Lost in Translation: Getting Employers and Educators to Speak the Same Language

Lost in Translation: Getting Employers and Educators to Speak the Same Language

by InstructureCast

What makes a skill count, and how does it travel from a classroom or a kitchen table into a job? Ryan Lufkin puts that question to Glenda Quintini, who runs the OECD's Skills and Future Readiness Division in Paris, with Simone Ravaioli sitting in for Melissa. Glenda's answer starts with a confession: a few months ago she couldn't tell critical minerals from rare earths, taught herself by reading and talking to people, and never enrolled in anything. That's how most adults actually learn, and almost none of it shows up on a resume.

The conversation works through what it takes to fix that. Degrees aren't dead, Glenda argues, they're bundles of skills nobody has unpacked. The harder problem is language: employers and educators describe the same skills in completely different words, a gap she says blocks worker mobility as much as visa rules do. From there the three of them get into micro-credentials, individual learning accounts, the data behind dropped degree requirements, and why governments have to move faster than a two-year accreditation cycle.

In this episode:

• Why eliminating degree requirements barely moves non-degree hiring on its own
• The difference between regulating credentials like New Zealand and letting the market sort it out
• Why the next 15 years will be about lifelong recognition, not just lifelong learning

For further reading:

• A Skills-First Labour Market

What is Educast 3000?

Ah, education…a world filled with mysterious marvels. From K12 to Higher Ed, educational change and innovation are everywhere. And with that comes a few lessons, too.

Each episode, EduCast3000 hosts, Melissa Loble and Ryan Lufkin, will break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening in education - the good, the bad, and, in some cases, the just plain chaotic. This is the most transformative time in the history of education, so if you're passionate about the educational system and want some timely and honest commentary on what's happening in the industry, this is your show.

Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and join the conversation! If you have a question, comment, or topic to add, drop us a line using your favorite social media platform.

• Getting Employers and Educators to Speak the Same Language
  Welcome to Educast three thousand. It's the most transformative time in the history of education.
  
  So join us as we break down the fourth wall and reflect on what's happening. The good, the bad, and even the chaotic. Here's your hosts, Melissa Lobel and Ryan Lufkin.
  
  Hello and welcome to Educast three thousand. I am your cohost, Ryan Lufkin. And this week, I am joined by a very special cohost. I'll let him introduce himself.
  
  Hello, everyone. My name is Simone. I'm your cohost for today, and I'm happy to join Ryan in place of Melissa today. And I'm super excited today to be tracing the path from learning to work. And we have a wonderful guest to do that. Now, hopefully we'll try to address some of the questions like what does it take for a skill to count and to travel?
  
  To do that, we're joined by Glenda Quintini, who leads the OECD Skills and Feature Readiness division in Paris, where she oversees the organization's works on skills and the future of work.
  
  Glenda, you are essentially the head of skills. That's a great title. Thank you for being with us.
  
  It's a pleasure to be with you today.
  
  Excellent. So before we jump in Glenda, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do at OECD?
  
  Yes. So you said our division is called skills and future readiness. So we look at what skills count. So how skill needs are changing in the labor market as a result of many of the trends we hear of every day in the news, AI, aging, the green transition. And then we look at the policies to address any skill shortages or mismatches that come from those changes, particularly focusing on adults and how to upscale them and reskill them for the new needs of the labor market.
  
  Amazing. Amazing. Before we jump into the broader questions, one of the questions that we always like to ask our guests is about a favorite learning moment, and that can be as a teacher or a student. Would you be willing to share one with us?
  
  Yeah, absolutely.
  
  So I feel quite lucky because I'm in a role where I learn something new almost every day. So without even signing up for a formal course or training. So a lot of it is self directed. So I often have to get very quickly up to speed on completely new topics for projects, for example.
  
  And I really like that process. Like very recently, we started looking at skills in a critical mineral sector. And so at the beginning, I knew very little. I hardly could tell critical minerals from rare earths.
  
  And I started reading, speaking to people, and little by little, I started to understand better the key issues. And what I find really rewarding is the fact that I can apply learning almost immediately than in our work. And of course, do this also outside work. I read a lot of non fiction generally related to topics that are not part of my work.
  
