Education technology became a popular investment category during the depths of the pandemic: in 2020 and 2021, many venture capitalists got the opportunity to experience online education and remote training in their own homes, and many new entrants began making big bets at high valuations. But in 2022, some of these tourists seem to have gone back home.

Venture investment in education companies declined steeply in 2022. According to Pitchbook, in 2022 (through December 9th) venture capitalists invested 57% less capital in education companies than in the prior year. This was the largest decline Pitchbook measured in any of the sectors they cover.

This squares with our own anecdotal evidence. A lot of tourists — the generalist VCs — who leaped into education in 2020 and 2021 leaped back out in 2022. And some specialized education firms slowed the rate at which they invested or even entirely stopped making new investments entirely.

Not us, though. I made my first education investment in 2003. Rethink Education launched in 2012. Today, we are still going strong. The partners of Rethink Education have dedicated our lives to our mission of helping to unlock the full human potential of people in marginalized and underserved groups. And we see more opportunities than ever before to build world-changing businesses that are also large, financially efficient, and defensible.

We have continued seeking new investments with our usual level of curiosity and persistence, but we were not faced with many opportunities that we loved.

We think there were several reasons we weren’t seeing lots of opportunities.

1. In 2021 many education companies raised enough money to last them several years.
2. Companies that needed money in 2022 often raised small extensions of the previous round from their existing investors.
3. Entrepreneurs became more hesitant about starting new companies.

However, Q4 was a different story. We invested in six companies, five of them new to the portfolio.

These recent investments are in companies with exceptionally inspiring missions.

We invested in three K-12 companies, two focused on literacy and one, initially at least, on math. All three have CEOs who have worked in K12 schools.

Ignite! Reading. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to lead the A round of Ignite! Reading, which delivers high-dosage literacy tutoring and a data-driven, differentiated, evidence-based foundational reading curriculum to early readers. Today only 35% of fourth-graders read on grade level, and 21% of American adults are illiterate. Ignite is delivering strong results: in one district, at the beginning of the first grade, 35% of students were reading on grade level. At the end of the school year, 80% of the students who received instruction from Ignite! were on grade level. Even more strikingly, a district official said, “100% of our students who moved from below grade level to at or above grade level were in Ignite.” The founders of Ignite!, Jessica Reid Sliwerski and Evan Marwell, both most recently ran successful nonprofits. Both have known Rethink team members for about a decade.

PeerTeach. PeerTeach is a pre-seed company focused on equipping students to tutor their peers in middle school math. The company has a strong grounding in research. The founder, Soren Rosier, has a doctorate in learning sciences and technology design from Stanford University and has been co-running a Stanford master’s program that teaches entrepreneurs to develop evidence-based education products. PeerTeach is the only pre-seed education company we know of that has already conducted two randomized controlled trials of the efficacy of its product. Students taught by PeerTeach-supported peers gained 30% more on test scores than students taught by peers not supported by PeerTeach.

The third K12 company we invested in is a stealth startup focused on neurodivergent students.

We also backed a company focused on making student debt more affordable.

Eduvanz. Eduvanz is enabling learners in India to build their careers more effectively by revolutionizing access to vocational education through affordable finance. With its innovative approach, Eduvanz is able to secure meaningful price concessions from colleges and training programs, making education more accessible and affordable for all learners. The company’s sophisticated data analysis enables swift loan decisions for borrowers with no credit history, and its dedicated philanthropic capital pool provides tuition for the socially and financially underprivileged. With its focus on student outcomes and institutional value-add, Eduvanz is becoming a leading voice in the education sector, working to hold colleges accountable and help improve student success. Rethink led a B round extension, which is unusual for us, but we were already honorary insiders because Andre Bennin had previously invested in Eduvanz from another fund. This is our first investment in a company headquartered in India and our first with Sequoia.

We also invested in two companies focused on upskilling front-line workers.

FN Logistics. FN Logistics is a stealth startup focused on upskilling front-line workers and unlocking opportunities for them. We are helping to incubate FN Logistics with our long-time friends Paul Freedman, former senior Guild executive and co-founder and CEO of our portfolio company Entangled Ventures, and Kate Finnefrock, who worked for Guild and Entangled and also, a long time ago, for Amplify Education.

Pathstream. Pathstream trains front-line workers and students to use no-code tech platforms to get attractive jobs at salaries that are on average $17,000, or 35%, higher. Pathstream’s offerings include Tableau for financial analysis, Asana for project management, the Meta advertising platforms for digital marketing, and Salesforce for sales administration. Pathstream also addresses a hard challenge that we are very interested in solving: helping deskless workers figure out which pathway is right for them. Pathstream customers include Walmart and Amazon. We just led a massively oversubscribed A round extension at Pathstream. Pathstream is an existing portfolio company; we initially invested in their initial seed round.

These companies are run by diverse teams. One of these companies, Peerteach, is part of our Rethink Equity carve-out for BIPOC founders, and three of the six have female CEOs. Over half of the total capital invested in this four-month period went to the three companies run by women.

Being able to invest in these six amazing companies is immensely gratifying to all of us on the Rethink Education team. We have never had a stronger belief in the power of innovation to unlock the full human potential of people who have been marginalized or underserved. We are acting out of deep compassion and deep outrage and a sense of urgency sharpened by the pandemic and by the pushback against social justice and equity around the globe.

Q4 Investment Strategy was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A look at the problem and potential solutions

Amanda Beaudoin

You are an elementary school student. You squeeze into your desk in an overcrowded classroom while an adult you have never seen before stands in front of your class — yet another substitute teacher filling in since your teacher left last month.

You are a teacher. You just recovered from your second case of COVID-19 and you can’t wait to see your partner and child again. You dread going back into the classroom, exposing your family to more COVID risk and exposing yourself to the unrelenting stress. You try your best to provide education, mental health support, and a safe space for your students, but it’s getting increasingly difficult and your relationship with your family is strained.

You are a school leader. You are losing teachers at record rates and seeing fewer prospective educators vying for job openings. You have been dealing with teacher shortages in certain subjects for years, but now the issue feels larger and more urgent, and you see the effects on your students.

We are dealing with a teacher shortage. While this concept is not new (there were 100k teacher vacancies in 2018), the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated recruitment and retention issues in education, adding 280k additional vacancies. The pandemic added numerous stressors to the teaching job, from a rapid transition to remote teaching, to health and safety concerns, to student learning loss and mental health difficulties, to escalated pressure from parents sometimes even culminating in physical harm over controversial issues like the mask mandate.

Since the nineteenth century, teacher shortages have loomed to varying degrees. Historically, schools have looked to fill gaps with substitute teachers, increasing the student to teacher ratio, relying on remaining teachers to take on more work, and granting temporary relief from certification requirements in times of particular need. These short-term solutions may have helped ease pressures in the moment, but they have implications for quality of instruction and have left the profession vulnerable to major events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the 1960s and 70s, teacher shortages were eased by the availability of qualified women who had few other middle-class career options. Teaching’s history as a “women’s profession” shaped the reputation of the field in ways that can still be felt to this day. As women were still expected to be the caregiver to their families and homes, relying on a husband to be the primary breadwinner, teaching did not need to offer career progression opportunities or high pay and was not as valued and respected as many other professions requiring a college education. While some of the job dynamics changed when women gained access to other careers during the women’s rights movement and men entered the field — fuller workdays, slightly better working conditions — the reputational challenges of the profession and the at once high workload and low pay still remain.

As a result, teacher shortages have persisted. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage became larger and more urgent. Now, nearly half of public schools across all 50 states report teaching vacancies, up from 30% pre-pandemic and over half of educators are thinking of leaving the profession earlier than they had planned. The vacancies include educators across ages, years in the profession, and roles within schools. Made worse, a disproportionate percent of Black (62%) and Latinx (59%) educators are looking to leave, a population already underrepresented in the field. Today’s shortages create a vicious circle; according to a National Education Association survey, 80% of educators report that unfilled job openings have led to more work obligations for the educators who remain and 90% of educators say they are experiencing burnout, perpetuating a cycle of overwhelm and attrition. Not only are teachers leaving and thinking of leaving in record numbers, but enrollment in education preparation programs at both the undergraduate and graduate level are declining.

This problem is costly — filling a teacher vacancy costs $21k on average — and leads to learning loss for students with more severe challenges for those in higher poverty schools, according to a study done by the Economic Policy Institute.

Why are teachers leaving? A key thread throughout my research and conversations was that even the teachers leaving the profession love their students. They are passionate about helping young people. However, many of these teachers either do not feel like they can do that as an educator within the public education system and / or they do not feel like they can sustain the personal and professional sacrifices required to do so. The four main reasons I gathered that are driving teachers from the profession and limiting the aspiring teachers are:

While these factors, particularly burnout and lack of support, have been exacerbated by the pandemic stressors, they have persisted for years, are deeply engrained in the US public education system, and largely stem from the field’s historical context. These drivers of teacher turnover have also suppressed interest in entering the profession. The low pay, the emotional difficulty of the job, and the heavy workload make it harder for aspiring teachers to justify the time and financial burden required to become a teacher.

(1) Low pay

Teachers mut incur substantial and often unmanageable costs to complete the higher-ed requirements to become a certified teacher. Almost half of all educators took out student loans to pay for college and still owe an average of $58,700. The student loan burden is worse for Black teachers, with 56% taking out student loans and 20% still owing more than $105,000. Teaching salaries have not kept up with the costs to become a teacher — they have been largely stagnant over time and are on average ~24% lower than the compensation of other college-educated workers. One teacher I spoke with is a first-generation American and did not see a path to building generational wealth for her family if she stayed in education (she is off to be a software engineer after completing a coding bootcamp). Other teachers cited the marriage of wages to school enrollment as limiting wage growth and causing too much uncertainty for them and their families. The pay issue is urgent: many educators emphasized difficulty paying for food, credit card balances, rent or mortgage payments, and medical expenses during the pandemic.

(2) Limited career progression

In many career fields, especially those that require higher education, there are clear opportunities for career mobility. These promotion paths involve additional pay and additional responsibilities, allowing employees to grow and learn and be recognized for their work. In education, the career progression opportunities for good teachers are limited and come with different skill sets than teaching does and / or require additional credentialing requirements, as administrator positions do.

Due to the limitations of official leadership roles, some teachers I spoke with looked for growth opportunities that they could pursue while maintaining their classroom teaching roles: working in instructional design, coaching new teachers, leading the school’s data and curriculum efforts, and working to identify learning interventions needed. While these roles allowed the teachers to learn and develop in their careers in the ways they were hoping, they were expected to maintain an ample teaching schedule, creating an unsustainable workload, and were not compensated adequately for the additional time commitment.

(3) Burnout

Teachers cite a variety of factors contributing to burnout, including growing workloads, long hours, and high stress heightened by the collective trauma of the pandemic forcing teachers to take on roles beyond their subject matter without added supports. The difficulty of building connections with students remotely has added to the stressors on teachers as well.

Another factor that has recently added to workload and burnout is the increase in the number of students that need intensive interventions. As many as 40% of students now require Tier 2 or 3 interventions versus 13–20% prior to the pandemic. These interventions require specialized teacher time, training, and resources to implement.

Given the heightened workloads from teachers leaving, illness, pandemic protocols, and increased interventions, teachers are being asked to do more than ever. One teacher I spoke with emphasized the need in this environment to prioritize quantity of work over quality, a tradeoff that took a toll on her mental health, constantly feeling like a failure.

Many teachers emphasized the gravity of the decision they made to leave teaching, phrasing it as less of a decision and more of a necessity after living in a state of perpetual stress with limited personal time and a strain on family and friends.

