor in Brazil in T&D is around US$ 200, way below the United States' average of US$ 1,200.

Investments in terms of gross annual revenues represent 0.63% in Brazil and 1.43% in the US, respectively.

Brazilians dedicate around 21 hours per year towards their training; Americans spend 33 hours.

This scenario results in noticeable changes to our job market and serves as a means to generate a new crop of innovative companies.

A study titled “Panorama da Transformação Digital no Brasil” (An overview of digital transformation in Brazil) notes that there will be 160,000 unfilled vacancies in the tech sector this year.

Here's that number again:

160,000!

75% of the companies interviewed say that they have a difficult time finding qualified candidates for these jobs.

One last statistic: according to the Institute for Business Value (IBV) at IBM, 7.2 million new professionals in Brazil will need to be trained by 2023 because of the increasing influence of AI and intelligent automation in the job market.

The World Digital Competitiveness ranking published by the World Competitive Center at IMD Business School in Switzerland, in partnership with Brazilian business school Fundação Dom Cabral, looked at 63 countries and placed Brazil in 57th place. In the category of "technical and digital skills," Brazil is 62nd.

The above ranking takes into account indicators such as the use of digital technologies in economic transformation and examines five variables - knowledge (ability to understand and learn new technologies); technology (ability to develop digital innovations); future readiness (preparation for future developments; industrial robots (measure of the total number of robots in operation); and robots used for the purpose education.

“By 2030 the largest Internet-based company in the world will be an education company that we haven't heard of yet.

"Nobody has quite cracked the code for the future of education," says Thomas Frey, a futurist at the DaVinci Institute.

His view is that open and massive online courses (MOOCs) will gain a vast array of resources over the next decade, including the use of robots that can deliver personalized on-screen lessons, enabling students to learn 10 times faster by today's standards due to dedicated attention and, thus, faster graduation rates.

The technological divide is one of the most pronounced symptoms preventing professional growth. This is clearly an important indicator since, as all this research shows, there is no future without technological development and disruptive companies are the ones that will lead in an increasingly interconnected world, bringing about business without borders, without intermediaries and always ready to move forward, leaving behind old models and paradigms.

As the American computer scientist Alan Kay put it, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Confucius said something similar:

"If you want to predict the future, study the past."

Bridging the gap between universities and corporations by bringing seasoned content producers with market experience is an urgent demand if we are going to improve Brazil's position among the most prepared nations for innovation economics.

Those who are in college and need to compete for their place in the sun in the labor market are in a hurry.

So are the employers searching for talent to run their businesses.

Only by integrating academia and business can we increase the chances of seeing a Brazilian company on Interbrand's list.

Who knows, maybe it'll be yours.

☺

(*) CEO of InterGroup Education Technology