Every other week, or so, we like to gather our team’s top reading recommendations and share them with our higher education community. If you’re on our newsletter, you’re in luck because you’ll stay informed on these recommendations regularly. Sometimes, like this time, we post these ‘reads’ here too. To consistently get updates on our recommended reading, join our newsletter! For now, you can just look below.
- This read was brought to our attention by Tom Riis, our Director, Product Success, but has widespread attention online already with 5,390 people applauding and countless comments and shares. Dalia Awad’s internship journey took her from Gaza to Silicon Valley, at just 19, landing experiential opportunities with both Google and Repl.it. (Spoiler alert: she chooses Google.) The value of experiential learning and the search for belonging and identity within companies and careers is universal and has never been more important than it is now.
- With an outlook of global economic recovery in a post-COVID world, we’re each faced with what we can do to support employment and business in our own backyards. This piece unpacks College of the North Atlantic’s work-integrated learning programs and how it supports students to obtain the necessary skills for success and stay working within Newfoundland and Labrador – when the otherwise would have to look out of province for employment.
- Bill Heinrich, our Director of Mindset, suggests you read “The Future of University Credentials: New Developments at the Intersection of Higher Education and Hiring,” by Sean R. Gallagher, for Harvard Education Press. Says Bill, “This was a solid argument for why we need to reconsider university credentials in the future, that begins with a historical review of credentialing, and proceeds to the rapid evolution of online academic programs and short courses (i.e. MOOCs). The author argues that traditional credentials need to evolve to reflect skills and talents, to align with employers’ needs, to capture experiential learning, and to inform equitable access to high-value education. In a more personal reflection of this text, all of us working now, were alive when the first online academic programs emerged from the petri dish of the early internet. All of the evolution toward micro-credentials, badges, competency-based learning, and credential wallets are current. They are happening. Now. It’s not too late to get involved and if you’re an educator or employer it’s probably a good idea to find out what your organization is doing to leverage the future of credentials.“
