Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Then what do you do to fill those gaps? Do you develop content modules to be delivered over the Internet around those skill gap areas?

John Miller: What we are in the process of doing with our clients is identifying the gaps and then, building a goal alignment. We go through a very detailed assessment on both sides. We try to identify what lines of business in their arena are changing, and what are the talent requirements that are going to be needed going forward.

One of the areas that we found in healthcare is that there’s a shift away from the hospital and the clinic, and moving into home healthcare as a direct fulfillment of this bubble that the baby boomers are bringing in. It was just unbelievable. Honestly, we’re going to need somewhere between three and five times the amount of skilled nursing in three to five years. We can see that this is forthcoming. Yet there wasn’t an initiative through education or between industry and education to really start to make that happen. In fact, we’ve found that a lot of universities were discouraging people going into nursing, because there isn’t a significant demand at the current moment when in fact, in a relatively short period of time, there’s going to be a huge need.

It’s really finding these issues and doing alignment. What are the skills? What are the talents that are going to be required?

Sramana Mitra: What you just mentioned is not just skill training. That is a question of communicating with the educational institution on what professions the career development office should guide the students towards.

John Miller: Yes, absolutely. As you go down this path, the missing link is education does not know the next generation or the next strategic move by a lot of these industries they serve. Through this process, we’re building a strategic alliance between industry and education so they can identify what are the skills and talent requirements going forward so education can impact that. All of the STEM challenge-related initiatives are really focused at K-12. We’re one of the very different, or at least one of the few, that are really focused on today’s workforce.

When we sit down and go through this with an industry, what we’re finding is that they have a huge number of existing employees who want to go back to school. Honestly, what we’re providing now is a new tool for education to engage that body of new students that’ll be coming back in. Kaiser is talking about 40,000 employees who’ll come back into that process.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: John Miller, Chief Operating Officer of Hands-On Learning
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