Amid the significant digital disruption of the last few years, Pearson has been in the proverbial lab, researching and developing ways to equip our customers, employees and the global community with the skills they need for a sustainable future. Pearson CEO Andy Bird, Richard Stagg, vice president for Portfolio Management and publishing director for Higher Education at Pearson UK, and Els Howard-Polman, vice president for Business Development and Innovation, discussed these plans during the Business Fights Poverty conference held this fall during the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The “Building Skills for a Sustainable Future: From Learning to Action” session, sponsored by Pearson and including other global business leaders from Unilever, Standard Chartered Bank, and Cemex, explored how the private sector can both support and benefit from collaborative initiatives to build essential skills.
The discussion centered around three actions, which are rooted in education being a powerful driver of change, sustainability being an integral part of learning, and partnerships being critical in delivering learning opportunities.
- Set reskilling and upskilling as the expectation
Andy Bird set the stage, sharing the dramatic increase in interest and inbound inquiries Pearson is receiving from corporations about solutions to their learning challenges.
“Corporations may become the universities of the future. They are asking, ‘help us assess our workforce, our learning needs, and help us create our bespoke curriculum.’ There is a need to reskill and upskill as we go on this lifelong journey.”
As examples, he shared how industries like healthcare and banking are being disrupted by technological transformation. “Healthcare will always need more healthcare workers, but what they really need is to upskill and reskill their current employee base with digital skills, as suddenly healthcare has become a two-screen environment,” said Bird. “You’re connecting with the patient on one screen and you’re reviewing the diagnostic tools on a second screen...Banks are transitioning their bank tellers, who are losing their analog jobs, and re-training them to be cyber security experts, preparing them for this new world.”
To better understand the needs of corporations during this time of global digital disruption, Pearson has been in conversation with CEOs and began a corporate partnership program two years ago.
- Leverage the Pearson Employee Partnership for Learning
Led by Els Howard-Polman, the Employee Partnership for Learning provides a platform for Pearson to collaborate with chief human resource and learning officers of multinational corporations to get insights into their needs as they are increasing in scale and complexity. A significant part of these conversations has also been about providing resources to reskill and upskill small and medium enterprises.The purpose of the group of about 25 corporate members is to leverage their research and strategy papers into solutions to future proof roles and businesses. “We want to create productivity, competitiveness, economic growth and clearly, ultimately, employment fulfillment,” said Howard-Polman. “Before that, though, we have to learn about each other's needs and challenges and - tapping into the wider infrastructure - experiment, co-create, test and respond to demands.”
Pre-Covid, the partnership, in collaboration with Pearson experts, designed an enabling framework around soft skills. Next steps are to create a pathway to develop assessing, accrediting or certifying mechanisms for organizations and for the partnership group, as a consortium, to recognize that learning.
- Develop curriculum with employers and learners
Pearson is collaborating with employers and learners to explore how to create more learning experiences and outcomes that will provide needed flexible, resilient and sustainable careers and workforces. As part of this inquiry, Richard Stagg shared several questions Pearson is answering:“How can we turn grand challenges like sustainability into learnable skills that can help people build the right futures? How can we engage all employees in learning those skills as well? And how can we make that learning have a real impact in changing the business?”
He detailed the shift in focus that Pearson is seeing away from roles and issues and into clusters of skills becoming the organizing units of learning that give people intelligent pathways to get into the right roles that are future proof. What will be important in engaging employees is providing them with incentives and rewards for this learning – a credential or badge, which can be leveraged for new career opportunities
Last, Stagg spoke to employing practical, applied and experiential learning through meaningful projects to close the gap between working and learning, when employees don’t have time to do both. This type of learning, he said, provides the opportunity to introduce skilled mentors... to get feedback on soft skills like critical thinking and collaboration.
Wrapping together these innovative strategies and research through partnerships provides Pearson with exciting opportunities to create the type of learning that not only develops people's skills and changes the businesses in which they work – it transforms both for a more sustainable future.
Joyce E. Davis is the director of communications for diversity, equity, inclusion and social impact at Pearson.