When’s the last time you had a mind-blowing learning experience?
We teach learners how to learn for a lifetime. I’ve heard versions of this phrase bandied about at conferences, in webinars, on panels—you name it—and it’s always driven me bananas. It’s often used as a retort when learning providers are justifying why they’re not connecting their educational pathways more directly to jobs in demand.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences put it best in its report on the future of undergraduate education: “Today, the long-standing debate over the value of a liberal arts education versus a more applied postsecondary program presents a false choice.”
Education and work are one and the same. As economist Anthony P. Carnevale explains: “The inescapable reality is that ours is a society based on work. Increasing the economic relevance of education should, if done properly, extend the ability of educators to empower Americans to work in the world, rather than retreat from it.” Of course, this doesn’t apply to just American education but also education around the world.
Over the last few months, I’ve had the privilege of working with colleagues in South Africa and learning more about the country’s digital upskilling needs, especially for the many millions of unemployed South African youth.
I had the opportunity to interview a few coding bootcamp participants from codeX, a program that not only prepares a wide array of learners for jobs in software development but also teaches them how to learn. One alumna shared, “I can do anything because of Codex honestly … I don’t get intimidated.” When’s the last time you heard an education review like that?
Each of the three learners I interviewed were coming in as one of the 7.7 million unemployed youth in South Africa (because they were so candid in their interviews with me, I’ll just use their first initials to represent them):
M had spent two years pursuing pharmacy and then switched to two years of journalism. She failed to graduate.
T was forced to drop out after realizing that Civil Engineering was not for her.
N discovered his major didn’t lead to any specific operations roles in the workforce unless he had six years of prior work experience.
T described the challenges of looking for work and constantly receiving emails that started with: “‘We regret to inform you’… Lots and lots of those emails. And they can have an effect on your psyche.” N shared that he went through bouts of depression and anxiety during his period of unemployment after completing his university degree: “It was a period of stress, depression and all that, because, you know, even to have completed something and now you’re not really making progress. It's really stressful.”
Each person was accepted into the codeX program, and from the get-go, they were learning professional skills, agile practices, coding skills, technical vocabulary as well as the jargon internal to an organization. CEO Cara Turner shares more about what the full learning experience is like here:
Because learners are showcasing their skills every single week—even on day 7 of the program—they gain confidence. The transition into a real work environment is a whole lot less daunting because as N shared, all of the daily stand-ups, check-ins, and thin slicing mimic the real world work environment: “You get to do things that they normally do in the workplace—practical things, you know, getting to build things…. And it gives you hope when you actually create something and somebody else can use it… you're actually developing the skill.”
Although Turner quickly runs through this point, it's important to underscore that codeX instructors do not provide coders with the solution to a challenge. Instead, they progressively remove scaffolding and add non-obvious gaps in their instructions so that learners must figure out how to plan, approach, and solve the problem on their own. Turner shares, “We would often get people saying, I could have got this right if you told me how to do this. And now we tell them why we don't tell you how to do it because we know that you can get it right if we tell you how to do it. We want it to come from within you.”
When T was learning SQL, she was totally confused and struggling. She now refers to that moment as coming into herself. She describes how she didn’t give up and showed her determination and resilience. For her, this was a real process of growth. Now, she says, “I’m a SQL pro honestly.” Those moments of productive struggle gave her a new kind of adaptability that she takes into her work at Accenture.
Interestingly, in her new role, T’s been moved into a cyber security unit for which she was not trained. When I asked her how she was coping with not really being skilled in this area, she responded that her company offers her the training to upskill and that it’s “not a big deal, not a big deal. Nothing’s a big deal. I think I learned that from codeX. As long as I have the resources, I know who to ask for help. I know who to talk to.” Not a big deal. Nothing’s a big deal. I hope my own children can say that one day….
N shares a similar transformation of his own capabilities. He explained that prior to codeX, he viewed himself as “somebody that never had skill.” And he questioned, “Am I really going to fit into the tech industry? Am I really going to make it?” For N, overcoming his own sense of impostor syndrome was formative for his development. Ultimately, he said:
The most surprising thing for me to discover was actually the tech capability that I had. It’s something that was totally hidden from me. I didn’t know that I could actually build software that a person can use… After university, there was nothing that I could do, you know, not even something small. So, the most surprising thing for me to discover was actually me having the capability to actually build something using tech and actually solving a problem.
For M, learning about Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset at codeX was revelatory: “Intelligence is something that you can cultivate, that you can work at it. It's not just like you are this intelligent, and you cannot break that ceiling. Actually, you can stretch yourself, you can stretch your mind….” She felt supported by mentors who kept telling her, “Yes, this is hard, but you can do hard things. It's okay for things to be hard, and it's okay for you to feel like you're not going to be able to do it, but the truth is you will, you know, if you just keep at it.”
Through self-paced, hands-on learning experiences, each of these three learners overcame tremendous obstacles to acquire a series of new skills. Not only did they learn the technical skills involved in software engineering, but they also learned critical human skills about growth mindset, overcoming impostor syndrome, and what it means to work on a team. They learned how to learn not just for this first job but for their second, third, and fourth jobs to come.
Technical skills-building and learning skills for roles in high demand does not mean that learners have to miss out on foundational skills or human skills. It’s not an either or proposition but both, and. It is the combination of human + technical skills that prepares learners for the jobs of today and tomorrow. And when done right, learners like N say, “It gave me so much hope.” And they call them “mind-blowing,” “eye-opening,” and “awesome” learning experiences.
Let’s do more of that.