Future Resume?

Economic and technological drivers for rethinking education.

5 min readJun 16, 2020

Notional “future resume” for non-degreed candidate. (Annotated below)

A new discussion in the DARPA Polyplexus, “Alternative Credentialing Models Across Business and Post-secondary Education” inspired me to share a concept I think persistently relevant: the essential role of community colleges in the Future of Work.

Back in 2014, for an AACC Workforce Development Institute plenary aimed at shaking up community college provosts, I introduced a notional “future resume” where a candidate had no degree per-se, but demonstrated credentials competitive with BS candidates: qualified education, relevant work experience and coursework from top-tier currucula.

Community Colleges: Local, Focused and Affordable

Community colleges are an essential safety net for training and education as our workforce increasingly requires reskilling due to the accelerating pace of technological change. Beyond the obvious disruption to how a job is performed (leveraging new technological tools, networks, etc.) are the reductions in workforce due to greater productivity through task automation (such as customer self-service, sophisticated data processing, robotics, etc.)

Workers seeking to retain jobs now requiring new proficiencies, or to retrain for a new job after displacement by automation will not likely have the same flexibility they had as an 18 year-old high school graduate. Most prominently, this worker-turned-student will be time-limited and strongly tied to their current locale due to family and community obligations such as a spouse’s job, child care/school, social ties, aging parents, and non-work engagements. This alone sufficiently challenges the feasibility of seeking traditional 4-year college options for new training.

Foundationally, community colleges offer affordable, focused, curriculum-adaptable, locally-connected training and support services for students. But necessarily to meet these factors, their offerings are limited by the teaching staff and facilities they can support and credentialing requirements — often requiring post-associate degree transfer to a university to complete a bachelor’s degree. This limitation has been challenged, however, through innovation in digital delivery through MOOCs (Massively-Open Online Courses):

MOOC Learning: Game-changing

MOOCs can be particularly attractive compared to traditional education when students are limited by time, schedule, finances, geography, disability, etc. Also called “Distance Learning,” this paradigm offers novel access to high-quality lecturers, student communities and learning curricula. Further, the structure lends itself to constant refresh of the teaching material, changes in technology and adaptation of case studies and projects.

Long-standing ideas on education itself are in the process of being disrupted by the versatility delivered through MOOC technology in redefining distance and time relative to a campus. For example, maximizing the value of time spent with teachers or peers. The “Flipped Classroom” model streams lecture-time (or content exploration) to the home, while using on-campus time for teacher-guided projects and what is traditionally “homework”.

Contrasting the traditional notion of degree programs, institutions can economically offer certified nanodegrees and microcredentials in highly-focused topic areas. While this deconstructs the university intent for a “well-rounded education,” these deliver for students seeking to minimize time and debt obligations. Professional societies (such as in the future resume example — the American Statistical Association) could then template certifications based upon qualifying compositions of coursework across the many MOOC options, promoting healthy competition and allowing cherry-picking the best fit to learning needs.

Objectively, we might ask, “How many unique courses do we need in staple introductory topics such as Calculus, Accounting or Databases?” Further, as widely-distributable videos capture Rock Star Lecturers of top universities or their ingeniously engaging ideas for learning projects, education delivered by mid-tier universities could be marginalized in value. On the other hand, over time teachers and students have found MOOC shortcomings as well, often due to the nature of the online digital delivery itself.

A New Role for Community Colleges

Several factors position Community Colleges to help address both critical workforce challenges arising out of the future of work, as well as deficiencies of the MOOCs. The future of education may favor top-tier universities developing MOOC content, in partnership with community colleges to delivery environments with value-adding teaching assistance, social classrooms, and physical equipment and facilties.

Community colleges already bring together local students, supply classwork, testing and lab environments, and are experienced in student continuity assistance to encourage follow-through for students whose life circumstances present challenges, offering critical services such as counseling, child care, and transportation.

Community colleges not only are affordable options to high school graduates, but also for mid-career workers needing retraining to adjust to changes in labor demand. Their local orientation and focused curricula make them pragmatic to a span of student ages and backgrounds. They are typically integrated with the local business community, offering meaningful internships and adapting to change more readily than universities, including embracing non-degree certifications. In-short, delivering the sample resume.

Future Resume?

Economic and technological drivers for rethinking education.

Community Colleges: Local, Focused and Affordable

MOOC Learning: Game-changing

A New Role for Community Colleges

Written by Richard Arthur