Carola Weil (McGill University) on Addressing Canada’s Skills Gap with Innovative Learning Models

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Carola Weil to discuss the mutual value exchange between continuing education and corporate partners, and the cultural, structural, and market challenges that complicate collaboration.

Transcript

Shauna Cox (00:02):

Carola, welcome to the Illumination Podcast.

Carola Weil (00:06):

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here today.

Shauna Cox (00:09):

Absolutely. So we are here to talk about tailoring a learning experience for a more corporate audience, and I want to kick off our conversation and first ask why are continuing education division specifically focusing more of their time and their energy on serving corporate Canada?

Carola Weil (00:28):

Thank you. It's a very interesting question. I think we would want to think about where are the growth opportunities and where are the needs of Canada today? So I should mention that I also serve currently as the co-chair of the National Workforce Strategy Policy Committee of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. And one of the big questions that we always have in that group is how are our local businesses, how are small and medium enterprises? How is corporate Canada and the university sector, the post-secondary education sector, how are we advancing Canadian productivity's? One of the big concerns today. And so I think all parties to this equation of thinking about how do we address and improve and advance Canadian productivity on the world Economic stage requires us to think about what are the different tools that we might have that we can deploy. And so continuing education is one resource, one actor in a multi-dimensional space for that.

(01:48):

And we do find that currently, I think we've always engaged with, as you put it, corporate Canada. We have always engaged with organizations that are in the private sector, both for-profit and not for-profit organizations. Corporate Canada as anywhere in the world brings a lot to the table for continuing education that we tap into. So it's really in many ways a two-way relationship. Universities have financial pressures. They cannot rely exclusively on a traditional full-time undergraduate or graduate student. We increasingly have worries about research funding and where that comes from. So continuing education plays in an important role in the financial health of the university. One way in which we then fulfill that mandate is by collaborating with the private sector through a variety of different mechanisms. So financial pressures. And as those have grown, and we certainly have many examples in North America now of universities worrying about their annual budgets, particularly as provincial budgets also are feeling the strain. This all translates to continuing education pressures as well on our financial pressures. So we've been dealing with, in some cases not just reduced public funding, but also chronic underfunding

(03:35):

By federal and provincial governments for a long time. So the relationship with corporate Canada is not a new one and it ebbs and flows as resources are available both within the private sector and the public sector because the public sector in many ways drives corporate education as well because they are providing subsidies to employers for continuing education. When those subsidies dry up, then there are fewer opportunities also for continuing education. It's always a two-way relationship. We at a university in continuing education, we are always looking for new revenue streams. We are looking for opportunities to engage with new communities, new markets. So that is from our side an interest and incentive for working. Continuing with Corporate Canada, we also have to recognize that there's an accelerated technology disruption going

Speaker 3 (04:43):

On.

Carola Weil (04:45):

There is an urgent need on the part of corporate Canada for an agile just in time workforce development effort. There's a need for up and re-skilling that they themselves may not always have the opportunity and the resources to provide to their own employees. So they will look to other partners. Continuing education, university-based continuing education is one of those partners. The challenge is we're not the only ones. It's a very end when we speak about challenges later, we go into that a little bit more. But continuing education is positioned to deliver and complement corporate training efforts. And we also draw on the experience, the practical experience that corporate partners have to build content that responds to new trends, particularly in technological fields. Work integrated and experiential learning is a critical feature of contemporary university education and corporate Canada can and does serve as one important laboratory that we have for applied hands-on teaching and learning. So I can give you an example of that. So at the school of continuing studies at McGill University, we have applied cybersecurity and cloud security programming. These programs have been developed with input, with advice from leading employers and professional associations. So we make sure that the curriculum is structured to reflect real world use cases. For example, in the cyber case, detecting advanced persistent threats or building predictive models so that employees can transfer their learning directly into their workplace. And that linkage is critical to successful partnerships between continuing education and the private sector.

Shauna Cox (06:52):

Absolutely. There are so many golden nuggets. I could just kind of dive tail and go off of from what you just said, but I want to come back to this idea of the equation. Typically in an equation there are multiple elements to reach that level of productivity, that end result that you're talking about. But what are some of those common obstacles that stand in the way of a meaningful collaboration between corporations and CE divisions?