  And that's another way I keep learning. I think the core learning for me happens informally in the ways that I've just told you, which allows me to reconcile a heavy workload, family responsibilities with the desire to learn new things, which I think is quite common for adults of my age. I think not having time for formal courses and training is a key barrier. And I think it links quite nicely with the discussion that we are having today of how to make what I've learned in this way more visible to the labor market.
  
  I love that. And I do think we tend to look at learning as a more formal process. And when you realize that in the right settings, you're learning all the time, I still couldn't tell you what a rare earth mineral is. Like, you can, but, no.
  
  I have to go figure that out. Then I'll probably go read about that. In preparing for the podcast, one of the things that we talked about was the current sea of the labor market is shifting from credentials to skills. And this is something that we've talked about with One Ed Tech and some of the groups in the US as well.
  
  But in plain terms, what is a skills first approach and why is it gaining real momentum here, I guess globally?
  
  Yeah. So a skills first approach means really putting skills at the center of how we think about talent. In practical terms, it means placing much greater emphasis on what people can actually do rather than the qualifications or the experience occupations that they've held in the past. And we are seeing this idea applied across hiring, but also talent management, training.
  
  So you may have heard about skills first hiring or competency based learning, for example. And the reason why I think this approach is gaining momentum now is that many countries are facing very big skill shortages. And relying only on candidates who have qualifications, the exact right profile is limiting the ability of firms to hire, to find the talent they need, to innovate, to adopt new technologies. So employers are much more open to consider a broader range of candidates based on skills they may have acquired in different ways.
  
  That's amazing. Yeah. And I think we see that in countries like the Philippines and Mexico that are doing federal, national level initiatives for reskilling and upskilling to really try to bring those workforces up to that, that technical proficiency level.
  
  Glenda, we are familiar with the headlines that the degrees are dead, but your recent report kind of reframes a little bit credentials as bundles of skills. So what's really happening to the degree in your opinion?
  
  Yeah. I don't think that degrees are there. And in fact, skills first approaches don't replace degree. The idea is to have a broader range of canvas, broaden the talent pool, not to replace it or to to have the same size in the end. So degrees and formal education still play an essential role, and they remain very important signals of learning, of commitment, of capability. But labor market needs are changing very fast. So formal education, curricular, degrees tend to be slow in incorporating emerging skills, for example.
  
  So many of these emerging skills are learned non formally on courses that are not part of the education curriculum. So we need to have a way to consider that part of learning as well. The other important point that I want to make is that we often think of young people when we think of learning. But in a context where lifelong learning becomes much more important, degrees that may be very valuable as a signal for someone who's just left education are much less important as a signal for someone who might have been already on the labor market for twenty years. So my initial degree reflects very little of what I can actually do now because my role has grown over time because of the breadth of my skills is much larger. And so if you rely only on my initial qualification, it would be hard to actually know what I can do and that applies to all adults.
  
  So in that sense, you know, understanding skills that are developed elsewhere becomes important. And as you said, we also need to see degrees that we need to make degrees a better signal of the actual skills that are learned. So the point you were making about degrees being seen as a bundle of skills is very important because we can unpack what a qualification actually represents and employers and learners and training providers can then develop a much clearer shared understanding of what somebody is capable of based on their qualification.
  
  I think especially now that technology is evolving so quickly like AI, that's even more important. Really try to really kind of unpack that degree and make sure the right skills are there. But that skills conversation can be kind of fraught with nomenclature hang ups. Right? I think a lot of times when people talk about skills, they're talking about technical skills. You know, there's the debate between hard skills and soft skills. What are we really talking about when we talk about skills?
  
  Yeah, absolutely. So that your point is very valuable on technology. In fact, the first works that we did on skills first approaches were for the technology sector, for shortages in the technology sector. Those are the skills that are changing the fastest, I would say.
  
  And that's precisely the technology sector that has trouble identifying enough graduates to fill their vacancies. So, that's just to rebound on what you said at the beginning. It is very important as you say that we have a common understanding of what skills are and what skills are in demand. And so it's very important that we develop what we call in the field, the taxonomy of skills that tells us, you know, for each occupation, what are the skills required?
  
  For each degree or training course, what are the learning outcomes? And very often what happens is that learning outcomes are defined with language that's completely different from the language that employers use to define the skills needed in a job. So having this common language is extremely important. And there's many countries that are investing in this.
  
