Similar but different

I for one welcome the Australian Government’s proposal to establish a National Skills Passport.

Tabled last year via the Working Future whitepaper, the idea is “to help people more easily demonstrate their skills to employers and reduce barriers to lifelong learning.”

Bravo. But of course the devil is in the detail, and so far there hasn’t been very much of that (perhaps by design).

Indeed, the Department of Education and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations have jointly released a consultation paper which advances the idea a smidgen more. For example, “Stakeholders have long called for the creation of a tool to help Australians demonstrate their qualifications to prospective employers. A skills passport could combine a person’s qualifications across VET and higher education to more effectively demonstrate their skills to employers.”

As per that extract, the document frequently uses the word “skills” in conjunction with the word “qualifications”, and I fear they’re being conflated.

You see, they’re similar, but different. I’ve previously expressed my view in the context of digital badges – see The past tense of open badges and More than just a pretty face – whereby a qualification is a promise that you can do something; whereas a badge is (or more to the point, should be) a symbol that you have done it.

There’s the rub. If the National Skills Passport is to be a collection of qualifications, then it will essentially be a promissory note. Granted, the interoperability of it across higher education and industry will be attractive, but it won’t ever evolve beyond Curriculum Vitae 2.0 because its premise will be flawed from the get-go.

In the corporate sector our strategies are increasingly skills-first, and I suggest the government’s proposed solution should be too. Rather than accumulating your qualifications, the passport should represent your skills.

Certainly a qualification can lend weight to your claim on a skill, but only to a certain level, because doing a course on data science doesn’t necessarily mean you are skilled at data science – P’s are degrees! In a similar vein, your employment history and other work experience could also lend weight, but occupying the role of Data Analyst for several years doesn’t necessarily mean you were a good one.

What I’m getting at is to be validated, a skill needs to be assessed. And because by definition a skill is practical, what is being assessed must be its practice. Now I realise this is challenging and potentially unwieldy to do, so much so that I’ve suggested that universities pivot their awards accordingly – see Higher Assessment – while some providers have spawned a new service offering – see DeakinCo and RMIT Online.

And I also realise that some courses are practically oriented, with their completion predicated on the production of a dashboard or the presentation of a project, for example. That’s a shift in the right direction, as the assessment of practice is integrated into the learning experience.

However, if the National Skills Passport is to be a National Skills Passport, then it needs to be founded upon… skills. Evidence such as qualifications and employment history contribute to your record of a specific skill at a particular level (aligned to a standardised rubric) but only through an independent assessment of practice can you reach the terminal level.

That way, if I’m looking for a SQL programmer who can speak Japanese, I can find someone at the click of a button without wondering how capable they really are.

Violets are blue

When I pressed the Publish button on Roses are red, it capstoned a year of semantics for me which spilled over into this year.

In addition to my annual list of conferences in Australia for digital educators, I applied my cognitive surplus to another nine posts that dive deeper into the murky waters of meaning.

• In Double defence I pondered the defensive value of so-called “skills of the future”, while in Skills of the present I recognised their value for offense.
   
• In Great and small I reshaped our pedagogical terminology.
   
• In Higher Assessment I proposed a new role for universities.
   
• In Space invaders I untangled terms relating to the spacing effect, while in Time pilot I extended the coverage to interleaving.
   
• In Gold vibes only I borrowed a mantra coined by the great Patty Mills and applied it to organisational culture.
   
• In The apex of innovation I isolated a variable that’s critical to continuous improvement.
   
• In The $100 hypothetical I compared can’t with won’t.

I’m keen to hear your views among mine, so feel free to add a comment to each of the conversations.

If you already have, I salute you!

Higher Assessment

I find it strange when a blogger doesn’t approve my comment.

I consider comments the life blood of my own blog, and whether they be positive or negative, classy or rude, they all add to the diversity of the conversation. If your fragile ego can’t handle that, don’t blog.

I recently submitted a constructive comment to a particular blog post, twice, and it never eventuated. A later comment by someone else has.

Right, rather than waste my thought bubble, I’ve decided to reproduce the thrust of it here…

The OP was about the future of Higher Education being modular and flexible, which I agreed with. However something that caught my eye was the author’s observation about the assessment of prior learning via an essay or exam defeating the point of documentary evidence of previous course content or work experience.

Yet I feel that assessment via an essay or exam or some other means is the point. We needn’t rely so much on the bureaucracy if we could simply demonstrate what we know – regardless of how we came to know it.

When accrediting prior learning, a university needn’t get bogged down with evaluating myriad external permutations that may be worthy of credit, because what matters is the outcome of those permutations.

Similarly from the student’s point of view, it wouldn’t matter if they’ve done a mooc but not paid for the certificate, or if they did a course many years ago and worked in the field thereafter. What matters is the knowledge they can demonstrate now.