Carola Weil (07:21):

There are, I think both external and internal obstacles. So universities often are their own worst enemies and we ourselves often have challenges in realizing our own visions and our own aspirations. So particularly given that we are working today and in more constrained resource environments, whether they're a fiscal or human resource resource needs, we do not always have the resources to drop everything and focus on a particular corporate client. We have to find ways in which we can adapt existing content to the needs of a new client. For example, now if we've done our homework and we've worked in close partnership, we've co-designed content, then that is less of an issue. But you still need staff that you can devote to the cultivation of these relationships, the business development aspect, the market research that has to happen, the marketing of your offerings to a corporate or private sector audience may be quite different than what you might need for open enrollment programming. So we have to think about the trade-offs and the opportunity cost and what is the return on investment for a continuing education unit in playing in this market. I mentioned earlier it's a very crowded marketplace. We are dealing not just with other universities who have continuing education and who are fabulous in this space, but we're dealing with colleges, we're dealing with vocational schools, technical schools, and we have a whole industry of private sector trainers and learning and development specialists, consultants who are in the same business.

(09:29):

And so we have also found that in many ways the corporate education market has now it falls into two different camps. There is one camp which is the one that has been really captured by organizations like LinkedIn and by Coursera where it's almost free. It may be subscription based, it's online. And many organizations, many companies tap into that and simply say to their employees, you have access to LinkedIn, go and upskill doing a quick one or two hour course there. The other part of the market is aiming more towards premium exclusive executive type education where it's very much about the whole package. It's not just about the content, but what's my learning experience? Is my hand being held while I go through it? Do I have a nice comfortable classroom in which I am sitting in? Do I have an opportunity to network with other influentials in my field?

(10:46):

And it becomes so much more than simply the content that we are delivering and universities playing in all of these camps, but we have to recognize that we're doing so often with higher overheads, we have sometimes more staff costs, more overhead costs that we have to cover that make it difficult for us to compete. Timelines are a big obstacle. So a corporate timeline is, I had a thought I asked you for something, can you deliver it yesterday? And I wanted in a really short format, so I would like to be upskilled in, you name it FinTech overnight I have basic accounting skills or my employee, it's often it's the C-suite often that will come in and say our staff needs to be upskilled in this particular area, data analytics or applied artificial intelligence or cloud security or FinTech and you name it. And they'll come in and they'll say, can you get this done?

(12:00):

And I need it in a really short turnaround time because of course also I cannot free up my employees to sit in a classroom for a full year and get that knowledge. Now as a university, we're going to say yes, but first of all, we may have to get approvals from our own academic quality assurance bodies, our governance bodies that might take longer. Hopefully we already have a set of offerings that are available to you, but they are typically structured around a traditional 13 week semester, either online or in person. You might have shorter content that we've developed, but it is rare that we would have available off the shelf shovel ready, something that can be so modularized as a corporation might need it to be delivered. So timeline to develop that if we haven't already developed it is often longer than what a corporation is willing to invest.

(13:10):

Now it's not insurmountable and we have plenty of examples where we've addressed that quite well and universities continuing education especially has become more and more agile. We adapt more quickly. We have that content shovel ready, and then there still are challenges on most of which have to do with culture and with perception. You may be familiar with Peter Drucker's famous statement, culture eats strategy for breakfast. We are dealing here with corporate culture versus academic culture. What do we consider to be high quality content? What is good enough to be delivered When we talk about upskilling? Well, from what level to what level do you want to go? How high do we need to go? This is often a challenge when we speak about language instruction. For example, we may get a request to say we need our employees to be bilingual. They need, particularly here in Quebec, we need French language training for a group or English language training. But they don't take into account that people are at different levels of language competencies. I cannot take someone who's never studied a language and put them in the same group as someone who is practically fluent. So on the academic side, we have to think we have a very different cultural approach to education and training

(14:46):

That can be overcome. And we both I think are learning each other's, but there still are lingering misperceptions. There is on the part of private sector organizations, there is the general sense of the ivory tower.

(15:03):

Universities are naval gazing, especially research intensive, highly selective universities like a McGill University would be seen as being too inaccessible, too costly, irrelevant to real world problem solving, too theoretical. How am I going to apply this? What we bring to the table though and where we address these kinds of misperceptions is to say it's not just about the short term, it's about the longevity of learning. It's about the long-term thriving of corporate Canada, and this is where university-based continuing education I think has the biggest opportunity to have an impact. So we do have those challenges and we need to find ways in which we navigate those challenges. But I think at the end of the day, it's a bit like a marriage between two individuals from different cultural contexts. We don't always speak the same language or have the necessary shared experience to communicate effectively with one another, but we do also have this attraction opposites attract and we have the ability to compliment one another, which often is the secret of a successful marriage that we've been told and I think many of us have experienced in a relationship. So I would see it as that it's that blending of cultures, it's the willingness of and the ability of continuing education to adapt to the needs not just today but of tomorrow for private sector organizations and at the same time the private sector becoming more better acquainted with what universities actually do and how we work and what we can offer for the long term.

