Universities are responding to the need for all graduates to have foundational skills for a data-driven, AI-powered, digital economy. These new university programs will create graduates with depth in traditional disciplines, as well as broader boundary spanning skills – resulting in T-shapes. Over time, our data will become our AI helper.
Two Skills Reports
Two skills reports are especially relevant to the breadth and depth of skills of T-shaped Adaptive Innovators, from BHEF and NESTA:
BHEF (2018): Markow W, Hughes D, Bundy A (2018) The New Foundational Skills of the Digital Economy: Professionals of the Future. Burning Glass and Business Higher Education Forum Report (BHEF). URL: http://www.bhef.com/sites/default/files/BHEF_2018_New_Foundational_Skills.pdf
“Modern jobs integrate an array of broadly demanded skills. These are not the specialized skills of the engineer the physicist, working with advanced mathematical models, so much as they are those of the analyzer of complex bodies of data, the software programmer, the project manager, and the critical thinker.”
Oddly worded, since engineers and physicists are typically critical thinkers who know how to analyze complex bodies of data. That said software programmer (especially Python), and project manager (especially Agile methods with scrums) are not always taught to engineers and physicists at the bachelors level.
NESTA (2017): Bakhshi H, Downing J, Osborne M, Schneider P (2017) The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030. London: Pearson and Nesta. URL: https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/the-future-of-skills-employment-in-2030/
- “Around one-tenth of the workforce are in occupations that are likely to grow as a percentage of the workforce and round one-fifth are in occupations that will likely shrink.
- Education, healthcare, and wider public sector occupations are likely to grow while some low-skilled jobs, in fields like construction and agriculture, are less likely to suffer poor labor market outcomes than has been assumed in the past.
- The report highlights the skills that are likely to be in greater demand in the future, which include interpersonal skills, higher-order cognitive skills, and systems skills.
- We also identify how the skills make up of different occupations can be altered to improve the odds that they will be in higher demand in the future.
- The future workforce will need broad-based knowledge in addition to the more specialised skills that will are needed for specific occupations.”
The last bullet point in the above NESTA report is especially relevant to T-Shaped Adaptive Innovators with breadth (“broad-based knowledge”) and depth (“more specialised skills”).
Systems thinking and collaborative problem-solving are also characteristics of T-Shaped Adaptive Innovators:
- ” Interestingly, systems skills, relatively underexplored in the literature, all feature in the top 10. Systems thinking emphasises the ability to recognise and understand socio-technical systems – their interconnections and feedback effects – and choose appropriate actions in light of them. It marks a shift from more reductionist and mechanistic forms of analysis and lends itself to pedagogical approaches such as game design and case method with evidence that it can contribute to interdisciplinary learning (Tekinbas et al., 2014; Capra and Luisi, 2014; Arnold and Wade, 2015).
- — The combined importance of these skills and interpersonal skills supports the view that the demand for collaborative problem-solving skills may experience higher growth in the future (Nesta, 2017). “
Four Universities Respond
The importance of Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence to all disciplines, occupations, and yes, even cultures (values), is becoming increasingly apparent to universities, so they are starting AI Colleges, Sub-Universities, and Centers to explore AI’s impact across the board, and/or managing complex systems from a transdisciplinary perspective.
For example, consider MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, UC Merced.
MIT (Oct. 15, 2018), see: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/mit-college-artificial-intelligence.html
The goal of the college, said L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., is to “educate the bilinguals of the future.” He defines bilinguals as people in fields like biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics who are also skilled in the techniques of modern computing that can be applied to them.
But, he said, “to educate bilinguals, we have to create a new structure.”
Academic departments still tend to be silos, Mr. Reif explained, despite interdisciplinary programs that cross the departmental boundaries. Half the 50 faculty positions will focus on advancing computer science, and the other half will be jointly appointed by the college and by other departments across M.I.T.
Traditionally, departments hold sway in hiring and tenure decisions at universities. So, for example, a researcher who applied A.I.-based text analysis tools in a field like history might be regarded as too much a computer scientist by the humanities department and not sufficiently technical by the computer science department.
Berkeley (Nov 2, 2018), see: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/02/big-data-ai-prompt-major-expansions-uc-berkeley-and-mit
Berkeley provost Paul Alivisatos said that simply expanding the university’s existing computer sciences department would not be enough to match the surge of interest.
