Recently, Arm Education was selected by edX to be one of 10 exclusive content partners that will receive development funding to produce a new online course addressing ‘essential human skills for the virtual age.’
Thanks to some intensive development work over the Spring months, we can now announce that our Business Models for Technology Innovators course is now open for registration. The course will officially start on the 15th July 2022 and you can find out more by visiting our product page: https://www.edx.org/course/business-models-for-technology-innovators.
In this article, we take a deep dive into the genesis of the course, the intended audience and what ‘essential human skills’ it sets out to teach.
Given Arm’s central role in the development of new technologies and approaches that are driving the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions[1],[2], we have a unique perspective on the key skills requirements, and therefore demand and supply gap that will impact the 21st century workplace. As these Industrial Revolutions take hold, companies worldwide will look to harness new technologies to maximize their business goals.
To meet these challenges, a workforce with the commensurate skills will be required to deliver on the transformative promise of this brave new world. The World Economic Forum refers to this as a ‘reskilling imperative’[3] and estimates that by 2022 approximately 54% of employees require ‘significant’ re-and upskilling. This is not just in core technical areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and Automation, but also in ‘human’ skills such as communication, problem solving and business skills.
Arm Education is addressing the ‘reskilling imperative’ through the creation of core technical courses including: Embedded Systems Essentials Professional Certificate, Build Your First IoT Application, and a forthcoming course on Machine Learning (ML).
We plan to complement these core technical courses with additional materials that cover the intersection of technology and the essential ‘human skills’ referenced previously, beginning with our Business Models for Technology Innovators online course on edX.
When we sat down to design the materials, we quickly realized it was important that there should be as few barriers to entry as possible. As a result, we decided from the outset that no special prerequisite knowledge would be required to take the course. While open to all, we had the idea that the course should focus on learners who work at the intersection between technology, product innovation and business – namely:
With this cohort in mind, we developed the content to address the ‘essential human skills’ we knew were in high demand by employers, including: problem-solving, critical thinking and creative & innovation skills.
Problem solving: Target Jobs [4] considers having strong problem-solving skills as the mark of an independent employee. These skills are often tested with competency-based questions at interview. In 2020, the World Economic Forum issued a report on the Future of Jobs [5]. They surveyed 350 executives in 15 of the world’s biggest economies across 9 industries. The number one skill employers identified as a need was problem solving, with 36% of all jobs across all industrial sectors requiring complex problem solving as a core ability.
Critical thinking: Pearson reports that recent large-scale employer surveys reveal that for new hires, critical thinking skills are among the most important [6]. They also note that there is a long-standing perception that higher education is not producing enough graduates with critical thinking skills to enable them to succeed in the world of work. Forbes also quotes a 2016 survey in which more than 50% of the employers said that their new employees had insufficient critical thinking skills. Academic research has shown that this problem translates into weaknesses in the labor market. Arum and Roksa tracked students [7] as they entered the jobs market. Those who were more likely to be employed and stay employed had higher critical thinking scores.
Creative and Innovation skills: The World Economic Forum’s 2016 report [8] shows that there is a new demand for creative skills among formerly technical occupations. Cobo (2014) [9] from the Oxford Internet Institute examined the need for soft skills in innovation across world class organizations, finding a skills mismatch between education and work in OECD countries which could not be solved with technology alone.
We also wanted to ensure that the course reflected Arm Education's focus on developing materials that are anchored around the principles of Project-Based Learning (PBL). Broadly speaking, PBL is a pedagogical approach where students learn by engaging with real-world and context relevant projects - you can take a deeper dive into PBL and Arm Education's approach in a previous blog.
In this course, our use of PBL takes the form of interactive use of case studies sourced from a variety of sectors such as the semiconductor industry, aviation, automotive, agriculture, smart farming, healthcare, the travel industry and healthcare. A good case in point is the final case study, where participants are challenged to write a pitch to potential investors (between 300 and 1000 words) on the creation of a new and disruptive electric vehicle brand. In their proposals, learners will be asked to consider elements discussed previously in the course such as:
Once learners have written their proposals, they will be invited to share these with their peers using the discussion fora and other interactive elements of the edX platform to assess, iterate and collaborate on potential business models and ideas. The intention here is that we will provide learners with a virtual platform to engage with each other - mirroring the type of interactions they are expected to undertake when entering today's hybrid, post-pandemic workplace.
By the end of the course, we expect learners to have a good grounding on:
All the videos in the course have been co-produced by Arm Education and Duke Corporate Education and the presenters have demonstrable experience in thinking about and tracking the effects of digital transformation in the workplace, with particular emphasis on business models. We have also made a conscious effort to ensure that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is a central tenet of the course. Duke Corporate Education have used their convening power to source two expert presenters from the global business and academic world with different positionalities and backgrounds.
Curious to find out more? Enroll in our Business Models for Technology Innovators Course on edX and be ready to start the course when it goes live on the 15th July 2022.
[1] https://www.arm.com/blogs/blueprint/the-fifth-wave-of-computing-ai-5g-iot [2] https://insights.regenesys.net/the-fifth-industrial-revolution-5ir/ [3] https://www.weforum.org/press/2020/01/the-reskilling-revolution-better-skills-better-jobs-better-education-for-a-billion-people-by-2030/ [4] https://targetjobs.co.uk/careers-advice/skills-for-getting-a-job/problem-solving-mark-independent-employee [5] https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020 [6] https://www.pearson.com/content/dam/one-dot-com/one-dot-com/global/Files/efficacy-and-research/skills-for-today/Critical-Thinking-ExecSum-Employers.pdf [7] https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/when-employers-demand-skills-professors-cannot-define [8] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs.pdf [9] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/10748121311322996/