Shauna Cox (17:04):

Absolutely. Before I dive into the other questions, do you have a hard stop at one 30?

Carola Weil (17:12):

No, I can. Okay, perfect. I have a two o'clock meeting, but I can

Shauna Cox (17:16):

Yeah, no worries. Okay, perfect. I just have two more questions that I want to, so I want to make sure that we get

Carola Weil (17:20):

To that. Yes,

Shauna Cox (17:21):

Yes. And so there was a point where you were talking about the crowded marketplace. Higher ed is clearly we know that crowded marketplace with the other institutions and all these other companies that are coming out with education offerings and things like that. I would also say the marketplace is not just crowded with the amount of people who are offering education, but it's also kind of crowded with its curriculum and the demands of the curriculum that students want, whether it's short-term or long-term. So coming from a distinctly university continuing education perspective, in what ways is it challenging to balance the short-term demand for technical skill development against that longer term need for the durable or soft skill development when it comes to working professionals?

Carola Weil (18:13):

So I think the short answer is it's a false dichotomy. It's not about short-term and long-term skills. It's more as if you were running parallel tracks. You will always have technical skills that have a short term impact and that you can learn quickly. I can figure out how to use an Excel spreadsheet probably in a reasonably short period of time. I may not be good at it, but I can figure out how to use it. But what do I do with that Excel knowledge in the long term? There are many other opportunities and I would want to build on those so that five years from now when nobody remembers Excel or 10 years from now, I have an ability to pivot to whatever the new technology is. So I think we need to be careful about not simply saying, well, technical skills are short term and other durable skills or soft skills.

(19:16):

I prefer the term durable skills are social skills or long-term. You need a combination of both at all times, but you might have short-term interventions that if they are planned strategically will build into long-term outcomes that continue. One of the reasons why continuing education I think is an important partner to private sector organizations is that we do always have that long view in mind and we are able to prepare today's workforce for tomorrow's jobs. It's not just about what you need to meet this quarter's bottom line that's really important and we can't lose sight of that. But it's also to recognize that if your company wants to succeed in two years and three years and five years, you need to start planning now for what your workforce is going to look like. And that's where universities really come in. It's also I think that we need to think about how do we merge technical and non-technical or durable skills?

(20:28):

How do you embed them in programming? So it's not an either or solution. A good example that I can offer you is we have a brand new master's in multilingual digital communication. It's fully online. It is designed for a part-time adult professional who may be coming either from the language industries or communication field PR translation and is concerned about whether or not AI is going to eat their lunch, not their breakfast, but their lunch. And on the other hand, the technologists who have to program or who are developing large language models who are developing the technologies that impact and that intersect with communication. So we've brought together a multidisciplinary set of skills and knowledge areas to say at the end of the day, both of those professional camps need to know enough about each other, they need to have transversal skills. And that's really where continuing education comes in in my view is that we are very good in some cases, exceptional at creating those transversal skills in ways that corporate learning doesn't always have the ability to do that. I can get really excellent training on Python or on a particular technology within a corporate environment, but can I also get the ethics? Can I get the ability to communicate written, written language and oral communication?

(22:28):

I understand the way in which systemic forces might impact that particular technology and am I prepared to do something else that may not be Python, but that uses similar calculations or similar algorithms or a similar approach.

(22:54):

That is what universities teach you to do in many ways and that you cannot get that. I would argue it's more difficult to get in a corporate context. The conference board of Canada reminds us regularly that the top skills that employers want include critical thinking. They want creativity, they want collaboration, collaborative skills, they want adaptability. Those are all skills that we have embedded at the school of continuing studies at McGill University into our coursework so that even when you are getting that technical knowledge, we are giving you these other skills or these other abilities. I would prefer to use the term ability over skill,

Speaker 3 (23:44):

That

Carola Weil (23:44):

Knowledge that you need to still be able to support your company down the road when the original technical skill may be obsolete.

Shauna Cox (23:56):

Absolutely, and I think that everything that you're saying there, it's just like this beautiful blend of the short-term long-term that quite honestly we shouldn't even be thinking about. It is just the ecosystem of learning, I'd say, and in this society we are often faced as higher ed leaders with this challenge to show an ROI to students. They don't. Sometimes they question the value of education and typically you hear it from the student, but I think it's also fair to say you can be hearing that from your corporate clients. So how can university continuing education leaders help those corporate clients kind of calculate that return on their educational investment?

