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Frederick Wehrle: Feeling that others have suddenly skills or start talking about things that are not something we feel comfortable with and you deeply understand. It's just a question of how honest are you with yourself in terms of taking those signs seriously and taking action to start learning again and try to keep up with what's happening around you.

Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and the EDGE in Tech Initiative at the University of California focused on expanding diversity and gender, equity and tech. EDGE in Tech is part of CITRIS, the Center for IT Research in the Interest Of Society and the Banatao Institute.

We're excited to share in this episode. We're going to look at the skills gap that we're facing today and how continuous learning is the key to success. As one example, AI and automation are making some jobs obsolete or creating new jobs. We're witnessing a great resignation or some might say a great migration for a myriad of reasons.

If you're thinking about or in the midst of a career change, you'll need to get up to speed quickly. If you're being redeployed into a new role or have been stuck in a role for too long and want to advance, you're going to need new skills.

So to get ready for the rapidly-shifting future of work landscape and to learn how to identify your own skills gap and strengthen your capabilities, today we're talking with Frederick Wehrle. Frederick is the Associate Dean for the Academic Affairs at UC Berkeley Extension, where he leads the strategic design and development of the institution's academic programs.

He also lectures in marketing strategy, product management, and go-to-market strategies. Frederick's research interests are in the influence of pre-existing biases on consumer behavior.

He earned his master of science in biology at the University of Freiburg, Germany and his doctorate in management sciences at the University of Paris. He has dedicated his career to designing new forms of education that fit the work and family reality of professionals and allow them to acquire the skills needed to succeed in their careers in the upcoming fourth Industrial Revolution.

In his own words, a big part of this endeavor in a world-leading public university is to disrupt the traditional five-year program review cycle and adopt an agile academic design approach that assesses and updates programs and courses almost in real time.

In service of this goal, he created the world's first academic design and innovation incubator allowing academics across all disciplines to effectively analyze, design, and prototype new courses and entirely new forms of education. Welcome, Frederick. I'm really interested in how you talk about the importance of being agile. Academia is not known for being quick and agile. It's known for being rigorous and slow to change. So how did you come to see academia as having a role to create and incubate new types of education?

Frederick Wehrle: Well, thank you so much, Jill. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today and to chat with you about this super important topic. Yeah, the way I actually came to it and the way I landed in education myself, aside the fact that I come from a family of educators, is I basically, while I did my PhD back in Paris, I was lecturing to finance my studies.

And I started lecturing or teaching in a way that I would have loved to be taught myself. And what that actually means is I was really trying to make every session meaningful to the students. Because I was lecturing in management, sciences, marketing, meaningful means there needs to be something in every session that the students can relate to the practice of, for example, operating and working in marketing strategy.

So in a nutshell, that means I could not just go and take a textbook and start lecturing from beginning to end. It meant working with professionals and experts in the field to figure out what is it that people actually need to be able to do. What are the skills required? Look at the students, identify the gap. And then basically reverse engineer from the need of the corporations and the need of the job towards the reality of the students.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah. This idea of reverse engineering means you have to really understand who your customer is. Who's the learner and what are their needs? And I guess beyond that, beyond what the learners' needs are, what are the employer's needs? What do they need these skills for people to have? So given that kind of reverse engineering, what is the gap that you're trying to fill?

Frederick Wehrle: Well, it's actually very interesting. And I might just add onto the point that you were just saying. You're mentioning that the student potentially being the customer, I think it's more a co-creator with the institution to build something together towards actually the outcome.

And the outcome ideally is not just serving an organization or a corporation, the outcome is really to find your career where you really are able to do something very meaningful. And so to your question of what are these types of gaps that we can find in there, I think there are maybe three different types of gaps that are interesting to consider.

The most salient ones so that people always have in their minds is what you call back in the day soft skills or power skills nowadays. So these leadership, communication, teamwork, competencies.

I think the second one closed behind that is a gap in technological competencies, notably data analytics. I think it's similar in terms of a phenomenon to social media. It's not because you grow up with tech that you are techie.

So it's not because you use a phone that you know how it works. And I think the last gap that we actually see is that there are simply emerging jobs and fields that people that are a little bit older and even younger ones are just not aware of.

So if you think about the framework of a person, thinking about going to college or going to grad school or taking courses or deciding about a career, they will always fall in almost archaic job categories in their mind of what they're thinking of what they would want to do.

However, there are a lot of jobs out there that are quite different and that didn't even exist just a few years ago.

Jill Finlayson: And that's part of this whole issue of the future of work is that jobs aren't staying in the same classes. They aren't staying in the same types of things. So you have to be able to learn how to learn. They always say, you go to college to learn how to learn.

