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Meghan Cureton

LinkedIn's 2017 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report - 0 views

  • 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately hold jobs that don’t yet exist.
  • Here’s what we found:
  • Tech is king:
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  • Soft skills matter:
  • Jobs with high mobility on the rise
  • Low supply of talent for top jobs:
  • Future-proofing skills is critical:
  • Comprehensive sets of skills that cover multiple disciplines are seemingly in higher demand. Many of the roles on this list cover multiple disciplines and are applicable to multiple industries.
  • Certain specialist roles are on the decline
  • We also took a look at the skills that were growing the fastest across these professions, and the same trend emerged: soft skills are represented across the board, as well as basic computer literacy.
  • We surveyed more than 1,200 hiring managers to find out what they’re looking for in a candidate when it comes to soft skills: Adaptability Culture Fit Collaboration Leadership Growth Potential Prioritization
  • It’s always a good reminder that soft skills will always be important, no matter the profession. The ability to collaborate, be a leader, and learn from colleagues will stand out in interviews, and even more once starting a job.
Bo Adams

Laurene Powell Jobs Commits $50 Million to Create New High Schools - The New York Times - 1 views

  •  
    HT Education Reimagined
Nicole Martin

The Power of Hidden Teams - 0 views

  • the most powerful factor was simply whether or not respondents reported doing most of their work on a team. Those who did were more than twice as likely to be fully engaged as those who said they did most of their work alone. The local, ground-level experience of work — the people they worked with and their interactions with them — trumped everything else.
  • The team is the reality of your experience at work.
  • The quality of this team experience is the quality of your work experience.
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  • by finally being able to see dynamic, ephemeral, local teams, we would better fight the real war for talent: not just attracting the best people, but getting from them the best that they, uniquely, have to offer.
  • the biggest differentiator between high- and low-performing teams: trust in the team leader.
  • we discovered that strong agreement with two statements from our survey, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me” and “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work,” corresponds with a high level of trust in the team leader. This suggests that despite the fluidity of today’s working world, the best team leaders can help each team member feel both understood and focused. Know me for my best, and then focus my work around that: These are the fundamental needs of every team member, and the foundation of any high-performing team.
  • frequent attention to the work of each team member is what we might call the anchor ritual of team leadership. These organizations have all instituted a simple weekly conversation between team leaders and each of their team members and have been able to measure increases in engagement as a function of the frequency of these check-ins.
  • The fundamental lesson of the research is that work happens on teams, whether they are overlapping, dynamic, spontaneous or designed, long-lived or short-lived. The real world of work is messy. We must push into the richness of real teams doing real work, and we must ask new questions: Do large successful teams have the same habits and rhythms as small successful teams? In how many ways do teams start? Do the best ways for team members to share information vary according to the type of team they’re on? Are some ways demonstrably better than others, in terms of their impact on team engagement? Do virtual teams adopt a cadence different from that of colocated teams?
  • frequency of conversations is critical
  • The research reveals that for people to be engaged, the span of control must allow each team leader to check-in, one on one, with each team member every week of the year. Any relayering, delayering, or org redesign that prevents such frequent attention will ultimately lead to disengagement, burnout, and turnover.
  • to engage your people, you should avoid mandating that they show up at the office every day, and also that all the time you spend helping your remote workers join, get to know the other members of, and feel supported by their teams will pay off in the form of more-engaged workers. Engagement is about who you work with, not where.
  • Employees should have more control over their work and a greater chance to do work they love. They should have the best of both worlds: one predictable, stable role with a “home team” (more often than not, the static team depicted on the org chart) and one “side hustle” — a series of opportunities to join dynamic teams inside the same organization. Their greatest value to any of these teams may well be the particular, wonderful, and weird set of strengths they possess.
  • Thus we should select, train, reward, and promote leaders not on the basis of an abstract list of generic leadership competencies but, rather, on their appetite for team leadership and their demonstrable track record as team leaders.
  • What are your priorities this week, and How can I help?
  • For team leaders, the emphasis needs to shift from the generic to the specific. We need to be clear that the job of a team leader is simply, and challengingly, this: to create, day in and day out, an experience on the team that allows each person to offer his or her unique best, and then to meld those contributions into something no individual could do alone. We need to anchor this job in rituals and measures, all designed to help magnify what the best teams do: the weekly check-in; frequent discussion with each person and with the team as a whole about where people can employ their strengths; and use of the eight items in our methodology to gauge progress, not for the purpose of accountability but, rather, for illumination and course correction.
  • nd here, finally, we see the core purpose of teams: They are the best method we humans have ever devised to make each person’s uniqueness useful. We know that the frequent use of strengths leads to high performance, and we know that strengths vary from person to person. High-functioning teams are essential to a high-functioning organization because they create more opportunities for each person to use his or her strengths by enabling the tasks at hand to be divided according to the strengths on offer. Teams make weirdness useful. They are a mechanism for integrating the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization. If we can get them right, we solve a lot of problems. Ultimately, then, to help our people become fully engaged, we need to help our team leaders see that they are our weirdness orchestrators, our quirk capturers — that theirs is the most important job in our companies, and that only they can do it.
  • The eight statements (taken verbatim from the ADPRI study) capture the emotional and attitudinal precursors to engagement and the productive employee behaviors that flow as a result. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. My teammates have my back. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. I have great confidence in my company’s future. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
T.J. Edwards