Carola Weil (24:39):

I think there are some real practical, not tricks, but steps that we can recommend. And yes, you're right that there is always a challenge of how do you determine the monetary value of something that we refer to as a soft skill. Again, why another reason for thinking about durability, about productivity as opposed to softness. It already just the selection of words already changes the value proposition in that way. Universities have not been very good at communicating their own value proposition. You're absolutely right. But where we can help a corporate client is, for example, in thinking through pre and post training assessments, we often use these tools that you do a quick assessment of your employees before they've done a training and after they've done the training, self-assessments, ongoing self-assessments, engagement surveys, is someone just a bum in a seat or are they actually engaging with the material?

(25:50):

We try to focus on very specific KPIs on the indicators that might come out of having a more educated workforce. Things like sales conversion or project completion time, reduced error rates. These are all very practical things that an employer can use to test whether or not their share the partnership that they had with the universities yielding the outcomes that they have. We, as an example, for example, we've provided lean six Sigma yellow belt training to several companies and also business analytics training where participants have to apply their newly acquired knowledge in real life cases, even as part their education, and you basically get a twofer. The company is getting a better trained, a better educated employee, but they may also actually be solving a problem that they have at the workplace. And so they're not just getting the education, they're actually getting a resolution of a task that they had.

(27:05):

So we should think about that investment not as an isolated educational investment, but that it is in fact contributing to the bottom line of a corporation of a company. We also know that university graduates that have continuing education tend to onboard better more quickly. They're able to insert themselves into a corporate environment more quickly than someone who hasn't had that applied practical knowledge that they might bring in. This is where we make sure that we use project-based curricula, that we have capstone projects that put people into that real world context, so by the time they transition back into their job or into a new job, if that's what it is, they are ready to go. They're already on a ramp.

(28:07):

We also recognize that there are some measures of success that may be more difficult to quantify, but that they're really important this day and age. We are very concerned about data privacy, for example, and the emerging threats that come from both the opportunities, but also the threats that come from artificial intelligence, from cyber security threats, from the fact that we live in a communication world and that things are changing really rapidly really quickly. By having employees who understand both the governance structures and these threats and who are aware of how to counter them, you already have reduced the risk to your business significantly. You still have to invest obviously in your own risk assurance, but that human error factor goes down significantly. You have a greater educated workforce that is able to adapt to those disruptions that we talked about earlier. So I do think that we can show a value proposition in that corporate Canada can calculate a very strong return on investment from their partnership with continuing education units. They also get in the process a level of transferability that is more difficult to get if you, for example, invested in in-house training.

(29:51):

Deloitte has its own university. Many large companies have their own, I think Google has Google you, Microsoft has Microsoft, you there are all these and they're very good at what they do, but the credential that someone gives at a Deloitte or a Microsoft or a Google or you name the company is not going to transfer in the same way to a competitor as a university credential will. You do still have the verifiability, the credibility of post-secondary education and universities. That means something in today's education marketplace.

Shauna Cox (30:40):

Absolutely. So if there are any corporate clients out there listening, that is your reason to partner with institutions and their CE units.

Carola Weil (30:50):

Absolutely. You get results with academic rigor and you have the ability to be prepared for a future that you might not even know yet what it looks

Shauna Cox (31:02):

Like. Absolutely, and I love the idea of the transferability of an institution credential. It can go a lot farther than say from a Google you or something like that. Well, Carol, those are all the questions that I have for you, but before I let you go, we have to ask our very important question around food. You of course are based in Montreal, Quebec. If someone is coming to the city, where do they need to go to eat?

Carola Weil (31:32):

That is the most difficult question you have asked me and as a foodie I have to say that there are so many choices in Montreal. It depends on your preference, whether you want Italian food, little Italy is amazing. There are more great Italian restaurants in Montreal. Then I can count. I would say one great place to start is in old Montreal in the old Port area where you have a wide range of different ethnic restaurants. You are next to Chinatown, you also have interesting fusion restaurants. You could go to a restaurant for example, that offers Peruvian Japanese Nique cuisine and at the same time get a really great Quebecois meal at a restaurant down the street and they're all in walking distance. We're on an island, so it's all very manageable, but I would be really hard pressed to single out one single restaurant just to say that whatever your food preference is, there is a restaurant for you.

Shauna Cox (33:37):

Amazing. Carola, thank you so much for the recommendations and the conversation. It was great chatting with you.

Carola Weil (33:43):

Thank you for your time and thank you to the listeners. It's great conversation. Thank you. Bye.