  We have approaches that are more policy based or top down, where you have countries developing their skills, the classifications that are common for learning outcomes and job content like the UK standard skills classification, which has been recently launched.
  
  And you have countries that are also initiatives that are also bottom up, like George Washington University initiative, which is called Leveraging AI for Skills Extraction and Research, where they are actually using AI to identify common language across multiple taxonomies. For example, between employers and training provision. And we are also working at above national level. So we're working with the ILO to the International Labor Organization to develop a global taxonomy of key occupations and the skills required in those occupation. Because even between countries, we're not using the same terms and the same language. And that creates a barrier for cross border mobility of workers and learners that's as big as migration barriers of other sorts like visas and actual difficulties of mobility.
  
  The cascades as it gets further down the path.
  
  So Gonda, thank you. As your report points out, it looks like the issue is not really money or motivation, but there's really a notion of the interoperability of skills and the language that we use that that is super important. And thank you for pointing out some examples of what works. You know, we deal a lot with the interoperability, the technical interoperability side of the equation.
  
  And only to find out that there is an issue on the languages and the way we make sense of skills through the know Lithuanian. And so I think your guidance and the research that you're putting out speaks to us very loudly. And hopefully, you know, as we are working with other entities to solve that problem, we'll get there. I wanted to kind of make a little bit of a jump in looking at just unpacking what is signal, like what is meaningful.
  
  You know, very recently, one of the most hyped terms in the learning space is micro credentials. Everyone is excited about them, but there are also some pending issues, for example, around quality assurance. So I guess the question is like, in your experience, what really sets apart a micro credentials that is credible and it's labor market worthy? In other words, that has signals versus noise.
  
  Absolutely. So micro credentials are getting a lot of traction these days. Apparently, it's also a rebranding of modular courses that we've had for a while, of course, with the credentialing at the end. So with certification of the learning outcome that can be stacked and can be portable between institutions.
  
  But of course, for all that to happen, there needs to be trust in the micro credential value attributed to the micro credential. And as you said, often there's issues of quality assurance or visibility of the value of these micro credentials to employers or to across between institutions if you want those to be portable. So there's different approaches to solve that. OECD countries, some OECD countries are taking more of a regulatory model.
  
  So New Zealand was one of the precursor of micro credentials and they have a very regulated system where the qualifications authority approve micro credentials only when they met certain standards. These include, for example, the provider's ability to develop the learning modules. And they also require evidence that the content of the micro credential responds to labor market and societal needs. Other countries take a more market driven approach.
  
  We hear this often in some countries and some contexts. So you have large learning platforms such as Coursera or RedX who work with many different providers, including technology companies like Google. And in those cases, the quality and the relevance are driven and shaped by the market. So by the demand for the credentials, by the ratings and by the number of learners for that credential.
  
  And so which model works best to guarantee quality, trust, value and visibility really depends on the context in each country. In general, I would say that the broad international trend seems to be some government involvement, but with lighter regulation than we see in formal education, for example.
  
  Yeah. I mean, it's a pretty big shift for colleges and universities and even training providers to really make this shift towards skill based learning. Where do they start? What's the best way to reorient in that direction?
  
  Yeah, I think a lot of the biggest challenge here is for the training providers, education and training providers to connect more closely with the labor demand side with employers, right? And there's many ways again of doing this. In many countries, there are mechanisms that bring social partners or employers and training providers together to support education and training provision like in Australia, for example, the jobs and skills councils are one example. But often these mechanisms work better when these more flexible provision is provided with informal education. So it's important also that we have a mechanism to ensure the labor market relevance of non formal learning also for courses that are provided on the market.
  
  Another important point is that providers also need to use the skills information that they have in terms of changing skill needs. For example, that every country tends to have or that they can gather by consulting with employers to shape the curricula. And so learning outcomes could be clearly articulated at the skill level, for example, this is something we say in our forthcoming report and expressed using a common language, like we just said in your previous question, right? So, this makes it easier for learners to understand what they're gaining, for employers to know what graduates can do, for providers also to demonstrate the relevance of their courses.
  
  And we've had some analysts in the United States recently talk about businesses just aren't shifting to skills based hiring, right? How do we drive more momentum around that? Or are we seeing more skills based hiring and it's just not being recognized?
  
