6 ways that the Coronavirus pandemic alters the future of learning and work

This has been a tough couple of months for some of us, a deadly one for others, and one that has pushed many to the brink of financial ruin and survival. Many families at the school network I founded, Rocketship, were already working multiple jobs and living multiple families to a rented apartment. This has been an incredibly tough time for them and I’m proud of the Rocketship team for raising almost half a million dollars to give relief to those families.

At the same time, all crises create change and in the long-term, that can help us move in the right direction. As a seed investor, I’m in the change business, so I have been intently watching the way Coronavirus has affect my portfolio and friends and family as they adapt. There are six basic themes that I have noticed:

1 — Everybody is a home schooler.

This simple fact is incredibly important, because home schoolers were thought of as a little weird, had religious overtones, and a lot of things that would have kept most people from trying. By command of the virus, if we have children, we are now home schoolers. This simple change has major implications. The hardest part of changing behavior is often the first step. And now everyone has taken the first step. This does not mean everyone is going to decide to home school forever. In fact, most people will go right back to the status quo as soon as they can. But they can no longer treat the alternatives to public school in the abstract, they have lived it.

2 — Everybody knows a lot more about their kids’ schools.

We have all been turned into formal or informal tutors, coaches, assistant teachers, and every other odd job that happens every day at schools. For me personally, our two kids go to two different schools. One school jumped on it and got the program reasonably right, and things have gone great. The other did a terrible job, trying to transplant classroom lectures to Zoom and boring our daughter endlessly. We have also seen the kind of expectations and motivation our kids are getting every day. I make no judgment here, but most U.S. parents are perfectly happy to send their kids off to school in the morning and ask them how it was when they get home. They now know how it really works, and can make much more informed decisions.

3 — — Everybody has socialized online.

One of the biggest biases I hear often when talking about anything online is that it is inherently anti-social, whereas if you are serious about relationships, you need to be there in person. By no means do I think that the two are equivalent but my guess is that many fewer people will believe that is impossible to build or maintain relationships online after this. The millennials and Gen Z already understood this, now everyone else does.

4 — — Every manager has now managed a remote team.

In my opinion, the biggest roadblock to building remote teams has been how difficult they are to manage. Many managers wanted to have nothing to do with remote teams, preferring everyone within their eyesight. The tools and techniques for remote management have been around for decades, but companies and managers resisted. Until a few years ago, Silicon Valley was part of that resistance. My guess is that some companies and managers will immediately go back to their comfort zone of everyone in one place. Some, like Twitter, will move the other direction and make remote the default. And a lot more companies will be open to a lot more remote work than before.

5 — — Every employee has worked from home.

Some of my most interesting conversations have been with people who didn’t believe work from home was anything more than a company perk. Then they went a few weeks without the commute and all of the other hassles involved in relocating themselves every day. And a big chunk of these people get it now in a way they never did before. Just basic exposure has done its magic. So while the supermajority of Americans has always preferred some work from home, everyone has now done it for an extended period. Some will run back to the commute, and others will change their lives.

6 — — Even tech workers can lose jobs.

A couple hundred thousand tech workers in Silicon Valley have lost their jobs now. That’s a pretty big number. For those under thirty, they had likely never seen a recession in their working lives. Now they are scrambling, interviewing, and picking up odd jobs to make ends meet. In the process, a lot are doing full-time gig work on sites like Upwork. For most, they will happily return to the working world as soon as they can. For others, the freedom of freelancing and entrepreneurship will be more compelling.

So what do all of these changes add up to? I think we have fast-forwarded the adoption of online learning and remote work by three to five years in the last two months. That’s a pretty bold statement, but is backed up by the 10–20x increase in usage that we’ve seen at many of my companies. Usage on sites like Outschool, Beanstalk, Epic!, Kunduz, and Lingokids has gone through the roof. School applications at schools like Lambda, SV Academy, FourthRev, Galileo, Sora, and Prenda have done the same. GetSetup is teaching thousands of seniors a day how to stay healthy, safe, and mentally active during this time. Contra now has tens of thousands on its waitlist to join its professional network for freelancers. No doubt, when shelter in place is over, a lot of this will move back to something more normal, but I hear stories every day from people who love studying and working online, and didn’t even know about it before.