(4) Lack of supports

Input from parents on curriculum, teaching style, and health & safety protocols has increased in the past year, from resistance to mask mandates to opposition to “critical race theory,” a nebulous concept that sometimes seems to involve anything that mentions race at all. Education is a unique career field in that everyone has the experience of being a student in the education system, and as a result, individuals often feel empowered to voice their opinions on what teachers should be doing and how they should be doing it. This can be draining for teachers and can make them feel as if their voices and expertise don’t matter. School leadership can play a large role in empowering teachers and making them feel professional and valued. Many of the teachers I spoke with struggled with a lack of support from school leaders, citing actions misaligned with the teacher’s viewpoints, a disregard for the teachers’ strengths, and a lack of closeness with the students and their needs. Teachers want and need to be included in the leadership conversations and given support systems even before they begin teaching. Teaching should be a team sport but can often feel isolating to the detriment of both teachers and students.

Now let’s talk solutions.

While as a venture capitalist I would love to tell you that technology can solve all of these problems, it is impossible to ignore how multifaceted and complex this issue is, much of it stemming from practices deeply ingrained in a system historically resistant to change. Policy change is needed if we ever want to stop losing teachers. However, there is room for tech innovation to challenge the way we train teachers and educate students. We need to lower the time and financial barriers to becoming a teacher without sacrificing quality, make teaching a more sustainable career, and increase interest in the profession. While I don’t think tech can achieve these goals alone, I do think it can help.

Lower Unnecessary Barriers to Becoming a Teacher

The financial and time costs of becoming a teacher followed by insufficient pay, make teaching an unsustainable or unrealistic career for many. In preparing students for the profession, quality and efficiency of the preparation are highly important.

Solution 1: Earn While You Learn. Instead of requiring aspiring teachers to delay income and take on debt to pursue a college degree, we should be training teachers on the job. Teaching experience is associated with student achievement gains, yet traditional educator preparation programs (EPPs) rely heavily on coursework with limited classroom hours as part of the training. An apprenticeship-style program consisting of on the job training coupled with essential coursework on nights and weekends instead of a traditional college degree can allow aspiring teachers to earn while learning, to avoid student loans, and to enter the teaching profession with more classroom experience than through traditional pathways. Schools can leverage trainees as teaching assistants, providing extra classroom support for certified teachers while building a pipeline of workers.

Example: Craft Education System is facilitating this type of teacher apprenticeship program through its data platform which automates the process to apply for government funding, like WIOA funds, for teaching apprenticeship programs. Craft’s tech platform eases the burden on schools of implementing registered apprenticeship programs, and provides the incentive of access to funding. Craft’s data is also valuable in understanding the gaps and shortage areas within districts and states to better target solutions to the teacher shortage.

Solution 2: Ease Certificate Reciprocity. State-by-state teacher certification requirements create a barrier for teachers to work in multiple states in their careers. Teachers must apply for a teaching license when moving to a new state or request reciprocity, a resource burden on teachers. If teachers could move more freely between states, they could fill key gaps in the country and find the best fit program for them and their families.

Example: GlobalEd is working to create a universal, accredited certification system to allow learners’ credits to transfer with ease.

Solution 3: Illuminate Pathways to Teaching. Too often, high schoolers graduate without a clear sense of the career pathways available to them to achieve their goals. We need a system to help aspiring teachers understand and weigh their pathway options; receive custom recommendations based on interests, skills, location, finances, etc.; see what credits can transfer; and access financial aid. Too often, teaching careers are left out of the career exploration conversation.

Make Teaching a More Sustainable Profession

Increasing the number of people entering the teaching profession is important, but we will face a teacher shortage forever if teachers don’t stay in the field. Increasing the quality of life for teachers will not only help with retention, but also recruitment. In order to do that, we need to change the shape of education, challenging the notion that teaching must be done in a physical classroom with one teacher in front of many students.

Solution 1: Offer Tutoring in Schools. Tutoring has historically been accessible only by the wealthy few, with sessions ranging from $25–80+ per hour. Recently, there has been an influx of K-12 public school and district funding going towards tutoring with startup companies launching technology-based solutions to bring tutoring to the masses through K-12 schools, increasing the ways students can receive instruction.

The key question when evaluating tutoring options is efficacy. Tutoring is fantastic because it is proven to be effective when delivered in high doses. If you spend time in K-12 education, you are probably hearing the phrase “high-dosage tutoring” quite often. In edtech investing, “high-dosage tutoring” has become the new “AI.” Most tutoring companies say they are implementing high-dosage tutoring, but not all have incentives in place to ensure the student attendance and session frequency needed for success. An article from The Hechinger Report reveals attendance is often low; apparently sessions during the school day perform best. To successfully increase learning outcomes, investors and educators alike must prioritize efficacy and ease of implementation and integration into the school day when selecting a tutoring platform.

Examples: BookNook, BrainTrust, Cignition, Littera, Tutored by Teachers

Solution 2: Outsourcing Courses. Schools unable to fill teaching positions in certain subject areas or looking to provide more elective courses for students can turn to edtech for help. A few companies like Stepmojo are offering full-service, online courses complete with curriculum, certified-teachers, and data collection. While these platforms may not directly help retain in-school teachers, they allow students to continue to access rigorous courses and quality teachers. In addition, they offer teachers the opportunity to take on a flexible teaching role from their home instead of or in addition to their in-school careers.

Solution 3: Learning Outside the Classroom. In challenging the idea that teaching requires a classroom, we open up the possible methods and formats for students to learn. While spending the day in a classroom with an adult is an important component of education for younger students, it may not be necessary for high-schoolers. By the time students look to make decisions about their careers, they often have not spent time with or learned from industry professionals in industries outside of teaching and have limited views of what careers are possible, how to achieve them, and what they entail. Spending a portion of the high school day in a company and learning about the career field in an apprenticeship-type model could accelerate learning and help students make informed career decisions. While this may be difficult to implement, a technology platform, like Spark Mindset for cybersecurity, could help by matching students to open apprenticeship opportunities and coordinating with schools for scheduling, student data, and feedback. A simpler way to expose students to careers could involve inviting industry professionals to present to students, freeing up teachers’ time for an occasional class period and providing students with new perspectives.

Solution 4: Learning Through Community Engagement. Similar to the apprenticeship model, community engagement not only improves student outcomes but allows them to learn outside the traditional classroom environment. Local Civics, for example, offers an online civics education and learning platform for schools. Teachers can assign students activities in their local communities that create valuable real-world learning opportunities.

Increase Interest in Teaching

While improving teacher quality of life and easing the pathways to the career are essential to increase interest in the profession, increasing awareness of teaching as a career option and improving the public reputation of the career are important pieces of the puzzle to expand the pool of professionals entering the teaching workforce.

Solution 1: High-School Exposure to Teaching Careers. Students see teachers in action throughout their education journeys and likely make some assumptions about what a teaching career looks like. However, there are few opportunities for middle and high schoolers to truly explore what a career as a teacher entails. A tech-based matching platform to place high schoolers or recent graduates in local schools that are looking for part-time teaching assistants could help provide students with teaching assistant and shadowing opportunities that are mutually beneficial to the student and the school. As this may exclude students who could be talented teachers but have not considered it as a career option, I would like to see a CTE platform work to identify student skills through student activities and teacher comments to help students understand if teaching is right for them (a team captain or activity leader may be a great teacher, for example). I’d also like to see technology used to to translate a high schooler’s work experience in teaching (and other fields) into college credits to reduce the burden of teacher training.

Solution 2: Building Community Among Teachers. Teaching can often feel like a solitary career. Teachers need a community of current and aspiring teachers to ask and answer questions, mentor each other, discuss challenges and wins, and learn more about how to be a successful teacher. Ribbit Learning is building an online professional development platform for teachers, providing each one with a trained mentor / instructional coach, personalized PD resources, and professional learning networks made up of fellow teachers. A platform like this can help teachers feel heard and motivated. Aspiring teachers could benefit greatly from this platform as well to understand more deeply if the profession is right for them.

Solution 3: Improve Teaching’s Reputation. While exposure and awareness is a great way to create more interest in the profession, the way society as well as family and friends view the profession will have an impact on students’ interest in teaching. While a collective attitude change takes time, awareness of both the challenges of being a teacher and the expertise it takes to do well in the career could help increase societal respect for the profession. School leaders and edtech companies play a role as well, particularly in including teachers in important conversations. EdTech companies should be working directly with teachers on product testing and design to best serve the needs of teachers and students.

Lately, parents have been challenging teachers on their instruction content and methods. Sometimes lack of awareness can cause misunderstanding and even violence. Tech can offer parents objective insight into what their students are learning and ease that miscommunication.

At this point, I hope we can all agree that issue of teacher retention and recruitment is critical, urgent, and complex. We need systemic change to reach a long-term solution. Stakeholders from both the private and public sectors need to reframe the way we think about teacher training, classroom instruction, and teacher value. If you care about this issue or are building a solution, please reach out (abeaudoin@rethink-capital.com) — I’d love to connect.

For fear of leaving you overwhelmed by what it will take to solve this problem, I’ll leave you with some good news. Teachers care deeply about their students and will be invaluable advocates and facilitators of change even in careers beyond the traditional classroom. Now we just need to start caring more about our teachers.

I’d like to profusely thank all the people that helped me with my research. A particular shout out to Bruna Lee, Craig Jones, Katie Risbrough, Kim Smith, Kimberly Neal-Brannum, Kira Leander, Kris Schmidt, Marjorie Pim, Sandra Caballero, and Taylor Brown.

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APPENDIX: Easing the Burden on Teachers Within the Current System

While I think we need larger-scale change and innovation to put an end to teacher recruitment and retention issues, there are many edtech platforms currently available that can make teachers’ lives easier working within the current system of education. I see the teacher shortage as needing several solutions stacked on top of each other to achieve meaningful change. For evaluating companies in the categories outlined below, the keys to long-term success (both efficacy and traction) will be ease of use for teachers and efficacy.

Curriculum platforms in core and supplemental subjects provide teachers with content, lesson plans, homework and assessments, and data dashboards, simplifying the lesson planning process, saving teachers time and effort that they can spend with their students and with their families and hobbies to reduce burnout.

Supplemental classroom tools. There are several tech companies offering classroom learning tools for students that teachers can use to aid their lessons and as classroom activities. For example, one of Rethink’s portfolio companies, Amira Learning, uses natural language processing to provide feedback to students as they read aloud. This way, students can practice in small groups with Amira while the teacher can focus on helping the students most in need or spend classroom time lesson planning and thus take less work home. Many of the tools in this category similarly free up teachers’ time in class and make it easier to personalize lessons to a wide variety of levels and serve the most students.

Grading and assessing are other responsibilities that many teachers dread and that seep into personal time, often contributing to burnout. There are several tech-based tools that automate and aid feedback making it quicker and easier for teachers to give and for students to understand and learn from.

Communication tools. Teachers often spend extraneous time trying to communicate with parents and share important student information with parents and each other using email, spreadsheets, and long meetings. LMS platforms and edtech communication and classroom tools reduce the burden of information sharing and allow teachers to communicate effectively and efficiently with easily accessible online student information and simple communication channels. Not only do these tools increase the efficacy of school communication, but it also frees up time for teachers through fewer meetings and emails.

Mental Health Support. I’d be remiss to talk about reducing teacher burnout without mentioning mental health. According to a study by the RAND Corporation, 27% of teachers reported experiencing symptoms of depression during the 2020–2021 school year versus 10% of the US adult population. Stress levels are also elevated in teaching with 78% of US teachers reporting frequent job-related stress versus 40% of employed adults nationally. Without supporting teacher mental health, we cannot solve the student mental health crisis either.

