Corporate Education: yay!

I've been really asking myself what I want and how I got so down recently.  Today, during my Merkaba meditation I got inundated with answers.

What do I want?  Surprise, surprise, it's the same thing I've always wanted and the reason I was put on this Earth.  It's Phiolo and more.  I've always been an educator, back in 2003 I wrote my Master's Thesis on a paradigm shift in how we educate students.  My professors said, "You realize you have a tremendous uphill battle ahead of you?" and I said, "I know, but it's the right thing to do."

I was writing about how we truly learn and how we should truly teach years before even Seth Godin broached the subject in his manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams.  Give it a quick read, he and I are 100% on the same page in this subject.

I knew the world wasn't quite ready for what I was proposing.  I thought to myself, "I wish corporations put the time and effort into educating their employees to build a more effective work force," but at that time they didn't see the value.

Then the Great Recession of 2008 hit.  People were laid off everywhere and the only people who could keep their jobs were the ones who were indispensable.  So what made them indispensable?

My theory is that they were creators and problem solvers: companies literally would perish if they weren't there.  They were the exact type of people I wanted to create through education.  There were "smart" people.  But as Seth Godin says, you can teach people to be smart it's not innate, you just have to know how.

Here we are now in 2015 and I'm back in the job market and starting to be amazed at all the "Educational Leadership" positions in multiple corporations.  It's like a dream come true.

The Great Recession was simply part of a cycle. Historically they will look back and see that it marked the end of the Industrial Age where people were taught to be obedient and follow orders.  It also marks the beginning of the Information Age.

Today, all the people getting jobs need to be "highly creative", "problem solvers" "self starters" with "people skills" and the "ability to collaborate".  Sadly, college hasn't caught up, it's still trying to breed obedience, not creativity.

However, Capitalism moves much faster.  Companies quickly realized it was going to be near impossible to find the type of talent they needed from the job pool of fresh college grads and started building their own education programs to meet their needs.

What do all these education programs have in common, they are about the applied use of specific knowledge to create and solve new problems.  That is to say they are focusing on using content to illicit higher order thinking skills, essentially creating smarter people who can get the job done.

I may just be entering my flow.