The Future of Work Is Changing. Here’s How You Prepare for What’s Next.

The future of work is changing, whether you’re ready or not. But getting ready is no simple task. Who can you trust to teach the new skills you’ll need? How much should you pay? What’s more important: credentials or knowledge? University of Virginia Darden School of Business Dean Scott Beardsley has spent the last six years honing the School’s strategy to serve the needs of the next generation of business leaders, and he joins Darden Executive Education & Lifelong Learning’s Anne Trumbore to dissect the landscape of lifelong learning, how it is evolving to meet the needs of the modern workplace and how professionals can best tap the power of education to advance their purpose.

Read full transcript here:

Scott Beardsley:

I believe we're seeing a proliferation of learning forms, in degree and non-degree formats, from many different providers because the need for learning is so high. We've never been on an exponential growth curve enabled by technology the way we have the last 20 years. It's unique in the history of humanity.

Sean Carr:

The future of work is changing, whether you're ready or not. But getting ready is no simple task. Who can you trust to teach the new skills you'll need? What's more important, credentials or knowledge?

Scott Beardsley is dean at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where he spent the last six years honing the school's strategy to serve the needs of the next generation of business leaders. He's a fierce advocate for lifelong learning and why it will be the key to career success in a future defined by rapid change.

I'm Sean Carr, and welcome to Darden Ideas to Action. Today's episode is hosted by a special guest, Anne Trumbore, executive director of digital initiatives for Darden Executive Education and Lifelong Learning.

Anne Trumbore:

Scott, thank you for joining us today.

Now, you've changed careers coming to Darden from Belgium after 26 years at McKinsey, and you're a prime example of a lifelong learner earning your doctorate at Penn. What's it actually like after decades in one career, with kids at home, life in Europe, to move into a new chapter in a new country and a new industry?

Scott Beardsley:

It feels great. When I was a kid, my favorite book was Curious George, and I always have been curious about life and about learning new things. A new chapter gives me an opportunity to continue to learn about education, about myself, about other people.

So I view it as part of a journey that I have undertaken called my life to learn as much as I can about as many different things as possible. It just so happens that I believe very much in the power of education to change people's lives. That you can go from anywhere to anywhere with education, and that it really is the great equalizer.

Anne Trumbore:

If you could take me back into what it was like having a very successful career, and then thinking about going back and doing the work that's necessary to get a doctorate, write a dissertation, really put yourself back into the mode of serious student and to do scholarship again?

Scott Beardsley:

As I was leading all the learning and leadership development, all the capability-building for all the McKinsey professionals worldwide, I was on the faculty in many different programs, often with senior leaders, but also with some of the younger consultants.

What I realized is that I enjoyed that more than anything else I was doing. I told myself, "Gosh, in some ways I'm jealous that I'm not on the learning end. I'm always on the faculty side. I wish there was a program for me to learn myself."

Initially, I thought it was impossible because I was not willing to give up my career and take five years to go do a doctorate. So I was searching and searching and searching for all the top universities. Is there any kind of a program that I might be able to do while I was working?

I got into the Penn program, and when I embarked on it, it was very exciting. I told myself what a privilege it is to be able to invest in myself and to dedicate a big portion of my mind towards learning.

Anne Trumbore:

That brings up something really interesting. I think in the conversation around lifelong learning, particularly over the past year with the acceleration brought about by COVID, folks are thinking more about lifelong learning as something they need to do to stay current, or is it something deeper than that?

Scott Beardsley:

It's never too late or too early to invest in your own education and your learning. The best investment you can ever make is in yourself and in your own capabilities. Then the next best investment you can make is in the capabilities of those you love the most.

I view it as just part of life and that no matter where you are in your life, it's not too late to still learn. The world is changing rapidly. With the onset of technology, there's many types of roles that require you to retool. Lifelong learning is the ability to retool yourself maybe for the job market, but also just for the joy of learning more.

Anne Trumbore:

That also gives a nice segue to the idea of technology and how technology has not only increased what we need to know, but it's also changed how we learn.

Scott Beardsley:

Sometimes the knowledge that you need to gain is just in time. You need it promptly. You don't have time to take weeks and years off to go learn something. That suits itself very well to technology, just-in-time delivery.

On the other hand, we also know that a lot of learning comes from interpersonal interaction, building relationships, putting yourself in situations where you actually have to deal with human beings and not just with androids, or with robots, or artificial intelligence. So it's how do you find that balance.

Anne Trumbore:

What anecdotes can you share that you think are useful in creating sort of the history of how this technology is changing, the way that we learn, particularly at work?

Scott Beardsley:

I think that a lot of people want the answer to be black or white. The entire world is going to online learning. Or they want to believe in a world where everything is done the way it was for years in the typical classroom, all in person. So the debate is often polarized into one or the other one.

My main observation is that it's rarely about one or the other. It's an and. Even in in-person experiences, there's an opportunity to leverage technology in any modern classroom today, whether it's the students studying to prepare for class using the internet, watching videos, using datasets that are available online, or whether it is actually as we've seen during COVID, probably the greatest experiment in technology- enabled learning the world has ever known, taking place at a very short notice. The systems are very scalable as we've seen.

The real question is where do we go from here, and I think the answer is going to be still a hybrid. The answer is it's an and. How do you get the best of both worlds? That's where we are now.

Anne Trumbore:

Do you think that professional education for professional development then should be more in-person? Should that be an opportunity for this community? Or do you think that professional development will be primarily online now?

Scott Beardsley:

I think it depends on what skill you're trying to learn. If you're trying to learn how to give people feedback, or how to make presentations under stress, or how to discuss the meaning of your life, your sense of being, or to understand how to build a sense of values in a corporation and a shared sense of purpose, it's much easier to do some of those aspects in person.