Substitute Education: Substitute teachers can relieve the burden of teacher vacancies from full-time teachers. They can also be a pipeline of quality full-time teachers. There are a few tech platforms helping schools more easily manage substitute teachers. Swing Education and Ready2Teach help manage the substitute teacher process from end-to-end including matching teachers with school openings, managing payments and scheduling, etc. Another company in the space, Bench K-12, is focused on simplifying the substitute teacher credentialing process to help increase the supply.

Our Teachers Are Leaving — What Now? was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last year I wrote a blog post that discussed Rethink Education’s values, beliefs, and investment theses. Buried in the middle of that post was a sentence that I think distills our core beliefs in a helpful way. Here it is again, with slight modifications:

We believe that education at every level should combine the playfulness and joy of preschool, the intense collaborative experiments of a hackathon, and the deep self-guided exploration of a doctoral program.

I and my colleagues at Rethink Education are not alone in believing in this kind of education. Many people, starting with my friend and mentor Jennifer Carolan, responded strongly to this sentence when I published it last year. My sentence helped them describe something they already passionately believed. There are tens or hundreds of millions of people who believe in and practice this kind of learning, frequently outside of traditional schools and colleges and corporate trainings. I am following in the footsteps of giants. I recommend the work of John Seely Brown, Cathy N. Davidson, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Laura Sandefer, Sugata Mitra, Esther Wojcicki, and Clark Aldrich, to name just a few examples. Inspiring examples of this approach to education include the national education system of Finland, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, XQ Schools, Acton Academy, High Tech High, the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, Rethink Education’s own portfolio company Sora Schools, CoLearn Club, Synthesis School, the Stanford University d.school, the MIT Media Lab, Singularity University, Georgetown University’s Red House, and Big Picture Learning and College Unbound. There is a wonderful non-profit called Education Reimagined that is trying to knit together the believers into a coherent social and political movement that can pursue system change in a more deliberate way. I intend to help this movement in any way I can.

It may seem strange that a powerful and dynamic movement with tens of millions of practitioners doesn’t have a name. But there is no single phrase that points clearly and unambiguously to the kind of learning I described above. Some people call it “student-centered learning.” But that phrase is bland and a little ambiguous: some people use the phrase to describe approaches that are student-centered in only a trivial sense. “Progressive education” is a widely-used term, but one that has perhaps curdled and passed its sell-by date.

I am still looking for a simple, resonant name for the kind of education I believe in. The best ones I have thought of so far are “joyful education,” “imagination-nurturing education,” and “curiosity-driven learning.” But I have the nagging sense that a better name is just around the corner. I welcome other suggestions; please email or DM me. For now, I think “joyful education” is probably in the lead just because of its brevity and clarity. After I coined the phrase in a discussion with Kelly Young, president of Education Reimagined, I discovered that Laura Sandefer previously used the phrase in her inspiring 2017 book Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down.

Many people are suspicious of joyful education. I recently had a conversation with someone who made major contributions to the U.S. charter school movement, and he firmly dismissed my explanation of how I thought our education system needed to change. Education, he explained, could not be all dessert. Students also needed to eat a large amount of broccoli.

I happen to be the parent of a picky eater, and I can attest that not all children can be fed broccoli. As Mark Twain said, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” Forcing children to do things they hate is not right, and it is also not practical or sustainable.

Force-feeding children educational broccoli yields mixed results. Many students revolt or lose confidence, particularly those who are victims of deprivation, bias, and violence. All human beings are engineered to be voracious learners, but many of us end up hating and fearing school. And even the most avid broccoli eaters may have their own problems. Anyone who graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has eaten a large amount of broccoli, has shown a huge appetite for broccoli. And MIT graduates are unquestionably talented and impressive people. So it is sobering to watch the famous video of multiple MIT graduates being given a battery, some light bulbs, and a wire and asked whether they can make a bulb light up. The video was obviously edited selectively and may be unfair in other ways, but it nonetheless hints at a massive failure of elite education. Now think about all of the students who become depressed or even suicidal because they are terrified that they won’t be accepted by universities like MIT.

What could STEM education look like without the force-feeding of broccoli? A decade ago I visited the original Acton Academy location in Austin, at a time when all of their students were twelve or younger. Those students had developed a shockingly strong understanding of science. At Acton, teachers are prohibited from ever answering a question with a declarative statement. Teachers can only coach, nudge, and ask questions. Acton’s curious, playful primary-school students had designed a series of experiments to understand the flow of electricity and how it resembled and differed from the flow of water. I am confident that any randomly-selected ten-year-old from Acton would have succeeded instantly where at least some MIT graduates failed. Joyful education works. Students who learn joyfully and curiously and experimentally and autonomously develop a deeper understanding of science and everything else. If you want sustained, profound, original thinking, you cannot force-feed students broccoli.

There are sparks of joyful education everywhere in education systems and platforms around the globe, but however heroic the efforts of individual teachers and administrators and developers, the norm is still joyless. What are the alternative spaces where learning is joyful and autonomous? How do we transform existing systems and platforms?

There are books that tell a series of beautiful anecdotes about joyful education but do not offer a set of practical steps for large-scale system change. System change is a daunting challenge, a wicked problem. Where do we start?

I will avoid giving a utopian, paralyzingly elaborate prescription that cannot be implemented.

There are two simple steps we can take. First, within schools and colleges, we can stop using letter grades, which create entirely the wrong kind of incentive and which are ultimately useless even for filtering students for elite colleges and employers. We can replace grades with portfolios and lists of competencies. We need to shift institutional focus away from summative assessment and toward formative feedback, experimentation, and exploration.

Second, creators of new tools and services for learning can focus on collaboration. Not all collaborative platforms are effective, but we should approach with caution any platform that does not foster collaboration.

Education tools need to integrate with the platforms people use to work and learn and play and maintain human connections. People learn where they communicate. The crucial learning platforms of our time include GitHub, Discord, Slack and Teams, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Zoom, Twitter, Figma, Facebook, Wikipedia, Roblox, WeChat, Fortnite, Snap, 4Chan (alas), Pinterest, gaming console software, TikTok, Toutiao, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Salesforce, Facebook, DropBox, and Google Workspace, to name just a few. Web3 offers some fascinating new possibilities for the creation of new kinds of learning community. As these web3 communities emerge, it is interesting to see how dependent many of them are on Discord.

On all of these established platforms as well as on the new ones yet to be built, the challenge is to build healthy, compassionate, equitable communities. Many of these social communication platforms are predatory and divisive, geared to amplify or even create envy, insecurity, bias, fear, and hatred. Others are designed to serve the needs of institutions rather than the humans who inhabit or interact with those institutions.

Learners can only truly thrive and grow within a community or collective space that they trust. Learners need to feel accepted, protected, and even cherished. If they don’t feel safe, they won’t experiment or build or speak the truth about their own experiences. Stress inhibits not just bold exploration but even rote learning. It is completely crazy to subject students to processes designed to intensify their stress and self-doubt.

One way to think about the next generation of education platforms is that they need to create a space of safety within a hostile, attention-fragmenting, anxiety-generating environment. Education tools, platforms, services, and institutions need to function as an antidote to the rest of the world. Perhaps every learning activity ought to start with a ritual of detoxification, a ceremony of caring and trust.

Communities of Trust and Care: Education in 2022 and Beyond was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Case for Human Skills:

In June 2020 Chief Empathy Officer became a popular buzzword in news headlines. In the face of a series of difficult and uncharted moments in history — COVID, Black Lives Matter, etc. — top CEOs, like Tim Cook, redefined their leadership roles, communicating the change world leaders need to adopt to face this unprecedented time.¹This singular moment is the product of a longer-term trend: there is a shift in the need for human skills. Despite this, our education system and labor markets emphasize credentials from colleges that do not necessarily teach and recognize these skills. For now, most of these human skills are learned outside of formal schooling.

Human skills, also often called soft skills or 21st century skills, can be defined as durable skills that help citizens and employees participate, contribute and succeed in their communities and in any job vocation. Empathy is one of them. As highlighted earlier, the ability to emotionally understand others has become imperative to engage in the changing dynamics of the global market. Others include critical thinking, perspective-taking, having a growth mindset, emotional intelligence, etc. As we pursue political parity in our democracy, increasing leadership diversity, and deeper collaboration in our workplaces, and develop strategies to handle an increasing pace of innovation and a growing gap in education inequality, human skills have become increasingly critical.

Much literature has argued the benefits and the need for human skills. Numerous pieces of academic literature tie critical thinking and higher-order thinking to citizenship competence, a fundamental element for successful democracies.² In the workplace, employers seek non-automatable, enduring human capabilities such as agility that can continuously create value from technological advancements replacing technical tasks and the rapidly evolving market needs.³ Additionally, it has been shown that employees acquire more proactive attitudes, better work engagement, and increased receptiveness to transformational leadership when they have growth mindsets.⁴ Finally, some human skills are linked to improvements in academic motivation and performance in students.⁵ A kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored 95th percentile on the national achievement test one year after incorporating growth mindset practices in the classroom.6 Similarly, an academically struggling class of fourth-grade students in the South Bronx scored the highest grades in the state of New York on the state math test one year after applying the same approach.⁶

Educational institutions are still in the process of implementing human skill development in their current infrastructure, curriculums, and teaching methods. The human skill gap is real. Integrating it into our educational system can democratize it, creating a fair opportunity for everyone to learn these skills. Teaching human skills will require a transformation of our current educational system, though. ed-tech tools can help us achieve this change.

Rethink Education’s Market POV:

We categorize human skills into 3 key categories. Self-development skills help learners better manage their professional and personal growth. Second are thinking skills, those involving mental processes to absorb and make meaning of information. Finally, interpersonal skills are the social skills needed to interact and communicate with others (see exhibit below).

Based on secondary research and the industry experts we talked to, the most sought after and critical human skills are:

1. Agile learning / Growth Mindset
2. Critical Thinking
3. Emotional Intelligence
4. Empathy
5. Curiosity

Despite varying opinions, there is a larger consensus among experts that developing these skills is most critical before adulthood years. The earlier you teach human skills the better equipped people are to be natural lifelong learners, the more time they have to practice and develop their overall skill portfolio, both in and outside formal schooling.⁷ One way we can teach human skills is to increase the general awareness and knowledge of human skills. Still, experience and practice in the right contexts and with human interaction are at the core of learning human skills.⁶ Human skills eventually become a by-product of continual, accumulated experiences and interventions that train us to exercise the right human skills in the right moments. Consider a waiter whose name is Jane. Jane has completed high school and has been a waiter for the last 2 years. During high school, Jane learned about growth mindset, empathy, and critical thinking. She was encouraged by her teachers to exercise these skills whenever she faced challenging problems and interacted with her classmates. Imagine how these learnings could influence Jane in her current job; she has more potential to be empathetic and better manage difficult customers, carry a positive attitude towards challenging situations, viewing them as growth opportunities vs. failures, and think more critically about political conversations she’s overheard her customers have. Every time she practices these skills she continues to sharpen them. By acquiring an early foundation for these skills, Jane can build on them every day, making her a lifelong learner. She can then carry those human skills with her as she rises into a managerial or professional job.

