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"The Fourth Industrial Revolution is interacting with other socio-economic and demographic factors to create a perfect storm of business model change in all industries, resulting in major disruptions to labour markets. New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others. The skill sets required in both old and new occupations will change in most industries and transform how and where people work. It may also affect female and male workers differently and transform the dynamics of the industry gender gap. The Future of Jobs Report aims to unpack and provide specific information on the relative magnitude of these trends by industry and geography, and on the expected time horizon for their impact to be felt on job functions, employment levels and skills."

"We are at the point where the OPM industry needs to evolve. The industry as a whole needs to more closely mirror the values and norms of openness and transparency that characterize the culture of higher education."

Pioneers like Salesforce popularized SaaS, web-based business applications that were easy to use and even easier to purchase, with a click. With that, they took one of the first swings at the command-and-control business culture that has defined the Industrial Age. A $40 billion SaaS industry followed.

This lack of transparency from accrediting commissions is a relic of a bygone era when higher education was relatively stable and accrediting decisions mostly affected the specific institution under review. But given the changes that the higher education industry is facing and going through, these policies are damaging to those institutions who are trying out new models and need to know where the boundaries are drawn. Accrediting commissions play an important role in the governance of our higher education industry, in particular by providing a method for quality assurance. By operating in such an opaque manner, however, the agencies are effectively acting as a barrier to change and stifling innovation.

"Diamandis believes that solar energy will soon satisfy the demands of the entire planet and replace the market for fossil fuels. This will mean fewer wars and cleaner air. Systems for converting atmospheric humidity into clean drinking water will become cheap and ubiquitous. The industrial meat industry will also vanish, replaced by tastier and healthier laboratory-grown products with no environmental downsides. He also predicts that exponential increases in the power of AI would soon render teachers and universities superfluous. The best education in the world will become freely available to anyone."

"The two industrial giants aren't so much showing off as signalling transformation. Both firms are going through the most profound change in their corporate histories, attempting to switch from being makers of machines into fully digital businesses. GE's chief executive, Jeff Immelt, says the plan is to join the world's top ten software firms with sales of programs and services worth $15bn as early as 2020."

"Last week we started a series of webinars featuring our Social Fresh WEST speakers, as we lead up to the conference on September 27-28. One of those webinars was titled Stop the Social Media Shiny Object Syndrome (recorded and on demand). In an industry that moves so quickly, it is important to stay educated, to be informed about the tools available to us. During the webinar, we outlined an 8 step process for reviewing social media shiny objects."

"As soon as it was explained to me, I said, "Wow. I know a lot of professionals who have first world career problems." In my line of work, I interact daily with people who are unemployed or under-employed - many of whom are professionally challenged. They've got outdated skills, or were part of a dying industry that lead them to where they are now. So, when I hear someone who is educated, articulate, and above all, employed, say one or more of the first world career problems below, it can be tough to find compassion for them. I have to remind myself that "perception is reality.""

Why is it that introducing profit as a motivator into higher education makes that endeavor suspect, while we don't seem to believe this to be true for journalism, publishing, media, technology or any other information or service industry?

"I graduated from the University of Toronto in Industrial Engineering back in 1988 and I remember how confused I was about where my career would take me when I was in the latter stages of getting my degree.  I thought providing my perspective and experience to someone who is looking for some guidance would be a nice way to give back my time. The experience has been so memorable."

Social media is buzzing over apparent sexism in the tech industry after a female developer was fired for allegedly tweeting a picture of two men making jokes at a conference. NBC's Amna Nawaz reports.

Given his calm and reasoned academic demeanor, it is easy to miss just how provocative Erik Brynjolfsson's contention really is. ­Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology-from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services-are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

"During the second half of the semester, student work outside the classroom is focused primarily on the completion of specialization badges. Students are encouraged to forge their own path through the course material by completing badges from the following categories: coding, industry analysis, graphic design, user experience, power user skills, and entrepreneurship. In order to earn an A grade on the badge component, students must master at least eight specialization badges. To ensure breadth, all students must complete at least one badge in each category in order to pass the course. (Note: Students were also allowed to pitch their own badges if they could make the case for the badge's connection to course themes.)"

The letter lays out why, after several decades, Conti believed he had to call it quits. Conti points the blame at legislators who "failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education," a testing company. He argued the New York State United Teachers union failed its members by not mounting an effective campaign against standardized testing, and said there's now a "pervasive atmosphere of distrust" preventing teachers from developing their own tests and quizzes.

"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age."

Silicon Valley has wielded its growing political clout at the state Capitol to kill a digital privacy bill that would have given consumers access to information about them being collected online. Had the Right to Know Act become law, California would have been the first state to take direct aim at an online industry that stockpiles and trades in a wide range of personal data about nearly every adult in the United States. In a major defeat for consumer groups and privacy watchdogs, AB 1291 will instead become a two-year bill, effectively putting it into a deep freeze until next year.

"Take professional associations, for example. They exist in essentially every industry, and most offer substantially discounted student rates. Yet in my experience, not many college students are motivated enough to get involved. Should they? Here are five reasons why students should be active in associations that align with their career path."

"Millions of Americans who went to college seeking a better future now face crushing debt from student loans-while the industry makes a handsome profit. How a broken system landed so many in this mess."

"The far greater danger is that of preparing today's students en masse for a repeat of life in the twentieth century, when homework was for the eyes of teachers only, where learning was delivered exclusively by an expert standing at the front of the room instead of sometimes constructed collaboratively by a network, and where students were taught to be effective but largely passive cogs in an industrial machine, rather than active and intelligent nodes in a networked learning society."