How Engineering Class in 9th Grade Can Excite Diverse Learners | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • Engineering has been getting a lot of attention because of its real-world applications and clear job prospects, but learning to think like an engineer could be useful no matter what students decide to pursue for work
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Not making engineers....learning to think like
  • all ninth-graders
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      What if Ted was required for all?
  • I felt like I didn’t know how to make enough stuff,”
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  • Pilla worked as a mechanical engineer at Lockheed Martin before switching to teaching. “I didn’t have enough experience working on and planning out a really big project,”
  • That’s what he tries to give his students in high school.
  • When students newer to making come in excited to take on a project, the old hands help them get up to speed on the skills. And a lot of those projects are about improving the school itself.
  • Tiarra Bell, a senior at SLA Center City. Design drew her into engineering. She experimented with architecture and industrial design, but has really become passionate about furniture design. She now makes and sells her own furniture.
  • Kamal and Pilla meet with an advisory group of engineering industry professionals periodically to make sure their program is truly equipping students with the skills they’ll need to go into these fields later
  • The experts say students need to be able to write, to find problems, to communicate, to Google, to understand constraints. They need to be creative, take thoughtful risks and have a “fearlessness to leap.
  • robotics, senior engineering, astronomy and space sciences, MakerSpace, electronics and programming)
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Seems like a lot. Too many choices?
  • To me it’s not about becoming an engineer in college or after. It’s about the critical thinking and the challenges and the creativity that comes with it,”
T.J. Edwards

Why we should bring back vocational training | MNN - Mother Nature Network - 0 views

  • College isn't for everyone.
  • That's 59 out of 100 students whose high school program (or life situations) didn't prepare them for the type of work they'll be doing for the rest of their lives
  • The demise of vocational education at the high school level has bred a skills shortage in manufacturing today, and with it a wealth of career opportunities for both under-employed college grads and high school students looking for direct pathways to interesting, lucrative careers."
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  • Because my high school offered auto mechanics as part of a region-wide vocational program, I thought I could add that onto my course load with some careful maneuvering of classes. The problem was, I was a strong student academically. And the part of New York where I'm from, like many other places, separated students into academic versus vocational training tracks — and never the twain shall meet
  • just because someone studies to be a car mechanic doesn't mean they won't love Shakespeare or calculus is just as silly as assuming that someone headed to college doesn't need to know how to fix a car.
  • but I never really "use" trigonometry either
  • vocational programs for everyone would allow academically oriented kids to find new hobbies or new ways to solve problems, and would also destigmatize the jobs that they're connected to — which are necessary, interesting and challenging. There's more than one path to success
Bo Adams

Unstoppable Learning: Making Room For Students' Passions - 1 views

  • This always happens, I reflected. I get the best ideas when I have more time to listen, to read, to run. I always learn the most when I have space just to think. As a new mother and a classroom teacher, lead teacher, mentor, fellow, friend, and wife, my days are jam packed. Further, my time is often completely scheduled. The time and space to read and think is few and far between. But making space for it is so, so important.
    • Bo Adams
       
      How are we making time for "space just to think?" How are we building and innovating future and current programs so that student-learners have time for "space just to think?"
  • “As your teacher, my job is not only to help you learn and master our objectives and standards, but much more importantly, to help you become lifelong learners. In order to be those kinds of scholars, I need to give you space and time to ask yourself, ‘What am I curious about? What do I want to pursue?'”
  • But I think we can do even better. I feel strongly that it’s my responsibility to foster curiosity, and give my students MANY opportunities throughout the day to choose, to make responsible choices for themselves, because they are thinking actively about what they are curious about, and making a plan about how to pursue those interests.
Bo Adams