The larger question to consider is not when it is most optimal for a learner to learn human skills, but when it is most practical and realistic to teach them considering current educational systems. The ed-tech startup space is overcrowded with players offering different solutions that teach human skills from early childhood to employee education. Some of these solutions are not primarily learning solutions but are tools that engage users in ways that breed habits fostering human skills. For instance, Cultivate is a culture development platform helping managers adopt leadership qualities in their communication with employees. It is not an education focused solution, but by using it managers are inherently refining their interpersonal skills. All in all, we can categorize the solutions in the market under 7 buckets (see exhibit below):

Pain Points and Areas of Opportunity:

I. Effectively teaching human skills requires many conditions:

Condition 1: The Right Culture

Unlike learning hard skills, learning human skills requires many systemic and environmental pre-conditions. First, the culture, mindset, and norms around the ways we teach human skills are crucial. Studies have shown that student trust in the instructor and peer norms are critical contributors to an active learning environment.⁸ Similarly, in the corporate field experts have emphasized the importance of creating a sense of safety for employees to practice and experiment their human skills.

Opportunity: We see an opportunity for VR solutions to close this gap by creating controlled environments that stimulate the right learning conditions for human skills. A recent study by PWC showed that employees felt 40% more confident about applying soft skills they learned through a VR experience compared to other forms of delivery because VR created a safe environment for them to learn and practice these skills.⁹ Another experiment done by Stanford researchers found that participants who undergone VR simulation experienced higher and sustained levels of empathy towards homelessness as compared to participants who undertook other forms of empathy education.¹⁰ Mursion is a great example of a startup that curates 2D and 3D VR simulations to teach different types of soft skills relevant to different industries. Another is Praxis Labs, which uses VR to create simulations that increase empathy in the workplace to support DEI initiatives.

Condition 2: Continuous and Contextual Learning

Another limitation, which we find in many of the solutions in the market, is the isolative nature of teaching human skills. Compartmentalizing the human skill learning experience as one-off instances that are not contextualized does not capture its full value. Having one travel experience, one project-based assignment or one class discussing empathy that exposes students to interpersonal skills does not instill long-lasting transferable learning in them. Instead, teaching human skills must become a routine practice embedded in the day-to-day learning process just as teaching math needs to be a repeated practice for students to grasp it.

Opportunity: Habit development apps such as wixklub can be useful here as they create a 10-minute daily drill routine in their app-based programs for students to practice different thinking skills: e.g., critical thinking, creativity, etc.

Other than making it a recurring practice, students learn human skills most effectively while they practice them, rather than learning them solely conceptually. For instance, students may be able to understand creativity as a theoretical concept, but they may not be able to put such conceptual understanding into practice. However, if you teach the idea of creativity and creative strategies while developing a project, for example in an art class, an “aha” moment can be created for the students. Alternatively, the recurring practice of creative thinking in an art classroom, without recognizing it as they practice it, allows for creativity to become tacit knowledge, intuitive wisdom that will unconsciously shape actions in the future.

Opportunity: An interesting solution here can be an idea similar to Local Civics. Local Civics is reinventing civics education by providing educators and students a platform that gives students opportunities to participate in civic engagement as compared to learning standard curriculums. Students get to learn about civics while practicing activities that expose them to community service and outreach, and civic discussions that train their debating, active listening, and perspective-taking skills in a relevant context, politics.

Condition 3: Leader & Educator Buy-in

Corporate and school leaders, teachers, and faculty members have a lot of power in shaping the right learning culture, applying the right teaching methodologies, and foreseeing opportunities to contextualize human skills. Finally, educators are a consistent part of a student’s learning journey giving them the ability to continually intervene and make human skill development a repetitive learning process. Without their buy-in, rolling out human skill programs can become fruitless. However, educators and employees are already overworked with the increasing demands and pressures of the current schooling system and the job market. The same is true for students.

Opportunity: Hence, the best solutions are the ones that find a way to integrate, and not add, human skill development into the current educational curriculum or work processes. Gong is a great example highlighted later in the article that tracks and manages soft skills as employees do their job, without requiring significant time to be carved out for it. Another critical element to seek in solutions is whether it considers the change management programs needed to motivate and train educators and business leaders in building the right culture that encourages human skill development.

II. Measuring human skills and their impact:

One thing we noticed during our interviews is the lack of a common language or terminologies used to refer to human skills. Educational institutions tend to emphasize words such as SEL, resilience, or perseverance, while corporate language usually revolves around agility, soft skills, and growth mindset, words that are usually used as an umbrella terminology for various human skills.

Building a common language, approach or metric system that can measure skill progression and impact can open doors to exchange knowledge and create a shared ecosystem to extend the value of these skills and increase the willingness to pay for human skill solutions. We already see an appetite to invest in solutions that build human skills. This March President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), 20% ($22B) of which is dedicated to addressing student’s wellbeing and social and emotional learning (SEL). Companies, managers, and business schools are spending over $24B on management training services. Still, the ability to scale, manage and make informed decisions that yield better outcomes is hindered as long as we don’t have a way to measure these skills and their impact. Such generous funding can easily be allocated to traditional ways schools have addressed SEL, e.g., increasing the number of counselors and social workers, instead of revamping curriculums and classroom facilitation in ways that challenge students to apply human skills daily.

Why is it hard to measure human skills?
Measurement of human skills is hard for many reasons.

1. Unlike technical skills, human skills cannot be assessed through a standardized test. Setting a standard definition for good communication skills becomes impossible when it can vary by culture, organization, and role.

2. The human element is critical, both from an outside-in and self-perception angle. Even if peers assess that an employee has strong negotiation skills, unless the employee believes in this assessment they will not use these skills.

3. Human skills are dynamic and life-stage dependent. The human skills you need today may not be the same skills you need in your next role. Setting and tracking human skill goals is a personalized process that should align with your current vocation and needs to be continuously revised and updated.

What are some current measurement approaches and their limitations?
There are already various skills mapping solutions in the market applying different measurement frameworks. Some rely on self-reporting tools, others on frequency-based metrics, elaborate role-based rubrics that define exceptional, average vs. unacceptable performances, or feedback loops that collect team input through 360-degree surveys, etc. However, these solutions have not been scientifically proven to enhance human skills in the long run, nor have they been tied to an overall better job or academic performance, or human well-being and competence. They also heavily rely on human bias and lack a common taxonomy that can be used across organizations, meaning that students nor employees can use them as credentials to support their career progression. Finally, these solutions only measure human skills in a formal learning context while a lot of human skills are acquired outside such settings. A stay-at-home mother may have accumulated more human skills than a white-collar employee with 15 years of experience; however, as of today, we have no way to measure and formally recognize her human skills that can help her find a job. Similarly, Jane, the waiter we’ve mentioned earlier in this article, has no way to formally credit the human skills she developed as a waiter, a priceless advantage that can help her progress in her career.

Opportunity: An interesting solution we have come across is a revenue intelligence platform specifically used for sales teams. It assesses soft skills based on hard data collected from employee video and phone calls, emails, and messages, naturally embedding itself in the day-to-day of sales teams. They use this data to support employee development by creating personalized coaching programs and highlighting preventive measures to avoid trouble spots in employee interactions. They also couple customer feedback to their data, adding a human element to the overall assessment. What is specifically great about Gong is its ability to build a customer network of 2,000+ companies creating a common standardized system for organizations to approach human skill measurement in the context of sales teams. Moreover, this network effect reinforces a continuous learning cycle for Gong to perfect its AI skill assessment algorithm as its database continues to grow with its growing customer base. The Gong model is not a conventional ed-tech solution, but it can inspire other human skill measurement solutions that can be applied to different contexts to create a similar network effect.

III. Limited Scalability:

As shown in the market landscape exhibit, the market is filled with many players providing diverse solutions, but none of these solutions have proven to be scalable. This is natural considering that human skills, or human behavior, vary contextually and need to be personalized to each learner’s journey and environment. For example, RADical Hope Foundation launched RADical Health, a program to support students develop skills around relationship-building, resilience, time management, etc., and has recently launched a pilot at NYU. In general, such programs can be difficult to scale to the wider university community since it requires adaptation to speak to the different communities in a school. The program needs to be adapted to the athletes, art students, and medical students for it to be relevant to each of them. These scale barriers exist within the context of one university. Imagine the customization needed when we start considering different countries, cultures, and organizations. What may seem to be effective communication skills in one culture may be perceived as rude elsewhere. When failure is celebrated in one organization and rejected in another there will be a need to tailor the way growth mindset and learning agility practices are introduced in each organization respectively.”

Even if a one size fits all solution cannot exist there surely can be a way to extrapolate the value that these micro-solutions offer by connecting them and letting them speak to each other. For instance, you can make a project-based learning experience much more informative if it is mapped to a skills mapping tool that prompts students to intentionally set human skills goals and track them throughout their learning experience. This skills mapping tool can inform educational institutions and teachers about the students’ human skill gaps and help them curate content and exercises to tackle them. On an even larger scale, educational institutions, governments, and employers can share such data to align agendas. By integrating micro solutions we can create a scalable impact.

Opportunity: Perhaps there are a few ways we can integrate these solutions.

1. Larger data or HR management systems, such as Workday or Lattice, can start partnering with ed-tech human skills solutions. This can build a more centralized and holistic platform that can be adapted by an organization or educational institution while also giving room for data to be exchanged across them.

2. Another way is through APIs that connect different apps or solutions used within an organization, increasing the sum of its parts. A good place to integrate and centralize human skill solutions is in the software we naturally use in the day-to-day. For instance, adding a habit formation app such as Life Intelligence into Zoom or Teams can trigger employees to check in and practice a human skill such as empathy before a meeting start, normalizing the empathy practice.

3. Finally, there are already integrated software systems that offer educational institutions a larger suite of human skills solutions. For instance, The Indigo Education Company provides schools with a suite system that includes standard content of human skills, train the trainer material, and skill mapping tools.

All in all, ed-tech investors, VCs, and portfolio companies are well-positioned to lead this form of integration and tap into the new value that can come across solutions.

Human skills do so much to shape our professional, political, social, and private lives. Their tremendous and all-time relevancy makes us confident that the need for them is here to stay and will continue to be a growing priority for most political, business, and educational leaders. We hope that we can find and integrate tools that place human skills development at the front center of a person’s everyday life.

There is so much room for us to learn about human skills. We would like to continue having conversations and discussions around ways we can create new opportunities to support democratizing human skills in and outside formal educational settings.

If you are a founder building something around human skills, drop us a line!

If you are an L&D leader, educational leader, or researcher involved in human skills development and interested in engaging in these conversations or exploring innovative tools, please reach out! Email: s.will9001@gmail.com and epope@rteducation.com

References:

[1] Gallo, Carmine. “Tim Cook And Other CEOs Take On Role Of ‘Chief Empathy Officer’ In Response To George
Floyd Protests.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 3 June 2020 (link).

[2] Mark Weinstein (1991) Critical Thinking and Education for Democracy, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 23:2, 9–29, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469–5812.1991.tb00129.x

Glaser, Edward M. “Critical Thinking: Educating for Responsible Citizenship in a Democracy National Forum, 65.” National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal, vol. 65, 1985, pp. 24–27.