  I think we're seeing more and more precisely because businesses facing shortages. I think it is true that this is bigger for larger businesses than for small and medium enterprises. And we have some very good examples. I would say that businesses need to go through different steps. So the first one, if we look at businesses that have a bit of a historical tradition of including Skills First, the first thing they do is generally look at the roles they have and identify those to which Skills First can be applied. For example, there are roles that require licensing in the US, in other countries it's even higher. So those roles clearly are not easy.
  
  Those are relatively, yeah.
  
  It's hard to apply skills first, but there are roles. So first, there might be a subset of roles to start with. And so IBM, for example, which is a global leader in this country, in this area, started off precisely with a comprehensive review of their job descriptions, identifying the roles where the core skills could be acquired through non formal and informal learning. The second step is rewriting job description.
  
  As I was saying before, there's a need for a common language, but I've spoken to many companies, especially big ones who are telling me that even within the company, didn't have consistency and job roles were described in very different ways depending on the area, depending on the managers and so on. So having a clear description of the skills required, those jobs role is crucial if then you're hiring based on skills. The next step is to set up that hiring based on skill, which means you also need to be able to identify those skills, right? So to test, do competency based interviews, the skills assessment, other practical methods you can think of depending on the occupations to focus on the skills.
  
  And then often it stops here, but we would argue that for many years, it stopped there. So for many years, as I started off saying, I think skills first was skills first hiring. And now we're seeing skills first approaches extend to other areas. So you don't just hire based on skills, you also have to promote people based on their skills to give them training based on their skills because otherwise, you know, they don't grow within your organization.
  
  So that last part is taking more Very common issue and really important.
  
  Yeah. That's incredible.
  
  I really appreciate, again, this conversation around the language that the employers speak on one side versus the language that say the word of education speak on the other side. And hopefully skills are that common language amidst, you know, some of the challenges that you've been researching.
  
  So it looks like there are different components to this transition toward, you know, skills based labor market. And in order for this transformation to happen, I think there needs to be a set of incentives.
  
  One that OACD has really researched in the past is this notion of individual learners account. So just new ways of financing upskilling. What's really working around individual learning accounts, Glenda, and how might those change behaviors really in promoting a skills based labor market?
  
  Yeah. So I'll start by challenging what you said, which I do even with my colleagues. I don't see individual learning accounts necessarily as a financing method. To me, it's more an instrument that channels funding in a different way, right? In fact, many countries who set up individual learning accounts already had the money set aside. They were just paying it out in different interesting thing of individual learning accounts is that the money is given to individuals and they are empowered to use it to choose their own training.
  
  And it also supports this idea that they're learning throughout their life course, not in a specific job for a specific employer, right? So I think those points are the strength points of individual learning accounts.
  
  So here in France, because I'm based in Paris, one of the most best known examples of individual account in learning accounts in the world is the French account personal deformation, individual learning account. But then there's also examples in the US where there has also been discussions of setting up skills savings accounts. And for individual learning accounts to become a real game changer, precisely because there is this empowerment, this empowerment idea or objective, they need to really be integrated into a much broader learning ecosystem. So successful systems like the French one, the one in Singapore match individual learning accounts with a broader range of instruments like national qualification registries to guarantee the quality, career guidance to support learners in their choices, skills passports to make the learnings and the courses more visible.
  
  The recognition of prior learning for individuals again to have some sort of a valuable certificate of what they've learned and support for the weakest for adults who are generally less likely to participate in training and for job seekers. So, the lessons about the account is that it's a great idea, only Sony is not enough and it needs to be connected, I think, to a much broader ecosystem of guidance, quality learning opportunities, and labor market information.
  
  I wanted to ask or maybe share a reflection quickly, Glenda, with you. So we started looking at skills as currency, right? And then as you introduce this notion of a skills passport or a wallet, and from our perspective, most of the flow that we've seen is how skill as a currency then turns into another type of currency, which is your euros or dollars when you turn education learning into job opportunities. And so there is this counter flow, if you will now with individual learning accounts or lifelong learning accounts, where you start from euros or dollars from a currency that is very liquid, like money.
  