No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down | World news | The Gu... - 0 views

  • the most important skill a school can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves
  • “The mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st century, schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”
  • “The more freedom you have, the more structure you need,” says Rasfeld.
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  • The main reason why the ESBC is gaining a reputation as Germany’s most exciting school is that its experimental philosophy has managed to deliver impressive results.
  • “In education, you can only create change from the bottom – if the orders come from the top, schools will resist.
  •  
    HT Education Reimagined Issue #17
Trey Boden

The 100-hour knack - The Whiteboard - 0 views

  • with a 100 hours of investment into a new skill or practice, you can hit a tipping point,
    • Trey Boden
       
      What obstacles hold us back from reaching the 100-hours. What part does interest play? How (should we?) get beyond our own interest for the sake of skill aquisition?
    • Trey Boden
       
      What obstacles hold us back from reaching the 100-hours. What part does interest play? How (should we?) get beyond our own interest for the sake of skill aquisition?
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  • I had unwittingly reached a point where the effort became an asset.
  • the benefits outweigh the struggle
  • So, how do we push ourselves through this “pre-knack” period when the short-term calculus doesn’t seem to add up?
    • Trey Boden
       
      Really important quote for this article...
  • That means our job is not only to teach our students the skills and tools for their practice, but also to inspire and set into motion a practice that gets them past that tipping point, where the ability becomes part of them and they couldn’t imagine not putting it to use. 
Nicole Martin