And now, that's become even more compelling. So as we think about how do you know what skills you need-- I think there's sort of this overarching feeling that we all could improve as leaders, that we could all gain some good communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving. Those are kind of those 21st century skills that are really useful.

But how do you know what skills you need to advance in your career path? And how do you know you're lacking them?

Frederick Wehrle: I can take maybe myself as an example of just in recent years that, not because of lack of conceptual understanding or capacity of strategic thinking or just even technical skills, data analytical skills, and knowledge about tools, knowledge about new types of concepts in ways you can now through these tools, for example, address new types of customers as you were just saying or ways and how you can analyze financial data.

I felt just very quickly talking to colleagues who had those competencies that I was not up to date anymore. Or I didn't really just follow as easily as I was able to do before. So reflex for an educator then, as well as to become a learner again, and take executive education courses or other professional courses to bring me up to speed, courses that are targeted specifically on those weaknesses that I felt.

And I think that something, if we are honest with ourselves, probably everybody's feeling very easily in their work environment, feeling that others have, suddenly, skills or start talking about things that are not something we feel comfortable with and we deeply understand.

And I think given how fast things are moving-- automation right now really seems to be following Moore's law, meaning it's exponentially growing. And its capacity, computation capacities of AI are growing exponentially as well.

I think we're all feeling it very quickly. And it's just a question of how honest are you with yourself in terms of taking them that seriously and those signs seriously and taking action to start learning again and try to keep up with what's happening around you.

Jill Finlayson: I like that gauge of comfort. If you're feeling very comfortable, you're probably not learning something. But if you're feeling uncomfortable, that's probably a good clue that there's something that you want to level up on.

Frederick Wehrle: There is a huge misunderstanding, I think, in many education institutions or education providers, these EdTech companies and so on that exist, that the problem is pricing. If you do, particularly, continuing education that is supposed to propel you in your career, potentially lead to a promotion, or allow you to change jobs and so on and so forth, the money question shouldn't be really an issue.

Because supposedly, through your learning, you'll be able to advance in your career and get a better salary. So that'll make up for the investment.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah. I think a couple interesting things on time is if there is a return on investment, you're willing to make that investment of time. And I think if it's aligned, if it's aligned with your interest, if it's aligned with your curiosity and to your point, it's a pathway to doing more of the things that you enjoy, then that trade-off seems to be time better spent-- that opportunity to really focus in.

When you think about these folks who are trying to fill these professional skills gap, how is doing a continuing postgraduate education different from going back and getting a degree, a secondary degree?

Frederick Wehrle: The interesting perspective compared to a degree here is I would say the operational aspect of it. And you can hear it in feedback from corporations where corporations as well as organizations might have feedback to somebody applying with a master saying, well, we know that you are competent in terms of analytical thinking. You might know the subject area and so on.

But we anticipate at least 12 months of training internally for those people. That is maybe the difference to a certification which has the objective of not being vocational in the sense of just learning towards the job, but have the objective of training you with the theoretical knowledge and the conceptual knowledge-- and on top of it, training you on how to apply it and make sense out of it in the organization.

So for an organization, a corporation, it means effectively, if you come with a certification, you're operational much quicker. You're integrated into the work culture, you learn the tools and so on, but you are able to be operational and to apply the theory and the concepts.

Jill Finlayson: The other thing that's really interesting about this particular set of learning is the people in the classroom. So you're not just there with other students, you're there with other professionals. What does this mean if you're an instructor to be talking to professionals in the classroom? And what does this mean to be a fellow student in a classroom with other professionals?

Frederick Wehrle: If you have ever had the pleasure of teaching professionals and all you knew before was teaching students, graduate students, undergraduate students, you would be very, very surprised for the intensity and the intentionality and the precision of feedback and questions you get from the first session.

Professional learners will just hit you with their work reality and a very concrete question and feedback on this is it, this is happening, how do I deal with it? You're telling this but here is what is happening in my environment and my reality. And the trick of how I've seen this happen most successfully and how I'm trying to practice it myself is, alluding to your question as well, is to actually integrate, really, the classroom and the know-how and experience all the students in the classroom.

Effectively, the classroom dynamic is completely different when you have professional learners who bring several years of experience, sometimes decades of experience to the table. And it's absolutely fascinating learning experience of having somebody who is maybe just graduated with somebody who is 40 years old or 50 years old and have all these different life stories and experiences and they still work together.

Jill Finlayson: And as somebody in the class putting them in the position of having to give feedback to their peers is giving them more leadership skills. I do a lot of work with entrepreneurs and founders. And we have them practice their pitches. And then the audience, their peers, give them feedback. They score it on one to five, no three's. Because we want them to tip one direction or the other.