  And then you convert that into skills by upscaling. So this sort of exchange currency exchange happens within one of these new tools that are part of this learner mobility ecosystem, which is the passport or the wallet. And so I think seeing so much happening on the individual learning account side of this equation or ecosystem in different regions in the world has been really an interesting and missing piece of the equation. One that even with your colleague Shizuka, we've, we've had an opportunity to address more extensively.
  
  And so thank you very much for sharing and also pushing back and making sure that the framing of individual learning accounts goes beyond, I would say the immediate, it's a financing mechanism or it's FinTech for, like, education. So that's really helpful. Thank you very much for that.
  
  It is funny because I talked to my my kids have both been in Spanish immersion. And one of the things I think the the US education system does really poorly is actually train a second language. Right? And I think there's so much value in that.
  
  So I put both of my kids in Spanish immersion, and my son's like, I wanna stop taking Spanish. I'm like, trying to explain to him that there is an actual dollar value attached to that skill that is a kicker. You will make more money with that skill added to your portfolio. And this conversation is bringing that home.
  
  That is a real world example of that translation of skill to currency.
  
  Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's true for many learners, I think. So being able to demonstrate to learners, especially I'm sure your kids are quite highly skilled, but there's lots of low skilled adults who struggle with the barriers that I mentioned before, even more than I do.
  
  No time, they often work three jobs to make enough of a living for their family. Then they have family responsibilities. How do you justify to them the value of training? So many countries now and many policymakers are asking us what would work to show these low skilled adults what they can get out of learning.
  
  So what's the value of skills? So that's something we're really focusing on at the moment.
  
  Yeah, it draws that relatable path, right? They understand the efforts translate into something tangible. That is really important. Incredible.
  
  I wanted to circle back to one, I would say uncomfortable line that I find in the report Glenda, in that it speaks again to the removal of degree requirements, because that from one angle looks like it's liberating and it might be a loan, a way to broaden access and so an equity piece, but you actually look at that from a different angle. Could you tell us a little bit more about that particular insight?
  
  Yes, I think the value in skills has this important other objective. So the one hand you have the addressing talent shortages, as I said before, it's been a big motive, but also focusing on skills in principle allows you to broaden the talent pool to groups that you wouldn't normally consider for jobs. In fact, employers tend to be quite conservative in terms of the talent pool they consider. We see that when we ask them simply if they're having difficulties recruiting, they say yes, but then we ask them, Oh, have you tried looking at the non stereotypical worker you've had so far, generally by age or by gender?
  
  And they say, no, I haven't tried. So for a mechanic, they look for a middle aged man, for a nurse, they will look for a woman and so on and so forth. So, the fact that you're focusing on skills allows you to also broaden the talents that you have in your company. But eliminating degrees is not enough.
  
  So there's a lot of language around this, a lot of data that's repeated very often in the news, like the number of job vacancies that have dropped degree requirements rose many folds over the past years. But then if you look at the stats and you ask how many non degree holders that have those vacancies actually hired, those employers actually higher, they're still very small. So this needs to be accompanied by more opportunity for skills development among those non traditional groups. And in work that we did a little while ago, so before the report we're about to put out, we actually looked at many initiatives that employers are setting up to train actually, not just to find the skills once they're already there, but to actually train adults so that they have the skills required by the job they're trying to fill outside formal qualifications, precisely for the reason that formal qualifications don't yet include those skills.
  
  Like in the report, for example, we make the point of the example of Elli Lilli, which is a company that offers paid apprenticeships for adults without a four year degree. And their participants can develop their skills within the company as part of this apprenticeship. And then they can be considered the four full time positions at the company. At the time of our previous studies, we also find many initiatives that were specifically focused on women, on groups from lower socioeconomic background to convince them to get into technology, for example, technology courses, therefore creating already a pool of adults with the skills, but not necessarily university qualifications for hiring by companies that were facing shortages.
  
  And it seems like because of those shortages, Skills First is largely being driven by employers, right? But you talked a little bit about there's a role that government needs to play, you know, that requires cooperation between education institutions and employers. What role does government play? What is it seems like everybody needs to come to the table on this. Right?
  
  Yeah, absolutely. So you're right that the main actors are employers, but we need some sort of infrastructure. We talked a couple of times already in this conversation about the national skill taxonomies or the common language, right? So it's a prerogative of government in collaborations with the other stakeholders to develop this shared language. There's more we talked about skills passports. Again, that's something that naturally is put in place by policy makers for every adult to use and for then recognition by employers.
  