Why Curiosity Matters - 1 views

shared by Nicole Martin on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • And socially curious employees are better than others at resolving conflicts with colleagues, more likely to receive social support, and more effective at building connections, trust, and commitment on their teams. People or groups high in both dimensions are more innovative and creative.
  • joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, and social curiosity—improve work outcomes.
  • joyous exploration has the strongest link with the experience of intense positive emotions. Stress tolerance has the strongest link with satisfying the need to feel competent, autonomous, and that one belongs. Social curiosity has the strongest link with being a kind, generous, modest person.
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  • deprivation sensitivity—recognizing a gap in knowledge the filling of which offers relief. This type of curiosity doesn’t necessarily feel good, but people who experience it work relentlessly to solve problems.
  • joyous exploration—being consumed with wonder about the fascinating features of the world. This is a pleasurable state; people in it seem to possess a joie de vivre.
  • social curiosity—talking, listening, and observing others to learn what they are thinking and doing. Human beings are inherently social animals, and the most effective and efficient way to determine whether someone is friend or foe is to gain information. Some may even snoop, eavesdrop, or gossip to do so.
  • stress tolerance—a willingness to accept and even harness the anxiety associated with novelty. People lacking this ability see information gaps, experience wonder, and are interested in others but are unlikely to step forward and explore.
  • thrill seeking—being willing to take physical, social, and financial risks to acquire varied, complex, and intense experiences. For people with this capacity, the anxiety of confronting novelty is something to be amplified, not reduced.
  • we all seek the sweet spot between two deeply uncomfortable states: understimulation (coping with tasks, people, or situations that lack sufficient novelty, complexity, uncertainty, or conflict) and overstimulation.
  • people become curious upon realizing that they lack desired knowledge; this creates an aversive feeling of uncertainty, which compels them to uncover the missing information.
  • nstead of asking, “How curious are you?” we can ask, “How are you curious?”
  • But maintaining a sense of wonder is crucial to creativity and innovation. The most effective leaders look for ways to nurture their employees’ curiosity to fuel learning and discovery.
  • How can organizations help people make the leap from curious to competent?
  • by providing the right types of stretch assignments and job rotations.
  • complexity and breadth of the opportunities they’d been given,
  • It enhances intelligence
  • It increases perseverance, or grit
  • And curiosity propels us toward deeper engagement, superior performance, and more-meaningful goals
  • The ProblemLeaders say they value employees who question or explore things, but research shows that they largely suppress curiosity, out of fear that it will increase risk and undermine efficiency.Why This MattersCuriosity improves engagement and collaboration. Curious people make better choices, improve their company’s performance, and help their company adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures.The RemedyLeaders should encourage curiosity in themselves and others by making small changes to the design of their organization and the ways they manage their employees. Five strategies can guide them.
  • leaders can encourage curiosity
  • when our curiosity is triggered, we are less likely to fall prey to confirmation bias (looking for information that supports our beliefs rather than for evidence suggesting we are wrong) and to stereotyping people (making broad judgments, such as that women or minorities don’t make good leaders). Curiosity has these positive effects because it leads us to generate alternatives.
  • My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
  • What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”
  • “What is one topic or activity you’ll engage in today? What is one thing you usually work on or do that you’ll also complete today? Please make sure you think about this as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”
  • When we are curious, we view tough situations more creatively. Studies have found that curiosity is associated with less defensive reactions to stress and less aggressive reactions to provocation.
  • curiosity encourages members of a group to put themselves in one another’s shoes and take an interest in one another’s ideas rather than focus only on their own perspective. That causes them to work together more effectively and smoothly: Conflicts are less heated, and groups achieve better results.
  • he groups whose curiosity had been heightened performed better than the control groups because they shared information more openly and listened more carefully.
  • Hire for curiosity.
  • “Have you ever found yourself unable to stop learning something you’ve never encountered before? Why? What kept you persistent?”
  • most people perform at their best not because they’re specialists but because their deep skill is accompanied by an intellectual curiosity that leads them to ask questions, explore, and collaborate.
  • “What is the one thing I should do to make things better for you?”
  • hen we demonstrate curiosity about others by asking questions, people like us more and view us as more competent, and the heightened trust makes our relationships more interesting and intimate.
  • But focusing on learning is generally more beneficial to us and our organizations,
  • A body of research demonstrates that framing work around learning goals (developing competence, acquiring skills, mastering new situations, and so on) rather than performance goals (hitting targets, proving our competence, impressing others) boosts motivation. And when motivated by learning goals, we acquire more-diverse skills, do better at work, get higher grades in college, do better on problem-solving tasks, and receive higher ratings after training. Unfortunately, organizations often prioritize performance goals.
  • rewarding people not only for their performance but for the learning needed to get there.
  • Leaders can also stress the value of learning by reacting positively to ideas that may be mediocre in themselves but could be springboards to better ones.
  • Organizations can foster curiosity by giving employees time and resources to explore their interests.
  • Employees can also broaden their interests by broadening their networks. Curious people often end up being star performers thanks to their diverse networks,
  • Leaders can also boost employees’ curiosity by carefully designing their teams.
  • What if…?” and “How might we…?”
  • To encourage curiosity, leaders should also teach employees how to ask good questions.
  • Organizing “Why?” days, when employees are encouraged to ask that question if facing a challenge, can go a long way toward fostering curiosity.
  • 5 Whys
  •  
    HT Nicole Martin
Bo Adams

Four Design Parameters for Rethinking Professional Learning | GOA - 0 views

  • At its best, professional learning can be networked, collaborative, growth-oriented and focused on what learning science tell us about how humans learn best: through relevant, job-embedded, applied, and experiential learning
Meghan Cureton

Are You Teaching Content Or Teaching Thought? - - 3 views

  • education has a thinking problem
  • Shouldn’t a school fail to function without urgent and divergent thinking?
  • our curriculum is content.
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  • If our job is to teach critical thinking, design, and problem-solving–fluid intelligence–then thinking is our collective circumstance, and our curriculum becomes thought.
  • To learn to think, students need powerful and inspiring models that reflect the design, citizenship, creativity, interdependence, affection, and self-awareness we claim to want them to have. To teach careful, creative, and truly innovative thinking, students need creative spaces and tools, and frameworks to develop their own criteria for quality and success. They need dynamic literacy skills that they practice and build upon endlessly. Not projects that have creativity and design thinking added on, but projects that can’t function without them. And they need control of it all.
  • Can we simply “update” things as we go, or is it time for rethinking of our collective practice?
Meghan Cureton

