Education Trends 2020: Part 3/4
If you missed parts 1 and 2, here they are. This week continues on the trends I am seeing every day as I talk to both my existing founders and new founders pitching ideas in edtech and future of learning and work.
11. Freelancers and side hustlers are likely to rise significantly as tech moves to remote work.
It feels pretty inevitable that most employees at least below executive team will be majority remote, coming in maybe a day or two a week, or flying in monthly. That may be an over-reaction to covid on my part. The reason I think it will happen though is that the only reason it didn’t happen before is too many managers were scared of remote management. Now they are all trained or at least have all tried it. I think remote work will force better communication, expectation setting, and accountability on results to companies, which is far better than just expecting everyone to put butts in seats all day.
If this does happen, I think we are on a slope towards default freelance. Most of the reason that high-skill folks didn’t freelance before is that it’s hard to do another job while sitting in your workplace. Remote unlocks that. Should employers freak out and try to limit this? I don’t think so. If a growth person at AirBNB is doing 10 hours a week of consulting, they are arguably more in touch with the market than anyone who only works for AirBNB. Much like professors doing outside consulting, there can be a lot of value add in the side hustle.
What does this mean from an investment standpoint? Generally it means we will see a huge influx of people into freelancing and norms that make it fine that you are doing it. So networks like Contra and marketplaces like Marketerhire will do well. Payment tools, training systems, etc. are likely to get a ton better.
12. Remote work removes a significant amount of first job friction. If one can work anywhere from anywhere to get my foot in the door, that creates a lot of new opportunity.
For bootcamps, non-US job seekers, and any alternative to US Ivy league educated folks, remote is a big deal. The ability to show up physically somewhere and look like the interviewer is likely to fade in value relative to your ability to get the job done and contribute to the team. For everyone who had been locked out of the US tech workplace, this creates a lot of new opportunity. For employers, it is clearly the way to increase diversity, as well as likely a way of lowering cost per employee relative to paying people mountains of cash so that they can afford to live here.
13. Not all students need to go to college, but all students need to get a job.
This fuels a lot of behavior in the startup ecosystem. One big one right now is remote internships. There are a lot of companies doing this. Paragon One is a good example. Although companies like WhiteHat became big largely based on subsidies from the UK government, this really unlocks when companies start to adjust their hiring approaches away from looking for signal (Ivy leagues for new folks and good companies for laterals) and driving more towards rapid hiring of people that show promise. I think if a company can’t figure out a week or month long task that helps them evaluate the hard skills and fit of a prospective hire, they probably should eliminate the job rec, because they don’t know what they want.
14. The world is changing too quickly for people to get one degree early in their life. People need the same five things (networks, signal, academics, social skills, job training) every few years. These are not well packaged now since colleges don’t handle this well. Examples — degreed (perfect example of a company which found a need and didn’t necessarily solve it well), all of the MOOCs, and then focused players like getsetup in the senior space. A company I funded by Gagan Biyani and Wes Kao announced funding and is going squarely after this opportunity.
This entire area is shockingly underserved given how obvious it is that retraining should be a continuous process. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First, at least in tech, there is really no current behavior for people spending their own money to stay current, as their is in other professions (hair stylists is a good example!). That means any company wading into this space has to convince people that they should change their spending behavior, which is tough. On the enterprise side, these dollars have traditionally been locked up in HR, and spent on Learning and Development programs that were almost comically behind the leading edge. One of my main thesis with Gagan and Wes’ company is that with very high quality courses, company CEOs will reach in and trump this historical process and move more dollars to employees and managers to spend as they see fit. Then the best courses will win.
15. The first generation MOOCs are extremely hungry to be a channel for the future of higher education. That creates a channel for smart companies to tap their huge audiences and funnel students into higher value programs. Who knows if the MOOCs will eventually go all the way in to live intensive bootcamps in different professions. In general, the fact that they are focusing here is fantastic, because they have enormous top of funnel and lots of people on these services are trying to reskill. So for folks like SV Academy in sales, partnerships with Coursera or Gainsight are far more natural ways to find trainees for their programs than advertising on facebook.
This area just seems like day one to me. Like Google or Amazon, the MOOCs capture intent for a set of users who really want to retrain. While MOOC courses are probably incapable of delivering on this themselves, they do an amazing job of generating leads for those who go deep. There has been far less MO (MOOC optimization) than I would have thought given how valuable these users are to the marketplace and to the schools training them to shift jobs.
If you liked part 3, here is the final piece!