And they give that feedback because they say, OK, I gave you a two. I tipped down because. And so this idea of helping them to improve their communication, listening, feedback skills is all part of that two-way street where you're an engaged, active participant in the learning, not just a recipient of the learning.

Frederick Wehrle: There's the second thing that we have seen that was very exciting for me personally is when we were quote-unquote, "forced to go remote." When COVID started, we started basically having and opening virtual classrooms. So we basically did our courses the same way we would do them in person. But we would use Zoom as the virtual classroom.

We were able to suddenly see students from different time zones, from different continents pick up those opportunities and start learning together and sign up for programs and courses. And that was in a different way, a fascinating way to network, really, on a global basis for the students. Because if they are engaged in a project during 10 weeks in a program, for example, they have really many opportunities to get to know their peers who might be sitting in India and China, in Europe, in Brazil, anywhere around the world.

And to share your ideas, your experience with them getting those very, very different perspectives from them. Also, seeing what might be the same or similar problems that they might have in their companies is absolutely fascinating.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah it's super relevant given the hybrid work environment. This isn't just something that's happening in the learning environment. This is happening in offices as people have remote teams, hybrid teams. And so thinking about this experience, how does continuing ed teach people how to be better leaders, teach them how to create safe spaces where people can have these conversations, how to build a sense of belonging or foster listening skills?

We talked about power skills or essential skills for leadership. How does being in these classrooms working on team projects help them develop those skills?

Frederick Wehrle: Actually to your point, this is a very interesting perspective. If you're thinking of taking a position or continuing to foster your skills in the distributed teams or you're working remotely and a lot going forward, taking a course remotely as well can give you that safe space where you can test out how to act and engage within the company without the risk of actually misstepping within the company.

The learning environment is made for professionals in continuing education to have the opportunity to test their skills. in a, as you mentioned, safe space with actual pertinent, real-world feedback from experts and peers so that when you actually start translating it into your work reality and you start doing it yourself at work, you have had several test runs, for example, in the classroom.

Me personally, for example, I teach a lot of strategy in marketing. And I keep repeating that to the students. This is your moment to formulate and argue for your strategies and get the feedback from other real-world professionals without any repercussions.

Good luck trying that for the first time in your company. So if you go out and you put your foot forward with a bold strategy, and then you're completely unprepared, that's yeah-- it's a hit or miss. And you don't want to miss.

Jill Finlayson: Harkening back to your comment about COVID changed how you taught, COVID also changed who has to look for jobs. We know that women were significantly displaced during COVID. How are you seeing continuing ed helping the people who had to leave the workforce for various reasons get back into the workforce?

Frederick Wehrle: We see, actually, relatively regularly with our students that there are a lot of these, particularly women, that have stepped away from the workforce and are now thinking of going back into the workforce but who find themselves in almost a different world. As you mentioned, now things might be remote. Now they might be using technologies that they're not used to.

They just feel disconnected. And I think continuing education is actually a great way how to bridge that gap if there's indeed some level of a skills gap there. Because you don't need to take an entire program or certificate to just learn a few skills. You can just choose basically almost as-needed size of courses for the skills you're lacking.

But what it also does, it allows you to connect with people that are currently in the workforce that give you an idea of how things are happening. It also allows you to access career services in many institutions where people will tell you, oh, here is opportunities. The job market has actually changed right now.

And you might think you don't have the skills, because the job descriptions look so horrible and demanding. But actually, people are not able to hire enough people currently. And your skills are very valuable there.

Jill Finlayson: You talk about the speed of change, the speed of velocity of change. Are we in the fourth Industrial Revolution? Are we now in the fifth Industrial Revolution? What are those? And where are we going?

Frederick Wehrle: The first Industrial Revolution started automating with machines like the steam engine and so on. But that's technology that's relatively easy to understand. And basically everybody in their schoolbooks were able to learn about steam engines. Second Industrial Revolution-- electricity, gas engines, and so on-- things you can still kind understand and made it into the general knowledge and curricula.

Third Industrial Revolution integrated circuits and other technologies, much more complicated already nowadays, even though that's kind of history now. Most people don't understand that level of technology. But we are now in the fourth Industrial Revolution where we're talking about AI, artificial networks, IoT, AIoT, and things like this, blockchain. Those are technologies that are small fraction of humanity is actually, let's say, educated enough and trained enough. Whether it's formally or informally, it takes a lot of learning-- yeah-- a lot of learning and education to actually understand what it is and how it functions.

So whereas you could get away with the basic school education in the first maybe even in the second Industrial Revolution. And the third Industrial Revolution, if you wanted to go ahead in your career, you already basically needed to go towards Bachelor or beyond, now we're in a stage where that is not enough.