The Case For Competency-Based Education | Getting Smart - 0 views

  • transformed schools that feature tasks and projects that challenge young people in authentic ways to build design, collaboration, and communication skills that prepare young people for navigating new and complex situations.
  • Quality preparation. Much of the corporate training world has shifted from participation to demonstrated skills in order to improve job readiness.
  • Equity. If gap-closing equity is a stated goal, then structures, schedules, and supports can be aimed at struggling learners that need more time and assistance to accelerate their learning 
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  • Learning science. As Harvard’s Todd Rose notes, there is no average; each of us has a “jagged profile.” He and others argue that we should address the individual needs of learners.
  • Agency
  • The extent to which a student owns their own learning, often called agency, is key
  • innovation is required in five dimensions: More innovative learning models and networks, particularly for high schools (XQ, NewSchools, and NGLC grantees are a good start); Competency-based learning platforms, gradebooks, badge and portfolio systems; Quality guidance systems that ensure equity and access. Mastery-based transcripts that allow students to more fully share their capabilities with postsecondary institutions and employers; State policy that advances a relevant graduate profile, makes room for innovation pilots, and articulates a quality outcome framework (see the CompetencyWorks report Fit for Purpose).
Meghan Cureton

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone - 0 views

  • From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.
  • The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know
  • Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that education confers some marketable skills, namely literacy and numeracy. Nonetheless, I believe that signaling accounts for at least half of college’s financial reward, and probably more.
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  • The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them.
  • Those who believe that college is about learning how to learn should expect students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use it to analyze the world. This scarcely occurs.
  • Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use
  • The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t.
  • If all goes well, students learn what they study and practice.
  • Actually, that’s optimistic. Educational psychologists have discovered that much of our knowledge is “inert.” Students who excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world.
  • we must ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in—an educated one or an ignorant one?
  • As credentials proliferate, so do failed efforts to acquire them.
  • But ignorance of the future is no reason to prepare students for occupations they almost surely won’t have—and if we know anything about the future of work, we know that the demand for authors, historians, political scientists, physicists, and mathematicians will stay low.
T.J. Edwards

Impatient With Colleges, Employers Design Their Own Courses | WIRED - 0 views

  • That’s the fastest the university has ever introduced a new degree program, a feat it achieved by adopting off-the-shelf course materials already developed by Microsoft that the company is distributing to help turn out more employees with data and computer-science skills.
  • The courses employers have been helping to create don’t just teach skills students need to work for Microsoft, Amazon or Google, like the highly specialized training classes that are longtime industry standards
  • Instead, the companies are working with edX and others to provide what they say are the educations that all of their employees require in common, including such abilities as critical thinking and collaboration.
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  • And companies including Accenture, Boeing and Microsoft have created the Internet of Learning Consortium to speed up the production of job-ready workers by using the internet to teach them what they need to know.
  • “We talk about the days long gone when companies trained employees from the ground up and now we’re talking about companies training employees again. These organizations are saying [to the universities], ‘We need people with X, Y and Z skills and you’re not providing that.’ ”
  • While 96 percent of chief academic officers at higher-education institutions say they’re effectively preparing students for work, only 11 percent of business leaders strongly agree
  • Faculty could react more nimbly to industry demands if their universities hired more of them and gave them the resources they need to update courses or offer them online
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Hired more industry people? Career changers?
  • In addition to long waits for programs to be approved by faculty and accrediting agencies, for example, many schools can’t find enough people qualified to teach computer science. The increase in the number of tenure-track faculty in that and similar fields has been one-tenth as much as the increase in the number of students crowding into classes, the Computing Research Association reports.
  • The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, for example, is in the market for five or six new faculty hires per year in data, business analytics and other fast-growing disciplines, said Ash Soni, executive associate dean of academic programs. It usually manages to fill just two or three of those positions, Soni said.
  • “The pace of change and product cycles and skills demands in the economy are moving more quickly than traditional university processes and program development can keep up,” said Northeastern’s Gallagher.That needs to change, for universities’ own self-preservation, said Gordon, of Eastern Washington
  • “We’ve got to be at the leading edge of today and tomorrow,” he said, “rather than the day before.”
Meghan Cureton

Stop Telling your Kids that School Will Prepare them for Life - 0 views

  • In what job, for instance, would 20 to 30 workers have to sit in neat rows listening to their foreman or manager drone on for 40 minutes at a time before getting to work? In what industry does that work end up in heaps of unread papers — or worse — papers marked in some color to indicate failure, intended only to cause shame and worry before they are forgotten.
  • But I often wonder how many brilliant minds have been wasted because they didn’t conform during the critical years of adolescent education.
  • Still, with all of the advances in society, our conception of what an education system should be remains what is was when we were kids. And when our parents were kids.A system where introverts are often praised and extroverts are managed.And it looks nothing like real life.
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