  Mechanism for the recognition of prior learning or mechanisms for micro credentials, even without going to the full regulation that we saw that I mentioned for New Zealand, very often micro credentials can be, the quality assurance is led by government and put in place by government, which increases the trust in the micro credentials from the market. So there's a lot of infrastructure that the governments and policymakers can put in place for this to work.
  
  At the same time, they've got to be more nimble, right? Traditionally, those policies have not moved very quickly or the processes have not moved very quickly. With things like AI, it can't take a year and a half or two years to accrue the program. We've got to be moving more quickly than that, correct?
  
  Yes, absolutely. And yes, policymakers are adopting these new methods as well, right? So they are updating skill requirements in this shared language very quickly and regularly, thanks to AI. While before it would have taken a longer process and consultations with experts to do that.
  
  Skills passport are often in the form of electronic badges or repositories. So again, technology makes it possible to create something that's easily portable, visible, where everything is in one place.
  
  And so, definitely. Technologies makes all these processes much easier, much more agile. And also then, I think, more acceptable rather than being seen as low moving regulations or oversight.
  
  You kind of have to get over that perception, right?
  
  Yes. Glenda, thank you very much for, also pinpointing what the role of government is and particularly triggering me particularly on this idea of recognition.
  
  We, as a learning strategy team, look out at what are some of the major forces that are shaping the future of learning and recognition of learning is certainly one of them and one that definitely calls for a role by governments in, shall we say, opening it up so that all learning counts and all learning can be recognized politically, formally because the technology is there. Technology is there to support the recognition of all learning across different use cases, formal to informal. And so we also see that sometimes when I look ahead, if the last fifteen years have been about lifelong learning, as we say, I think in the future, the next fifteen might be about lifelong recognition.
  
  And that's kind of a framing that, we started to use, but clearly that's where government do play a role. Well, thank you for that. So we've kind of gone through a few of the findings in the reports. We don't want to spoiler everything for our listeners, but there is maybe a couple of questions that we want to land on in this chat.
  
  And here's one, like, is there anything that is not on that report that is super important, but then it should be on everyone's radars in the next few years?
  
  I think the, you know, the report is quite comprehensive and it builds on our work of several years on this topic on a dashboard that we developed and launched in October last year. So, there's a lot there. But one area that we are planning to do further work in is the employer practises. So, we can measure to some extent how employers are adopting skills first approaches. We can measure the extent to which they reward skills vis a vis qualifications. But the information is quite patchy on how they do on those four stages that we discussed before, right? So identifying job profiles and then defining jobs in terms of skills and then hiring or training by skills.
  
  So what we're planning to do is some case studies and try to shed light on promising examples beyond the large firms that we know of. We want to look at, for example, small and medium enterprise and how skills first approaches might be relevant to that. We also hope for this to be a bit of a pure learning process among companies. So, by seeing examples of others, there's a bit of emulation and understanding of what might be the challenges and how to address them. And we also hope to identify the conditions and that support that successful adoption at the firm level, enabling employers to learn from practical examples and adapting their approaches. So I think it's work on employers. We want to do a bit more through case studies and maybe setting up an observatory of employer, Skills First employer practices.
  
  Alright, Glenda. You have been soon available to have this chat with us. Also, Ryan, thank you very much for allowing me to freshen the podcast. I might ask Melissa to let me do this again. It's been a really fun.
  
  It's fun to have guest hosts and especially somebody as knowledgeable as yourself, Simone. Glenda, amazing. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. We'll actually include a link to the OACD report, a skills first labor market in the show notes here as well as, at least a lot of the the great resources that you talked about across the board.
  
  So for our listeners, check the show notes. Some great resources there. But, Glenda, thank you so much for your time. Simone Green is always partnering with you on this.
  
  And for our listeners, we'll see you next time.
  
  Thanks for listening to this episode of Educast three thousand. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and drop us a review on your favorite podcast players so you don't miss an episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to explore more, please email us at InstructureCast at Instructure dot com, or you can drop us a line on any of the socials. You can find more contact info in the show notes. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode of Educast three thousand.