S. Miedema, W. Wardekker “Emergent identity versus consistent identity” S.T. Popkewitz, L. Fendler (Eds.), Critical theories in education, Routledge, New York (1999), pp. 67–83

Geert T. M. Ten Dam & Monique L. L. Volman (2003) A Life Jacket or an Art of Living: Inequality in Social Competence Education, Curriculum Inquiry, 33:2, 117–137, DOI: 10.1111/1467–873X.00254

[3] “Skills Change, but Capabilities Endure.” Deloitte Insights, 2019, (link)

[4] Caniëls, Marjolein C.J., et al. “Mind the Mindset! The Interaction of Proactive Personality, Transformational Leadership and Growth Mindset for Engagement at Work.” Career Development International, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 48–66., doi:10.1108/cdi-11–2016–0194. (link)

[5] Cavanagh, Andrew J., et al. “Trust, Growth Mindset, and Student Commitment to Active Learning in a College Science Course.” CBE-Life Sciences Education, 22 Mar. 2018,(link)

Young, Jeffrey R. “New Study Shows Where ‘Growth Mindset’ Training Works (And Where It Doesn’t) — EdSurge News.” EdSurge, EdSurge, 8 Aug. 2019, (link)

[6] “The Power of Believing That You Can Improve.’” Performance by Carol Dweck, TED, 2014, (link)

[7] Workshop Report: Human Skills: From Conversations to Convergence. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020

[8] Cavanagh, Andrew J., et al. “Trust, Growth Mindset, and Student Commitment to Active Learning in a College Science Course.” CBE — Life Sciences Education, vol. 17, no. 1, 2018, doi:10.1187/cbe.17–06–0107.

Yeager, D.S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G.M. et al. A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature 573, 364–369 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y

[9] PricewaterhouseCoopers. “How Virtual Reality Is Redefining Soft Skills Training.” PwC, 2020, (link)

[10] Shashkevich , Alex. “Virtual Reality Can Help Make People More Empathetic.” Stanford University, 15 Oct. 2018, (link).

How Can We Close the Human Skill Gap? was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is Part 2 of our deep dive into talent mobility solutions for frontline workers. In Part 1, my colleague Joanne defined the frontline workforce and provided a landscape analysis for tech solutions to support their advancement. In this piece, I’ll synthesize the insights from a roundtable we convened including L&D, HR & DEI enterprise leaders as well as our portfolio companies who serve these workers.

The roundtable started as you’d expect. Participants shared statistics and facts on what the data has revealed to be the shortcomings of solutions in the market while others provided anecdotal experiences of initiatives they have tested to support this workforce. However, the most unique perspective was that of Rodney Ellison. Rodney started his career at Kohler as a gym attendant at Sports Core, the company’s fitness club, upskilled to become a personal trainer, reskilled to work in the ranks of corporate security, made the leap to become a customer service agent, and is now a learning and development specialist at the company.

When asked about the catalyst to his success, he didn’t quote training programs or formal support, but that you have to “Give A Damn” to do it. As I listened to his story, I learned that his secret sauce lies in his charisma, curiosity and expectation that he would receive no assistance at all. Since there was no formal career path from fitness to corporate roles, his career exploration was limited only to the constraints of his imagination. He built relationships in the organization working across roles. He described building a relationship with a Director of Customer Service at Kohler by simply walking by his desk everyday and saying hello while working in his customer service role. Once the barriers of unfamiliarity were breached, that Director began to visit Rodney to say hi and get to know him more organically. Rodney would ask this Director and other leaders about their respective career journeys and the skills needed to get there. He participated in stretch assignments and projects outside of his regular position and was hand selected for his current role in the L&D department.

Rodney’s story is a shining example of outstanding initiative and great employee support/development, but for workers within a company but outside of corporate career tracks this story shouldn’t be such an outlier. Especially when corporate employees aren’t held to the same standards with clear pathways, sponsorship and training at every step. During the hour-long roundtable we didn’t figure out how to bottle Rodney’s secret sauce at scale, but a few actionable recommendations surfaced.

Skills evaluation needs to evolve beyond traditional proxies

Companies currently qualify skills by formal learning — college, certificates, professional job experiences. But what about the learning that people experience outside of these experiences? The empathy built being a caregiver. The task management and level of “Give A Damn” it takes to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. For a lot of entry-level positions, skills are taught post-hire and acquired through doing the work. In Part 1, we discussed some of the companies that are mapping skills (SkyHive, Faethm, Burning Glass, Emsi). As employers use these tools to break down the myriad of tasks and skills needed for roles, they can also be more flexible in evaluating what types of experiences qualify for skills proficiency. If a role requires high interpersonal skills and balancing multiple projects, don’t overlook the compatible skills acquired in hourly jobs that might also fit that description, including hospitality & retail.

When transitioning jobs, skills development is not always linear and employers should prioritize mapping paths for high priority roles.

Employers are used to upskilling talent internally in clear paths from A to B, but it is much more challenging to think about reskilling someone from A to T. Brian Kropp, Group Vice President and Chief of HR Research noted, “If you ask employees the best way to find a new job at their company — most say it is easier to quit and get hired again from the outside versus moving internally because of lack of common understanding within company and especially between HR and managers.” It would take too long for this person to take a linear path to make this move and employers are challenged with trying to map and classify all the skills needed for every role within their organization to determine aligned competencies. Matthew Daniel, a Guild Education employee and former L&D specialist at Capital One, had this recommendation for employers: “Focus first on the five to ten roles in your organization that are most likely to be eliminated and the five to ten roles that are most difficult to recruit for. Think about what those adjacencies are and how to map each. Then get the right programs within weeks or months to qualified employees.”

Designing these initiatives should include the voice of those who have first hand experience.

We realized during our discussion that the group had a perspective that was very detached from the experience of a frontline employee. Someone noted, “It is ironic that a bunch of people with college degrees are thinking about how to eliminate college degrees and focus on skills instead.” It is incredibly hard for employers to develop solutions for frontline employees if they can’t empathize and identify with their problems. It is a great idea for employers to include frontline employees in the development of training and support programs that will help them be successful. This could include a frontline taskforce, advisory committee, or dedicated full-time role on the teams that are developing the career support for these workers.

If you are a founder building something for the frontline, drop us a line!

If you are an L&D, HR or DEI leader at a company interested in engaging in these conversations or exploring innovative tools, please reach out!

We hope to spark new discussions around how to better support frontline workers and keep engaging in these important and meaningful conversations. Email: ebrown@rteducation.com

Thanks to everyone who joined the roundtable and contributed to these findings:

Brian Kropp, Group Vice President and Chief of HR Research, Gartner
Carol Cooley, Chief People Officer, HSS
Rodney Ellison, Learning & Development Specialist, Kohler
Meg Lafave, SVP People and Gov Relations, Envision Health
Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities For Future of Work, Prudential
Lisa Jiang, Head of Remote Learning, Facebook
Pamela Harvey Brown, HR Leader, BCG
Dan Restuccia, Chief Product & Analytics Officer, Burning Glass
Sham Mustafa, Co-CEO, Correlation One
Matthew Daniel, Principal, Guild Education
Eleanor Cooper, CEO, Pathstream
Helen Adeosun, CEO, CareAcademy
Katie Nielson, Founder & Chief Education Officer, Voxy EnGen

Talent & Economic Mobility for 50M Frontline Workers (Pt 2) was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The frontline worker. The deskless worker. An essential worker.

“Frontline” workers hold many names but are commonly defined as employees who interact directly with customers or are directly involved in making a product. These are workers who must be physically present for their jobs and are also often concentrated in the “essential sectors” of the economy, such as healthcare, transportation, and critical manufacturing. They stand at the “front” of the organization, representing its brand.

We focus on frontline workers because they comprise a significant portion of the American workforce, yet are economically and socially vulnerable.

There are nearly 50 million frontline workers in the U.S. across 380 occupations, representing about a third (34.5%) of the American workforce. However, frontline workers earn lower wages on average — most make less than $30,000 a year and hold less than an associate’s degree. The table on the left shows the Top 10 largest frontline occupations — most of these occupations pay less than $15/hr, with cashiers earning the least at $11.17/hr. (Registered nurses are among the outliers, earning higher wages and often having very strong unions.) Frontline workers also tend to be disproportionately people of color and women, living with disabilities or without health insurance, do not speak English well or at all, and non-citizens at greater risk of unpredictable immigration policy.

They also tend to get less attention from L&D (learning & development) and HRTech, which have traditionally focused on serving the needs of professional workers “in the office”. Frontline workers are eager to learn skills that will prepare them for the future (an Axonify survey showed that 81%+ of frontline employees age <54 are interested in reskilling/upskilling training), but only 41% stated that their employers offered development opportunities.

At Rethink, we are investors that believe in the power of capital to catalyze and scale tech-enabled solutions addressing some of the most difficult challenges in education and the workforce. As part of our 2021 Investment Theses, we hope to turn the attention of employers, founders, investors, and policy-makers to the needs of the frontline, and explore how edtech inventions can support and create economic mobility and opportunity for this massive segment of the workforce.

Favorable Market Winds

A few years back when Guild Education (education-as-a-benefit provider for frontline workers & now one of the hottest unicorn startups in edtech) was first getting started, the conversation with Fortune 500 employers around education for the frontline was focused on the incentive of retention. Providing learning opportunities for frontline workers significantly increases retention and drives down the cost of high turnover of the frontline. They calculate a 208% ROI for every $1 spent on education benefits and, armed with this data, Guild was at the forefront of helping companies to understand education for frontline workers not as an expense, but rather an investment that generates a return.

Today, those conversations and incentives are shifting and the winds are blowing in favor of not just education for the sake of retention but also education for the aim of reskilling and career advancement for frontline workers. With the events of 2020 and the nation’s reckoning with race and inequity, employers are recognizing that in order to advance diversity in their organizations, it is imperative to advance their frontline employees and enable talent mobility for the frontline. After all, the most diverse populations in the organization often lie within the frontline.

Talent Mobility

“Talent mobility”, often used interchangeably with “internal mobility”, is the practice of moving employees into new roles within an organization. There are a number of talent mobility solutions today and product features include opportunity marketplaces for internal job postings, project and gig work, and mentoring, where professionals can freely explore projects with different teams, flexibly work with new leaders, and learn new skills. They also include career/performance management and succession planning tools. These platforms have become increasingly popular recently as employers recognize that it is cheaper to build or borrow talent from within than it is to buy talent and hire externally.

For the frontline worker, current talent mobility platforms solve one part of the problem. Because these tools usually serve the professional/white-collar worker, the delivery model and user experience are often not yet adapted for the frontline workforce. One particular consideration is that most tools today are usually self-serve: the onus is on the learner to figure out where they want to go in their career and how they will get there. However, economically and socially vulnerable frontline workers lack resources and time, may be juggling multiple jobs or working odd/night-time hours, and are managing competing priorities of work, family, and learning. (A recent survey by Digital Promise found that 50% of frontline learners drop out of their adult education class within 12 hours of starting.)

To enable economic mobility for frontline employees, it is not enough for employers to just offer education or job postings. Companies must also help workers connect the dots between their career goals and learning, and provide the wraparound services to support the learner (advising, tuition assistance, transportation, and internet access).

Solutions for Frontline Talent Mobility

Today, internal learning/HR solutions for the frontline are focused on compliance, health and safety, and performance/process improvement, but not on pathways upward within the organization. There seems to be a market gap for frontline-focused talent mobility solutions, although there are various tools solving parts of the problem, mapped out in the market landscape below.

We are hearing two large pain points that employers face today when considering talent mobility for frontline workers:

1. How to understand skills & plan for the big picture. Emsi talked to 300+ companies in the past year and found that one of the biggest problems employers face is first understanding skills: what skills currently exist in their organization, what skills are relevant to job roles they are hiring for in the future, and what are the skills gaps in between that requires training. Having a clear picture of the skills data in order to plan mobility pathways is a complex and daunting undertaking. Traditionally, Fortune 500 companies spend a large amount of money to hire consulting firms to do this work, an option not feasible for smaller employers (untangling skills data alone from the HRIS and ATS may take a year). Sophisticated skills-mapping and workforce planning tools (SkyHive, Faethm, Burning Glass, Emsi) are just beginning to emerge to create tech-driven, scalable solutions to this problem.
2. How to drive engagement. Effectively engaging a frontline worker requires designing solutions with thoughtfulness. Talent mobility pathways need to be created with intention with manager accountability, learning needs to be targeted towards the identified skills gap, and support services must be wrapped around the learning to maintain motivation and help balance learning with work, family, and personal priorities. We have seen that drop-out rates are notably higher without these critical wraparound services.

