5 ways to prepare your students for hybrid jobs

We posted an article last week, talking about the rise of hybrid jobs on the market and its impacts on higher education. Have a look at this chart from Burning glass technologies and you’ll understand.

Here you go.

Obviously, the impacts that hybrid jobs will have on higher education are many and changes are needed in terms of learning/ pedagogy, of internal organizations. Basically, as Joseph E. Aoun writes, “If the new jobs that are emerging are increasingly hybrid, then the programs of study may need to become hybridized as well.”

Let’s dive a bit deeper into how a university or a school could prepare its students for these new kinds of jobs.

1. Propose projects and learning paths that aren’t siloed

Although it is already changing today, learning paths are still very much siloed. If you’re a student in History, marketing, finance, biology, you won’t be able to learn or use knowledge from other fields to discover and propose solutions to problematics.

In fact, as Joseph E. Aoun explains in his article, it is much more enriching to base learning on problematics rather than on a defined field because it is the way students are going to be confronted to different kinds of situations in the real world.

Having access to one particular kind of knowledge isn’t a problem anymore, knowledge is available almost for free at any time, anywhere. Thus, it is about using different kinds of knowledge to solve problems. This is one of several skills that are at the core of hybrid jobs.

A good example of a structural and pedagogical transformation, from siloed to hybrid education, is Finland. From their youngest age, students don’t learn subjects, they don’t take courses, rather, they take part in projects around themes and problematics.

2. Insufflate a culture of a growth mindset

As Jennifer Gonzalez writes, ?most teachers know that one of the best things we can do for our students is to help them develop a growth mindset, the belief that they can get smarter through effort. But many teachers are at a loss for what exactly they should do to promote this mindset.?

The growth mindset is the idea that the brain has the ability to change throughout your life, writes Katie Brohawn. Already very popular in the entrepreneurial community through expressions like every mistake is an opportunity to learn, it is still hardly applied to higher education where performance is perceived by students as the end-goal over learning.

Teaching a growth mindset to students can have positive impacts on them in terms of methodology, engagement and retention. Gauthier Lebbe, Inbound Marketing Manager at Wooclap, a Belgium startup that makes smartphone engaging learning tools, proposes 5 ways to help students develop a growth mindset.

3. Propose Innovation Class

We previously talked about Don Wettrick’s Innovation Class and the opportunities it offered for higher education.

• Innovation classes help students to engage a lot more with the learning process.
• They help them develop a high curiosity for problematics they want to solve.
• They also help them develop a high expertise in a short time that is quite remarkable. They help them use tech tools and new practices to attain their goals.
• Finally, they help students to work together on projects and manage goals they set themselves.

Innovation classes match 100% with what is needed today on the labour market and in new functions such as hybrid jobs.

4. The Growth Tribe model

Growth tribe is the first European academy of growth hacking based in Amsterdam. More than growth hacking, the academy trains people from all ages to master a mindset that will them adapt fast to many kinds of hybrid jobs.

Seeing the rapid growth of this academy in such little time (2 years), it is interesting to analyze its case and extract ideas and structures that could be applied to higher education institutions.

What works as hell with Growth tribe is their project based learning pedagogy. The academy is contacted by companies (generally large companies) who need to optimize their processes, solve problems or attain certain goals. Thus, learners form teams and apply immediately what they learn through conferences and discussions.

What’s more interesting in the Growth Tribe’s model is the culture of data, feedback and optimization learners need to integrate in order to be able to benchmark their learning or adapt to those many situations where they’ll have to solve companies’ problems.

An academy like Growth tribe not only provides its learners with a large panel of skills, it ensures the companies with which it works that its ?students? have a high mastery of these skills and are adaptable to many complex situations. Many find full-time jobs in these companies afterwards (or get promoted in case of a professional formation).

5. Hybridize the administration of the institution

Finally, going back to the argument of Joseph E. Adoun about the need for institutions to hybridize their learning programs, we can go even further. Institutions can change their own internal process and organization to entertain a continuous improvement of their learning programs and a perfect match between what their students learn and the current and future needs of the market.

It means building teams of administrators, like a growth team, that could benchmark the market and latest innovations in order to adapt the curriculums accordingly. It means also training its faculty and administrators to get the skills needed to help students evolve and learn quickly. This a basic of hybrid functions.

We’ll go deeper into that question in our next post. Keep in touch!