As a bastion of education, the university is losing ground to external competitors. Yet it maintains a certain gravitas that I suggest can be channelled into more of an assessment-driven role for society, whereby it validates knowledge at a certain standard and awards its qualifications accordingly.

Its role in teaching and learning is retained, of course, to fill in the gaps; powered by research to keep it at the forefront of the science.

Semantics, semantics

I dislike grammar jokes, pedants, and Oxford commas.

That’s my jovial way to end a year that will be remembered as a tough one for a long time to come.

I found blogging a welcome distraction, so much so that in addition to my annual list of e-learning conferences in Australia (which took a beating!) I churned out no fewer than ten thought pieces.

My joke at the start of this summary is a nod to the theme of semantics, which I maintain are important in the L&D profession. Because it is with shared meaning that we do our best work.

I invite you to share your own views on each piece, so feel free to drop me a like and contribute a comment or two…

• In 6 more examples of Augmented Reality I share half a dozen real-world instances of an emerging technology.
   
• In Unhappy sheets I reframe Level 1 evaluation.
   
• In The next normal several of my peers and I anticipate the long-term nature of Learning & Development.
   
• In Yellow submarine I round down the prevailing notion of human-centered design.
   
• In The leader’s new clothes I distinguish between management training and leadership training.
   
• In Transformers I redefine training for a remote workforce.
   
• In More than just a pretty face I maintain a difference between certification badges and practitioner badges.
   
• In Academic deflation I spot a trend in higher education.
   
• In Roses are red I propose definitions for oft-used yet ambiguous terms such as “competency” and “capability”.
   
• In Scaling up I offer a simplified scale of measurement to support proficiency across an organisation.

I hope you find my articulations helpful.

In the meantime, I wish that for you and your family the Christmas season will be a time of healing, rest and renewal.

Academic deflation

I once had a conversation with a man who scared me.

It was over 20 years ago, and I remember him being quite a lovely fellow. He was simply proud of his son earning his PhD.

What scared me was his conviction that in order to keep up in the imminent future, an undergraduate qualification would not be enough; one must earn a postgraduate qualification. Not to get ahead, but to remain competitive.

With the ink still drying on my Bachelor of Science degree, my heart sank at the prospect of several years’ more slog.

The man was describing academic inflation and upon reflection, I realised I had experienced it already. Only a few years prior, as I was studying my high school diploma, “going to uni” was all the rage. Accounting was inexplicably popular, and competition for the trendiest major – Communication – drove its course entry score to the dizzying heights of Medicine and Law.

Not going to uni was seriously uncool, which no doubt contributed to a shortage of tradies such as plumbers, who to this day can charge a fortune for changing a washer.

The parallels to Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches are uncanny. This is a story about creatures called Sneetches, some of whom have a green star on their belly, some of whom do not. Of course the latter group covets those little status symbols, and their envy is duly exploited by an entrepreneur who invents a Star-On machine.

After the plain-bellies eagerly pay to get their own stars, the elitism of the original star-bellies wanes, and so the entrepreneur invents a Star-Off machine. The former elites pay an inflated price to reclaim their privilege, and so the pendulum swings back and forth with stars going on and off bellies until all the Sneetches run out of money.

Back in the real world which recently declared Australia’s most educated generation faces the worst job prospects in decades, I wonder: is academic inflation undergoing a Sneetch-like reversal?

The UK office of Ernst & Young ruffled a few feathers when they dropped the degree requirement for their entry-level jobs, while Elon Musk famously maintains that you don’t need a degree to work at Tesla.

I admit to not taking too much notice of this trend until Google launched its Career Certificates. Their courses can be completed online over several months, and they cover red hot topics such as data analytics and UX design. Their website says it all:

Learn job-ready skills to start or advance your career in high-demand fields. These certificates developed by Google connect you to top national employers who are hiring for related roles.

Furthermore, the tech giant’s SVP of Global Affairs claims we will consider our new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related entry-level roles.

Wow… if it’s good enough for Google, then “top national employers” isn’t an empty promise. Suddenly that little green star doesn’t shine so bright.

Perhaps after years of academic inflation, the pendulum is swinging back towards academic deflation. The prospect should sound alarm bells for a sector that’s already reeling from the impact of COVID-19.

If the trend towards short, practical, employer-sanctioned courses continues, one day of course we’ll collectively realise that the way to get ahead of the pack will be to embark on a longer, deeper dive that leads to a qualification with scholarly gravitas.

Hence the next generation of students going to university may no longer be doe-eyed teenagers craving a foot in the door, but experienced operators seeking to enhance their careers.

Which will in turn attract the young ones back when they realise they’re missing out on all the best jobs.

That is until everyone, once again, has stars upon thars.