It depends not only on what you're trying to learn, but it also depends on the geography you live in. I think what we have to do is to just remember that it depends on what you're trying to teach, who you're trying to teach it to and what their exact situation is, and there's different choices. The 8 billion-plus people in this world have different learning needs, depending on where they're from and where they're at in their life.

Anne Trumbore:

You started an in-house university at McKinsey. We know that that company is like Apple and others have very strong in-house training. What do you think about that in your role as the dean of the business school? Does that make you think, "Boy, maybe we should think about what we're teaching?" Will the entrance of those universities in people's lives change what gets taught in a MBA curriculum?

Scott Beardsley:

Of course, whatever you teach in a given program has to adapt itself to the reality of today. So as business evolves, so do business schools evolve what you need to teach, the skills that you need. I don't believe that it's a problem that corporations have their own universities and have their own skill-building and inside corporate universities. That makes perfect sense to me.

Think of the alternative. Would it make any sense that Apple or Amazon or Facebook, or any large corporation has no training programs whatsoever for their people? For me, it makes no sense whatsoever that they would not invest in their people. Their people are their greatest asset.

That doesn't mean for me that there will be no need for a business school or for higher education or for degree programs. I just believe we're seeing a proliferation of learning forms, in degree and non-degree formats, from many different providers because the need for learning is so high. We've never been on an exponential growth curve enabled by technology the way we have the last 20 years. It's unique in the history of humanity. We've never seen something like this before, and it's changing the face of work and how things happen in ways that we've never seen in history.

Anne Trumbore:

What would be your advice then for someone who wants to up-skill and make their career future-ready? Obviously, there's a wide swath of folks. There's someone who may have just gotten out of college who thinks, "Oh my gosh, I just got through this." Then there may be someone who's further along in their career.

Scott Beardsley:

I think the first thing is that you need to build a strong base. In a world with increased volatility and uncertainty, the value of options go up. We know this from financial theory. More volatility, the value of the option goes up.

Same thing with your education. So a top degree from a great school, like Darden, is an option creator. It gives you the possibility to work in more industries, more functions, more geographies. It's kind of like a passport.

Perhaps more importantly, at a place like Darden, we teach people how to learn how to learn because we can't possibly teach you everything you need to know for the rest of your life right now. But what we can teach you is how to adapt and how to be ready to learn the next set of skills that you may need for the given situation you may find yourself in.

Nobody has a crystal ball about the future, so what you can do is to prepare yourself to know how to adapt. And, everybody should think about how and when you're going to reinvest in your education, whether it's for credit or not for credit. That's why we have Lifelong Learning and Executive Education at Darden to help anybody re-equip, become reacquainted, re-engage with people that are like-minded.

My last point of view is put yourself in a situation where you're surrounded by great professors or great teachers and also great colleagues because you always learn better from those who really know how to teach. You also learn better from colleagues that are also with high aspirations.

Anne Trumbore:

If I'm a lifelong learner and I think, "Wow, I do want to go someplace where they really care about teaching," what are some ways you can engage with Darden beyond the traditional MBA? Why would I invest in myself to do that? What is the special sauce here?

Scott Beardsley:

Well, at Darden, we have our Sands Institute for Executive Education and Lifelong Learning, which is focused precisely on meeting learners where they are throughout their life. It doesn't have to be in the residential MBA format. It could be in the executive MBA format, or it could be in the master of science and business analytics arena, or it could be for different certificates and credentials that we have, either for credit or not for credit, stackable credentials, either towards a specialization, or maybe even a degree over time. They consist of in-person opportunities in Charlottesville and Washington, D.C., but they also consist of online programs that are available either synchronous or asynchronous. In other words, either live or recorded.

Also, some companies want to tailor offerings to themselves. Another thing that Darden does that companies should be aware of is we create custom programs for companies that they can then embed within their own organization, tailored to their own needs.

Anne Trumbore:

Now just circling back to the big Nostradamus question, what do you think the future of work and the future of education are as they talk to each other?

Scott Beardsley:

What we can see is that the need for knowledge-based workers is increasing as technology continues to develop at an exponential rate in so many different ways. I see a future where the future of work is going to be voracious in its need for those who can operate in the knowledge economy. I think we're going to see in the business world everything is technology-enabled.

At the same time, I think there are going to be a tremendous number of ethical questions related to the role of technology in corporate business models, who has the access and the right to private information, how it can be exploited for good or for bad. I think that is going to be a dominant theme for the foreseeable future in 10 to 20 years.

In terms of what that means for education, what I see is that the importance of education is going up, not going down. More than ever we need great teachers. We need learning. Education has to become an enabler even more in the future, and it has to be able to meet people where they are because it's going to be more and more necessary to kind of call it go back to school. As a result, as educators, we have the responsibility to meet people where they are in their lifelong journey.

If any Darden alumni are listening to this, we look forward to having you back in Charlottesville whenever you can make it back, and to our new Darden Inn and Conference Center for Lifelong Learning, which is underway and will be ready in January 2023. Construction is well underway, and that's going to be a very exciting gathering point for alumni and lifelong learners that want to come have a taste of our wonderful learning environment here in Charlottesville.

Anne Trumbore:

Scott, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom today.

Sean Carr:

Thank you for listening to this special episode of Ideas to Action, and thank you to Anne Trumbore for serving as our guest host.

Scott Beardsley is dean at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where he has led advancements in areas including student excellence, diversity and inclusion, faculty hiring and excellence, global reach, program innovation and infrastructure development. Prior to Darden, he was a senior partner at McKinsey where he worked for 26 years.

Join us next time for more research, analysis and commentary from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. You can subscribe to Ideas to Action on Apple podcasts, Spotify or Podbean. To read more expert insights on this topic and more, visit ideas.darden.virginia.edu.