The current landscape consists of fragmented point solutions. What we need is a comprehensive platform that can combine these solutions, with a delivery model designed specifically for the frontline worker (vs the professional worker). (1) Planning tools can help inform (2) talent /internal mobility opportunities, which will require targeted (3) learning content. (4) Enabling & wraparound support tools need to be layered on top to drive engagement with frontline workers and the learner-facing product should be embedded in the employee’s flow of work: through their (5) frontline communications & management tools.

(1) Planning

• Workforce planning / skills-mapping tools. As mentioned above, these workforce navigation tools help employers plan for the skills they need in the future and measure existing skills gaps. Internal mobility platforms would be greatly enhanced with an upstream solution that informs the 10-year strategic vision of how a company’s workforce hopes to transform.
• Labor market analytics & data. Burning Glass and Emsi provide key data on labor market trends and what skills and occupations are in-demand in various geographies. This informs the workforce planning process: what talent is cheap or expensive to hire externally vs train internally, and where there are talent shortages in the market that the company must train internally for.

(2) Talent / Internal Mobility

• These companies need to connect into the other solution categories to create a comprehensive platform that is frontline worker-focused. Degreed is one of the rarer players that has connected internal mobility with a curated learning content experience.

(3) Learning

• Training Providers. There are many fantastic training programs and content providers that serve the frontline (the SkillUp Coalition features a number of them). We don’t present them all here but have included a few that we have worked with closely.
• Curated learning. There is innumerable training & content available but we highlight the need for curation of these resources. Workers need tools that vet content for quality and applicability. Guild has a marketplace of education programs that they have pre-vetted as effective in facilitating frontline economic mobility.
• Foundational skills learning. 60–70% of frontline workers have job-limiting foundational skills (ie. literacy, numeracy, problem-solving). Companies like Voxy EnGen, Cell-Ed and Opus are creating content around English language learning, math, and digital literacy. The delivery is mobile-first, a necessity for the deskless workforce.

(4) Enablers & Wraparound Support

• Wraparound services are powerful to have for all learners, but especially necessary for frontline workers.
• Career advising / coaching. Leadership coaching & development platforms can train and empower first-line managers to help connect their workers to opportunities and relevant training, while increasing manager accountability in the talent mobility process. Most solutions are focused on executive coaching, but startups supporting first-line managers are beginning to pop up.
• Tuition Assistance & Funding. Education-as-a-benefit and tuition assistance offerings that help subsidize education will drive frontline participation in training. Solutions like FutureFuel also help workers navigate financial planning and debt management.
• Childcare. Childcare options and funding for childcare is a key issue for resource-strapped workers. Vivvi provides subsidized employer-sponsored full-time and back-up childcare, with an education focus and extended hours.
• Hiring. Hiring tools have the potential to enable talent mobility. Arena is an ethical AI-driven predictive hiring tool for frontline healthcare and restaurant workers, and can use its skills data to surface hidden higher-paying roles to candidates.
• Adult Career Navigation. Data-driven career exploration and navigation tools can arm employees with knowledge of what industries and roles are promising and in-demand in their local geography, information that is often opaque and hard to find, to empower employees with career mobility choices both within and outside of the firm (FutureFit AI).
• Certification & Credentials. Workers want training that results in a tangible certification or stackable credential that they can take away with them. Industry certifications backed by brand names are the most useful and applicable. Tools to create, issue and manage digital credentials can help assign value to learning and prove skills attainment (Credly, Badgr, Accredible).

(5) Frontline Communications & Management

• Learning should be embedded into the regular-course flow of work and communication channels. There are a large number of innovative tools providing mobile-first communication, operations, scheduling, employee engagement and collaboration for the frontline. Some also enable job training (onboarding, job processes, compliance). Talent mobility solutions should be plugged into these systems so that the learner can navigate their learning and receive reminders through their natural methods of communication.

We need a solution that is frontline-focused and brings together these fragmented point solutions. Yet, tools are not everything — solving a complex problem like talent mobility for frontline workers will require organizational change and buy-in at levels from the CEO to the first-line manager. However, our hope is that these tools grease the wheels of change and ease barriers for employers large and small who hope to tap into and develop the talent of their frontline workforce.

Also, while the above represents our initial thoughts on frontline solutions, we still have a lot to learn. We are speaking with large frontline employers and leaders in frontline talent development and will publish a Part 2 with further insights in the coming weeks — stay tuned.

If you are a founder building something for the frontline, drop us a line!

If you are an L&D, HR or DEI leader at a company interested in engaging in these conversations or exploring innovative tools, please reach out!

We hope to spark new discussions around how to better support frontline workers and keep engaging in these important and meaningful conversations. Email: jcheng@rteducation.com

This material is for general informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, or as an endorsement, recommendation, or sponsorship of any company, security, advisory service, or product. This information should not be used as the sole basis for investment decisions. All content is presented as of the date published or indicated only, and may be superseded by subsequent market events or for other reasons. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk including the loss of principal and fluctuation of value.

Talent Mobility for 50M Frontline Workers (Pt 1) was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Getsetup helps retrain retired educators to teach the U.S.’s growing senior population how to do the important things in their lives online, from navigating services online such as Medicare to running an e-commerce site. On the demand side, the number of Americans age 65 and older is projected to nearly double from 52 million in 2018 to 95 million by 2060. The technology services and tools to help these people live happy, productive lives are just beginning to be built. On the supply side, there are over a million retired teachers who have limited access to jobs that use their full range of skills or even pay them a decent wage, especially if they have mobility problems and want to work from their homes.

The platform provides live group video classes facilitated by empathetic guides. Topics range from job-related professional development to aspirational enrichment content. Customers can work through a personalized curriculum and make notes, save and play back sessions, access curated articles and videos, and discover other relevant tools. Through COVID-19, with senior citizens taking extra care around social distancing requirements and facing isolation, Getsetup has become a place of community for older adults to learn together and interact safely with peers. Many students invite a friend to join a class.

We are excited about the potential of our first “SilverEd” investment to create a future where older adults can unlock economic opportunity through learning to live more healthy, prosperous and connected lives. We are also excited about the power of the platform to create social connectedness and tackle loneliness among seniors, especially for learners from suburban or rural areas where remote learning provides access to new opportunities. The senior population is projected to grow significantly, yet there are not enough solutions that tap into and enable the creative potential of older adults.

Co-founders Neil D’Souza and Lawrence Kosick launched Getsetup in early 2020. Neil, the CEO and product head, was the founder of Zaya Learning Labs, a company which sells low-cost software to schools in India, and started his career as a software engineer at Cisco. Lawrence, the Business Head, most recently served as VP of Business Development at IFTTT, the leading connectivity platform with over 17 million users and 700 corporate customers. We are thrilled to be supporting this experienced team building “the online senior community” that will enrich the lives of an underserved aging population.

Announcing Our Series A Investment in Getsetup was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Preamble: 268 billion will be spent on education technology globally this year. We are living through a watershed moment where the adoption of online learning has radically accelerated, and this mass shift in teaching & learning has exposed the deficiencies in current technology platforms.

This acceleration has clarified our long-held theses on the future of education and how technology can help unlock human potential. The principles that guide our search for solutions are detailed below. As always, our starting point is our primary values. Our mission is to lift up the vulnerable, giving them the education and training they need to be productive and happy in their work, their civic engagement, and their personal lives. Our definition of who is vulnerable includes not only the poor but also those who are cognitively or physically different and those who experience persecution or bias for any reason, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, imprisonment or parole status, or lack of formal credentials. We also want to make our own firm, our portfolio companies, and the society they serve more humane, more just, more equitable, and more inclusive.

Our future vision for education rests on the following guiding principles.

Put human conversation & collaboration at the core of the learning experience

One of our core theses as a venture firm is that human conversation and collaboration are a critical element of education. We started the firm in 2012, the year of the MOOC, when many people believed that these pre-recorded free courses would replace universities and software would replace human teachers. We always believed that there would be a continued need for education that involved humans talking to each other and defining and solving problems with each other. In 2021, after the global coronavirus pandemic, billions of people have now experienced the power — -and the still unsolved challenges — of education that uses live videoconferencing. Although education usually also needs to include asynchronous components, synchronous education — education that involves people being present simultaneously — is here to stay. The institutions, processes, habits, tools, and platforms to do synchronous online education successfully, though, are just starting to emerge.

The rise of synchronous online learning allows us to rethink old educational institutions rather than merely attempting to transfer offline education paradigms into online delivery mechanisms. Schools, colleges, and workforce training programs today, whether online or offline, largely fail to meet the most basic requirements of learners. Learners need a safe space, one where they are not constantly feeling judged and graded and measured and humiliated. Any learning program needs to start by discovering who the student is: what kind of help does the student need at a particular moment? What are the student’s needs, goals, strengths, and interests? Today most learning platforms don’t have any capacity to discover or record this information. When great teachers meet the most urgent needs of their students, they usually do so in spite of rather than because of the structure of their institution. To generalize broadly, we need more mentoring and collaboration and less direct instruction.

When investors and entrepreneurs use the phrase “future of work,” they are often talking about the lower layers of the stack of collaboration software: the messaging, scheduling, and videoconferencing infrastructure. Our future of work thesis is more concerned with the part of this collaborative work that involves people learning in groups. We also see collaborative learning becoming an increasing percentage of all work. Any task that robotic process automation cannot handle involves continual learning, including mentoring, reverse mentoring, consultative sales processes, conferences, strategy formulation, and the examination of systems and processes. We are interested in enabling and amplifying and transforming the human part of these interactions, not in replacing them with algorithm-driven processes.

Tools for System Change

Like other venture capitalists, we are interested in tools and services that operate in the space of non-consumption. When one builds from scratch in a vacant space, one has the opportunity to get things right from the start. But we also don’t think schools, colleges, and traditional vocational training programs are going away. Therefore, we are interested in tools that have the capacity to transform existing education systems on a national and even a global scale. We will continue to invest in administrative tools that deliver improved access, affordability, employability, fairness, efficiency, flexibility, and completion rates; that integrate siloed systems; and that replace extrinsic motivation systems with intrinsic ones.

Engage students in a personalized way that recognizes their interests

Some discussions of education innovation lose track of the emotions of the learner. This is a mistake, since without joy and immersion, learning simply does not succeed. We are looking for the rare products and services that create curiosity and intense excitement in learners — that engage them deeply, help them develop a new learning habit, and ideally put them into a state of flow where they lose track of time. These products are often but not always characterized by relevance to the student’s life. They involve gamification of a deep kind, with surprises and moments of authentic self-discovery and the joy of developing new capacities, not the shallow kind of gamification that involves linear scripts of tasks, rewards, and flashing graphics. To return to our theme, these engaging products and services almost always involve some form of human collaboration, whether that collaboration is synchronous or asynchronous.

Provide continuous feedback loops between learner, peers, instructors, and employers

We are interested in software that makes education more humane and improves the feedback loops between the learner and the institution. We want to equip the institution to adapt to the unique needs and strengths of each learner. We are also interested in tools and services that improve the feedback loops between employers and educational institutions. Schools and colleges need the ability to continually tune and adjust their offerings to improve the employability of their graduates.