“Pretty much any field of inquiry and knowledge connects to [data science],” he said. “We wanted to create a structure that would allow that new methodological development to grow more, but also allow it to be widely used everywhere, where it can be beneficial.”
He said Berkeley envisions incorporating faculty members from fields as varied as sociology, public health and physics into a kind of “data science commons” to deepen their research. “From what we can tell, pretty much every part of this university wants to be involved, which is great.”
The field, Alivisatos said, is forcing other disciplines to come to terms not just with the widespread availability of data from diverse sources, but with “new methods that allow it to be sifted and analyzed.”
David Culler, Berkeley’s interim dean for data sciences, said the new division will be a peer of the university’s other schools and colleges. “But rather than standing apart from them, it’s really integrated with them,” he said, since these days, data science “touches almost every domain of inquiry.”
Culler said Berkeley, like most major universities, has been “grappling with this for at least five years” as it tried to figure out how to fit new computational disciplines into the broader world of other academic fields.
“The frontiers of knowledge are extremely integrative, and yet to a large extent, institutions of higher learning are very hierarchical,” he said.
Stanford (Mar 15, 2019), see: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/15/stanford-unveils-new-ai-institute-built-to-create-a-better-future-for-all-humanity/amp/
“The scope and scale of impact of the Age of AI will be more profound than any other period of transformation in our history,” Li and co-director John Etchemendy said in an online note about the new institute. “AI has the potential to radically transform every industry and every society.”
The institute will take advantage of Stanford’s strength in a variety of disciplines, including AI, computer science, engineering, robotics, business, economics, genomics, law, literature, medicine, neuroscience and philosophy, according to promotional materials.
“Our goal is for Stanford HAI to become an interdisciplinary, global hub for AI thinkers, learners, researchers, developers, builders and users from academia, government and industry, as well as leaders and policymakers who want to understand and leverage AI’s impact and potential,” the institute said.
UC Merced (Dec 12, 2018), add complex systems thinking, see: https://news.ucmerced.edu/news/2018/uc-merced-designing-management-school-future
The planning initiative is a faculty-led effort to create a new, transdisciplinary school that draws upon the expertise of scientists, researchers and practitioners from broad backgrounds to instill the next generations of leaders with the skills and knowledge needed to understand, design and manage complex systems.
The process will take several years, but Professor Paul Maglio, recently named director of the Gallo School Planning Initiative, said it’s time to look to the future and the next big development at UC Merced.
“We think the time is right to establish a new Gallo school at UC Merced to carry forward the interdisciplinary mission and vision of the campus and that relates broadly to management, decision making, information, communication and sustainability, and embraces the complexities of real interactions between people, institutions, technologies and the natural world,” Maglio said.
Brian Fitzgerald (BHEF) just send me this with more universities responding in the DC area: Cardenas-Navia I, Fitzgerald BK (2019) The digital dilemma: Winning and losing strategies in the digital talent race. Industry and Higher Education. 2019 Mar 25:0950422219836669. This was very interesting: In his study, 60% of the acquired employees left within 3 years—double the rate direct hires. The study also found that acquired employees were more likely to find their own companies, many of which appeared later to compete against the acquiring company (Kim, 2018). In Figure 1, blended professional – domain knowledge looks like academic disciplines. Industry knowledge, for example healthcare, retail, finance, etc. – is what IBM would be looking for.
My Advice
My advice to students and life learners of all ages:
Skills: Build: Data sciences and python programming for AI to build
Skills: Teach: Learning sciences for social-emotional-learning (SEL) skills
Skills: Collaborate/Lead: Agile scrum master and positive leadership.
Skills: Understand: Complex systems: Smarter/wiser service systems and service science, and service-dominant logic mindset.
Skills: Memberships: GitHub, Kaggle, Wikipedia, ISSIP.org -> becoming active in these communities of builders, teachers, collaborators
Working to become a T-Shaped Adaptive Innovator and learning about “service science” may also be helpful to those interested in working at IBM some day. IBM is always looking for high integrity individuals who are global citizens interested in building a smarter/wiser planet. Collaborating across industries, disciplines, cultures is hard, hard work, so not for everyone. See https://service-science.info/archives/3328
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Steve Kwan (SJSU Emeritus) for suggesting BHEF report and Stanford report, and Christine Leitner for suggesting the NESTA Report.