Elevate the teaching of human skills and not solely core academics

Schools, colleges, vocational training programs, and education tools and platforms are frequently teaching the wrong skills. The skills we all need include the ability to listen and empathize, to ask interesting questions and define problems, to collaborate, to solve problems creatively, to write and speak clearly, to evaluate the quality of information, to think critically, to analyze probabilities, to analyze and change our own habits of thought, to translate ideas and paradigms from one domain to another, to think about the behavior of systems, and to mentor and be mentored, to name just a few. We need less grading, less memorization of facts and formulae, and fewer multiple-choice tests. We need more active learning, collaboration, exploration, peer feedback, debate, simulations, interviews, metacognitive reflection, prototyping, projects, and portfolios. We need learning at every level to blend the continual play of pre-school, the intense collaboration of a hackathon, and the self-directed deep exploration of a doctoral program.

Hone the skills needed to filter, curate, and judge information

Another key challenge in education is filtering and sorting the flood of information washing over us. We have since our fund’s inception been interested in curation as a key educational function. We need many new tools to create trusted collections of learning objects and structure them into coherent learning pathways. We also need to do a better job of curating human connections for learning collaborations. We also need more tools to track and credential people’s progress down these pathways. Ideally these tools will not just help people get better jobs but will also change the way they narrate their own stories.

Parenthetically, many people worry about an excessive focus on employability displacing liberal arts education. But many of the skills employers most want are core liberal arts skills such as the ability to write well. The problem is that there are almost no colleges whose diplomas guarantee that their graduates possess those skills. If liberal arts institutions deliver on their fundamental promises, their graduates will be eminently employable. And there are many ways in which colleges and schools could learn from corporations, including a greater emphasis on collaboration and nimbleness.

Focus on Habit Formation

Nestling comfortably into people’s current habits is unquestionably a powerful and necessary strategy for most learning products. But for a small number of exceptional education products, it is possible to actually change people’s habits and transform the way they inhabit the world. Habit modification is a uniquely valuable form of education because it is so incredibly difficult. Even though it must start with the user’s consent, it still involves a kind of violence or rupture. Changing people’s habits requires defamiliarization — making a familiar object look strange and new, ripping people out of their cognitive entrenchment in a reflex action, altering the tacit knowledge people may not even know they possess. Most educational institutions pay far too little attention to tacit knowledge, the things we don’t know that we know and cannot articulate that nonetheless shape our actions. There is, for example, an argument to be made that schools should offer a course that teaches people, and especially white men like me, how to listen more deeply and interrupt less. Becoming more conscious of how we talk to each other is more important in life than trigonometry.

Advances in cognitive science are opening up some fascinating habit modification opportunities. We are excited about opportunities for habit modification in areas such as reducing gender and racial bias, mitigating ADHD and autism spectrum disorders, curing addiction, inculcating the habit of thinking in probabilities, getting people to think more like scientists, and of course language acquisition. Sometimes companies working on challenges of this kind do not think of themselves as education companies, and we ourselves regularly have vigorous debates over what fits into our mission.

Business Models for the Future of Learning

There are two key questions shaping our evolving thinking about what kind of business models we are excited about backing: is it a good business model and is it aligned with our values? First, will this business model help create a rapidly scalable, efficient, defensible business? Second, does it serve the needs of vulnerable people? Which population does it serve? Who pays for it? How long does it take? How does it change people’s lives? What is the success rate?

One of the business models we like involves selling software and services to an enterprise that serves a vulnerable population: a school or school district, a college, an employer, a government agency, a healthcare provider, or an insurer. From a business model standpoint, this can generate economically attractive recurring revenue and possibly even negative churn — annual growth within existing accounts.

The very best of these enterprise models deliver a strong return on investment to all of their stakeholders. Rethink First and Guild Education both help employers to offer their employees a free or subsidized educational service as a benefit [note: Rethink First is an operating business no longer affiliated with Rethink Education, although I co-founded it and Rethink Education invested in it]. The employees get free or heavily subsidized education. The employers get an extremely high cash return on investment from a reduction in employee churn. And, in the case of Guild, the education providers get a large number of new students without any customer acquisition effort. In the case of Getsetup.io, which offers live synchronous online education and socializing to older people, the learners get a free experience that is life-changing, and stakeholders like insurance companies and state departments of aging get a reduction in hospitalizations and an increase in engagement and retention. The strong alignment of interest between all of the stakeholders can create extremely rapid, frictionless growth.

We also like viral direct-to consumer models where the base version of a product is free. At sufficient scale, a company can monetize through premium subscriptions, transactions and affiliate relationships, or advertising and promotion.

We are much more cautious about models where the learner pays for the educational product or service. We flatly refuse to invest in companies that benefit only the affluent, and even a company that delivers some benefit to the vulnerable can on balance exacerbate inequality. If the product delivers a dramatic benefit to the learner, and if the cost is linked to outcomes in some way, we will consider these models. Bootcamps are one example. We would rather have a government entity or an employer pay. But if the cost is low enough and the experience transforms people’s lives, we are interested.

Our Next Steps and Yours

We will be launching a series of research projects that will help us clarify where the blank space and the largest needs are. Those research projects will involve one-on-one discussions, small convenings, and further blog posts.

Those research projects will dig into the transformations of education described above. We will focus on how those transformations can help some of the most vulnerable learners with key challenges in their lives.

Our first research project will center on how workers can learn new skills and move into better jobs. The tools, platforms, and services for internal upward mobility are just beginning to emerge.

A second research project will focus on career and technical education within high school and employer-funded apprenticeships. We want to help students make successful transitions directly from high school into the workforce. We are particularly interested in high-demand middle skills that do not require a college degree. The CTE capabilities of schools are far behind their college preparation capabilities, although the latter also need bolstering. Schools and employers need better tools, programs, and teacher training for CTE.

A third research project will focus on soft skills assessment. Employers currently do not have adequate tools for assessing the soft skills of potential employees and for conducting performance reviews in a fair, repeatable, research-based, and effective manner. Moreover, employers need to do a better job of complementing these high-stakes summative assessments with continual formative feedback to employees. Soft skills assessment needs to be embedded in the flow of work. Employees need a feedback loop as they do their work.

A fourth research project will focus on advances in cognitive science and the opportunities they create for transformative products focused on habit modification, human skills, and physical and mental health.

Acknowledgments: I would like to particularly thank my partner Michelle Dervan .

Rethink Education’s Investment Theses, 2021 Edition was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are going through a cybersecurity workforce crisis.

How we protect our data is more important than ever. Just this past weekend, news broke that highly-sophisticated hackers breached the defenses of publicly-traded cybersecurity firm, FireEye, implanting malware that “targeted and compromised ‘high-value targets, both government and commercial entities’”, including the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments. Cyber crime damages will cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 and spending on cybersecurity is expected to exceed $170 billion by 2022. However, beyond just buying technology to combat threats, we must also invest in the people and talent who can actually deploy these tools effectively.

The problem is that we don’t have enough cyber talent. The cyber workforce gap is estimated to be 3.1 million globally: 3.1 million workers that we need right now that we don’t have.

At the same time, I have been hearing cybersecurity pop up a lot in edtech venture, especially when venture investors talk about pathways for reskilling into cyber careers (especially now with the huge labor market dislocation by COVID-19). Since cyber has one of the most pronounced workforce skills gaps, great job security (0% unemployment rate), and an average salary of nearly $90,000 (in the U.S.), you would expect a lot of people to be entering the cyber workforce. So why is there still such a huge gap between cyber talent supply and demand?

The answer, as usual, is a mix of complex issues. What I keep hearing from cyber professionals, at the root of it, is that employers and Higher Ed/training providers still do not have a sufficiently effective shared language or lexicon around how to describe cyber skills, roles, and responsibilities (in spite of established frameworks such as the NICE Framework). To further exacerbate matters, the lexicon is constantly evolving given how quickly the cyber industry is advancing. How can Higher Ed & Workforce solutions train the new generation of cyber talent when it is hard to keep up with the skills employers are looking for? On the flip side of the coin, employers too have a hard time locating the right cyber skills and talent (when in fact great candidates may be hiding in plain sight) and candidates struggle to enter and progress in the cyber industry.

So what does it take to close the talent gap and train the much-needed cyber workforce? And what role can Edtech play?

Today, there are many organizations that focus on training content and certifications. However, there are structural issues underlying the cyber workforce skills gap that continue to call for innovative solutions. From talking to CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) and cyber workforce training specialists, I share thoughts on what is needed for (1) Reskilling, filling the talent gap and (2) Upskilling, training for existing cyber professionals.

What it takes to get hired in cyber: A Degree, Certifications & Work Experience.

Our portfolio company Burning Glass has compiled detailed data-based evidence on cyber hiring: right now, it takes the trifecta of a degree, certifications, and work experience to get a job in cybersecurity. This is a pretty high bar and clearly creates structural barriers to cyber job pathways. Meanwhile, employers are desperate to find great cyber talent, so it begs the question: why do employers look for all of these qualities in the first place?

The degree.

88% of cybersecurity job postings require at least a Bachelor’s degree. One CISO put it elegantly: cybersecurity is a “hybrid job”, requiring technical and domain knowledge but also importantly, an understanding of the human issues in business. It has significantly more soft/power skills requirements than IT: critical thinking and problem-solving, how to pre-empt threats, speaking across the business, and project management skills. CISOs prioritize hiring for these power skills over technical skills because they are harder to train for, and therefore tend to hire based on degrees as a signal of these “intangible” qualities.

Certifications.

Certifications are a key part of cybersecurity careers but many believe that some certifications such as CISSP are actually “far more useful in getting a job than doing a job”. Historically employers have overburdened job postings with certifications, creating labor market inefficiencies (there are more job postings requiring certifications than there are people certified). Because of the lack of a common lexicon for describing cyber skills and roles, technical team members (aka CISOs) end up having a hard time communicating with HR hiring managers exactly which skills they need to hire for. Thus, certifications have become a standard way to screen candidates based on keywords in the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), a short-term convenient but long-term burdensome filtering method. In reality, jobs may only need select skills not requiring the whole certification. While credential attainment is fantastic for the job seekers’ marketability and career advancement (in the U.S., a certification can increase salaries by 20%+), for CISOs, “the certification is hardly the lynchpin for getting hired; it will only get your foot in the door”. They will still want to test for competency.

Job experience.

This is the classic work experience chicken-and-egg problem. Cyber hiring managers greatly prioritize job experience, with 85% of cybersecurity job postings requiring 3+ years of cyber work experience. Currently, a good (but long) pathway is for candidates to begin building experience in IT/tech jobs in “cyber-adjacent” roles and then transition into a “cyber-core” role.

Where Edtech Can Help

Re-imagining the cyber bootcamp into “cyber apprenticeships”.

There are a number of cyber bootcamps today and what could be truly powerful for cyber is re-imagining that model into an apprenticeship or work-integrated learning model to tackle the “cyber trifecta” problem. In addition to the technical skills that more traditional bootcamps confer, we need to provide students with opportunities to work on real-world projects, develop their soft and power skills in the context of a team, and better understand what it means to be a cyber professional (day one on the job is not super-hacking!) This model can provide work experience, a certification, and help overcome the degree hurdle, by allowing employers to observe (and help train) a potential hire’s power skills while on-the-job. It also helps with career navigation: cyber careers are constantly evolving and tricky to navigate, which may be intimidating to new entrants. Ultimately, we need more solutions with great awareness of employer needs and a focus on actual job placement. There are already startups in edtech innovating around work-integrated learning models (not specific to cyber) that are focused on integration with employers and/or Higher Ed institutions, such as Forage, Paragon One, Parker Dewey, Student Opportunity Center, and WhiteHat.

Competency-based assessments.

A skills-based assessment tool could help employers better identify cyber talent without over-relying on certifications. While there are some performance-based tests out there (ie. virtual battlefield simulators), usually developed by the armed forces, there are few players in this space, especially ones with inexpensive offerings that enterprises could easily purchase and adopt in a widespread way.

I am reminded of an interesting model by one of our portfolio companies, Correlation One, which has developed a sophisticated competency-based data science assessment platform based on collecting a pool of performance indicator data from the many data science hackathons, or “datathons”, that they host. Employers have flocked to this solution because it is similarly hard to not only measure great data science talent but also find diverse candidates that don’t check the traditional boxes. It would be intriguing to apply the same model to cyber, where candidates could showcase their skills, critical thinking, teamwork, and creativity while battling in cyber range simulations, with data collection fueling a true, efficacious skills-based assessment that overcomes degree-filtering or perhaps even an expensive certification test. Also, gamers make great cyber candidates so a game-based simulation is an intriguing idea, especially for exposing young learners to cyber careers earlier on.

(It is important to note that there is regulation in the U.S. around hiring assessments. Assessments can be one aspect of the hiring process but cannot be the sole reason for hiring, and should be tested for validity to prove no “adverse impact” to any populations.)

Soft/power skill assessments.

A soft skills assessment and training solution can overcome the burdensome degree signal. However, there are a lack of inexpensive, effective solutions for soft skills broadly, not only in cyber.

One of our portfolio companies, Imbellus (recently acquired by Roblox), has done interesting work here. With a sophisticated game-based assessment adopted by McKinsey, Imbellus brings candidates into a virtual simulation in the natural world where they solve a problem such as protecting native plants against invader species. Imbellus can then measure qualities such as critical thinking, decision-making and meta-cognition by tracking every move of the mouse, actions and time spent on solving the challenge. Are there similarly effective solutions that can be developed for cyber for widespread distribution?

Structural workforce planning solution based on skills mapping.

Build, don’t buy, cyber talent. It is hard and expensive to hire a great candidate in a high demand market. For a large employer, the better solution may be to build cyber skills capacity internally. Burning Glass and EMSI have both written research advocating for this strategy and elevating which career fields transition well into cybersecurity roles.

What we need is a broad talent platform that can track skills, identify the right candidates that could transition into cyber based on known pathways, map with specificity which additional skills they need, and provide the targeted training to help them get there.

While it may take years to develop the educational apparatus you would need in-house to manage talent and skills for the whole organization, there are tech solutions tackling this problem. Our portfolio company Degreed (or others such as Faethm and SkyHive as part of an emerging category of skills-based workforce planning platforms) serve as platforms already managing and recommending learning across the organization with an internal mobility function to navigate role transitions. A data analytics company such as Burning Glass can further provide the underlying granular data around skills mapping and development.

Cyber career pathway navigation tools.

Career navigation seems to be trickier than usual in the cyber industry. Navigating entry into and progression in cyber careers is complex, especially given the large number of certifying bodies and certification options to choose from. Initiatives such as CyberSeek and My Cyber Path have begun elucidating the career pathway so it is less daunting for candidates to enter the cyber workforce.

The skills that cyber professionals need continue to grow complex, with 93% of cybersecurity professionals expressing a need to keep up their skills. There are a number of enterprise training solutions out there — what kinds of solutions will gain traction and successfully scale to impact learning for the cyber community? Below are a few key takeaways from my conversations with CISOs and cyber training providers on what employers are looking for when buying cyber training for their teams:

Relevant & large library of training content.

No two cyber organizations are the same. The same cyber role in insurance vs banking can look very different and require diverging skills and training based on the sectors, situations, and needs. CISOs want a training solution that is highly relevant to their business. The specialized nature of the training is why, by default, a lot of cybersecurity training has been developed in-house in the past, but an outside vendor has the potential to bring much more effective, well-designed, and engaging content. In addition, CISOs find it hard to develop effective training on new cybersecurity threats and would be interested in a company that could take the latest emerging cyber risks and immediately develop training on them.

Simulation / practical learning is a must-have.

CISOs greatly value hands-on practice simulations in cyber. Especially because it does not seem easy to develop great cyber range training and simulations, this seems to be a critical differentiating factor between cyber training vendors and key to defensibility.

System of record to track skills.

CISOs have expressed interest in a way to track the skills progression of a team over time and have the technology automatically generate recommendations for new training skills gaps. This can be built into a broader talent/learning platform as mentioned above.

Dashboard demonstrating ROI.

While this idea seems simple, the truth is that many C-level executives struggle to understand cybersecurity well and are not sure how to improve the cybersecurity of their organizations. In order to sell into enterprises and gain C-suite buy-in, a cyber training platform should clearly demonstrate ROI to senior management and help the CISO communicate the value of investing in cyber training to the rest of their team.

If you have additional thoughts or insights to add, or if you are a founder building solutions to the above challenges, we’d love to hear from you! Please reach out at jcheng@rteducation.com.

Finally, a big thank you to the cyber professionals who kindly lent their time to chat with me about this fascinating space!

This material is for general informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, or as an endorsement, recommendation, or sponsorship of any company, security, advisory service, or product. This information should not be used as the sole basis for investment decisions. All content is presented as of the date published or indicated only, and may be superseded by subsequent market events or for other reasons. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk including the loss of principal and fluctuation of value.

What It Takes To Train The Cybersecurity Workforce was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Term sheet negotiation can be stress-inducing for founders and investors alike. Our combined experiences as investor, founder, and negotiations professor have helped us distill the following lessons to help others smoothly navigate the process, and ultimately create and capture the most value from their deals.

H.A: Preparing for the Process

Do your homework. As a founder, you may come to the relationship with your investors at an information disadvantage. Having now gone through two rounds of equity financing at Care Academy, I highly recommend that founders do their homework by reading the most recent thought leadership (ex. AVC, First Round, CooleyGo, NVCA), the book Venture Deals by Brad Feld and James Mendelson, and by speaking with founders who have raised in the same segment and at the same stage no more than 6 months prior. You’ll receive timely feedback on what is ‘market’ and this can help you to look beyond valuation as the only place to maximize value.

The right lawyer is key. Partnering with a lawyer who sees a high volume of venture deals is really helpful. They will be another valuable source of information on what is ‘market’ and can advise on the levers that will be most salient given your company’s stage, industry, geography, and other context. When selecting a lawyer, ask how many venture deals they personally have done recently and at which stages (Series Seed, A, B, etc.).

Time is the enemy of deals. Once a deal is in play, remember that every delay diminishes the probability of it closing. For investors, this means acting swiftly when submitting and explaining terms, carrying out diligence and reference calls, and managing the legal team through setting concrete deadlines. On the Founder side, this means quick feedback on terms, submission of materials, and active management of the legal team towards a deadline. Know that the number of legal pages that culminate for the transaction can be daunting. Lean on your lawyer to help you know what to expect and you may also find this primer on VC deal docs helpful.

L.S: Getting the Terms you Want

Optimize for the overall package; don’t try to optimize on each individual term. Remember that there are multiple ways to do an equivalently good deal. Discovering the other side’s high-level interests and priorities before nailing down the specific terms will help both sides create value through understanding differences in priorities between parties. This will create more leverage, because it allows each side to discover wise trade-offs in terms of what one side values more than the other.

Similarity is the enemy of value creation. This may appear counterintuitive―but differences are the levers of exchange. The more ways you can differ (e.g., in interests, in priorities, in risk appetite, in confidence assessment, in time horizon), the more ways you can discover wise trade-offs. This applies both to founder-to-investor negotiations and cofounder-to-cofounder negotiations. Example: you and your cofounder are discussing how to divide company equity between you. If you have a high appetite for risk but your cofounder is more risk-averse, you might suggest allocating more equity to you in exchange for higher salary to your cofounder.

Don’t give anything away for free. Sell it for something else. Say you and your lead investor differ in your company’s valuation, and after multiple conversations it appears they are fixed on this specific issue. You might be willing to agree to their valuation―but for a price. What can you ask for in return for your agreement? A shorter vesting schedule, an earlier cliff, a more expansive ‘good leaver’ clause, etc.? Take the opportunity when ‘conceding’ to a term to exchange it for something else.

M.D: Managing the Transaction

Avoid a term sheet until you are synced on terms. This might sound counterintuitive, as most founders are laser-focused on getting that term sheet wrapped up yesterday. But in our experience, it is more effective for investors and entrepreneurs to sync up on a bullet-point list of high-level terms before writing a first draft. Once there is an agreement in principle, it is much easier to quickly get to an executed term sheet―without confusing redlines and without incurring excessive legal fees. Below is an example of what a precursor to a Series A term sheet might look like.

Inject humor & authenticity. Once the word negotiation gets introduced into a room (or Zoom), everyone gets uptight and formal―which makes it harder to reach an agreement. Being intentional about creating a relaxed, open, and authentic atmosphere ultimately makes it easier to find common ground and build excitement towards working together. It’s a good idea to keep negotiation conversations as small in size as possible. Large group calls can create awkwardness―or worse, lead to posturing and a greater sense of “us versus them”. None of this is helpful. Where possible, negotiate 1-to-1 or pull in just one lawyer representing each side.

Pay attention to the exhibits. The pro forma cap table for the transaction is usually included as Exhibit A in the term sheet. If this is left blank and sent by separate email, the pro forma and term sheet can get out of sync, leading to miscommunication. Make sure that the pro forma is updated to reflect any changes to the economics of the deal and pasted into the execution copy of the term sheet. This ensures that everyone is on the same page about ownership post-transaction.

A final note on the win-win

Business schools emphasize the textbook importance of the win-win, but sadly it is rarely prioritized in the real world. Sometimes, the compulsion to win-at-all-costs overwhelms the course of a negotiation. In venture, this is bad news. Early stage VCs invest in people with big ideas and the ability to drive them forward. If early in the relationship, Founders start off feeling disgruntled (or, worse, demotivated), it can be difficult to recover their trust and goodwill. Likewise, venture investors are fiduciaries: they have a responsibility to act in the best interest of their LPs when making deals. Finding terms that are fair to both sides is hard but necessary work — and worth the investment of time, energy, and intentionality.

About the Authors

Lisa Shu is Executive Director of Newton Venture Program and Negotiations Professor at London Business School. Helen Adeosun is Founder and CEO of Care Academy, a provider of mobile-first online training for senior care professionals. Michelle Dervan is a Partner at Rethink Education, a venture capital firm focused on early stage investments in education technology companies.

Disclaimer. The information expressed herein is subject to change based on market and other conditions. The views presented are for general informational purposes only and are not intended as investment advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, or as an endorsement, recommendation, or sponsorship of any company, security, advisory service, or fund nor do they purport to address the financial objectives or specific investment needs of any individual reader, investor, or organization. This information should not be used as the sole basis for investment decisions. All content is presented by the date(s) published or indicated only, and may be superseded by subsequent market events or for other reasons.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal and fluctuation of value. Hypothetical information presented is for illustrative purposes only, is not real and has many inherent limitations. It does not reflect the results or risks associated with investing or the actual performance of any company and has been prepared with the benefit of hindsight. Therefore, there is no guarantee that an actual company would have achieved the results shown. In fact, there will be differences between hypothetical and actual results. No investor should assume that future performance will be profitable, or equal to the results shown. Hypothetical results do not reflect the deduction of fees and other expenses incurred in the management of a fund portfolio. All content is presented as of the date published or indicated only, and may be superseded by subsequent market events or for other reasons.

Negotiate Your Term Sheet Like a Pro was originally published in Rethink Education on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.