You need to be on top of the latest developments, on top of having had a very deep and sound education already. And I'm personally very worried about where we're going. Because it looks much more like we're going into a situation where you have an extreme class society where you have one small part of the society that has access to a very high level of education, long years of education, and can afford to continuously get education and stay on top of the exponentially, developing technologies and the other part of the population who just don't.

And, unfortunately, I won't even put a qualifier on it of fortunately or unfortunately. I think the reality is whatever can be automated will be automated.

So if you're doing a job today, as has happened in many, many cases already, where you feel you are actually doing something that does not really challenge your intellect, that is somewhat repetitive, very likely it is something that can be automated and will be automated or has been already automated somewhere in the world. And so you are looking to be displaced in your job.

The only way you can stay on top of this is, actually, if you then are able to morph into something else. So give you an extreme example-- tax accountants in Brazil apparently were basically losing jobs by the thousands already a few years ago. Because there was just an app that came out that allowed you to do your tax declaration basically automatically very quickly. And everyone individually could do it.

The problem for those accountants was there's just no job anymore at all. There was no need in corporations for people with those skills. The only thing that they could do is either change their jobs completely in terms of not working in accounting anymore or becoming now somebody who works for these types of software developers, accounting software developers, which those people are looking for people that understand accounting very well, but also have advanced software development skills and data skills.

So it's really almost binary. Either you fall into something completely different, and maybe you actually don't find a job anymore. Or you have to become techknowledgeble and tech-literate and understand software development. Because you're going to have to work in a different level.

Jill Finlayson: This foundation of having an education is still key and core. But then the ability to add to that, to pivot, to learn the new technologies as they come out is going to be key. I think the one thing that makes me optimistic is that by automating the less pleasant, the more dangerous, the more tedious jobs, we can actually free people up to do jobs that are both more challenging to your point, but also more aligned with their interests and passions.

So this idea of part of the reason you might go back is you have a very good core skill in data science, but you want to learn more about climate, because that's the issue that you want to address. So this opportunity to use continuing ed to align your career with your passion and to reapply skills and gain new skills to focus in on a new area is the thing that gets me excited about the future.

So maybe you can give us some final parting words for people who are trying to figure out their next step, trying to figure out where does skill-building fit with them and building their desired career path? What is your advice to them?

Frederick Wehrle: Well, I think to your point, it's really something we see with our students-- and again, students meaning there's people of all ages, coming to continuing education to develop their skills, their competencies. I think there needs to be a fundamental motivation.

And we actually oftentimes see two fundamental motivations, primary drivers. And I would just urge people to be open to sensing them in themselves. The one, maybe more the pessimistic one, is the fear. There are a lot of people who are just feeling that this is slipping out of their control or their hands. Or they just feel disconnected. There's this level of comfort that we were talking about earlier.

And I think I would not underestimate that at all. I think if your intuition tells you that this is becoming uncomfortable for you, you should take matters in your own hands and look up what your company offers or your organization offers for you to continue closing those gaps or engage in closing those skill gaps and making you feel more comfortable in this, and just acknowledge that this is going to be the rest of your life. It's just going to be the norm to continue studying for the rest of your life.

And the second thing is maybe on the more, I would say, exciting note, as you said as well, is at the same time as all these changes are happening, you don't have to wait until you feel uncomfortable. There's so much need currently in corporations, in organizations, in research for people who are going beyond the basic work. From all I've seen, there is a huge interest in organizations and corporations to invest into professional development. Because it's so hard to find that specific talent.

If you're passionate about your company, if you really like that environment, you like the products that you have and so on, you have an incredible edge to an outside competitor like an outside applicant. If all it needs for you to get that type of position is a specific training, raise your hand, go for it.

I know of many examples where people really just said, I really don't like my job. But before quitting, let me ask. And they were allowed to literally transform from business analytics to web development by just actually taking the programs that would allow them to do so.

Jill Finlayson: Ilove that idea of creating your own job or asking for the opportunities and looking for it. If you're running a company and you want to be an innovative company, what is your obligation? How can you work with continuing education to provide these on-ramps for your employees?

Frederick Wehrle: Well, this is the craziest thing that I still have not understood how that ever happened is that corporations really built their own internal training programs rather than collaborate with the many continuing education providers that exist. But it is the case.

So I think that there is opportunities in large corporations, notably, to basically train up. But the corporation's, I would say, responsibility to their employees is, I would say, to find this right position with them where they feel fully-fulfilled and interested. Because that's where they will be the most performing to some extent.

And then the second is to get there, I think, the responsibility of the corporations is to invest in the people they have, because they are liable for, to some extent, their lives, their families' lives, their families' futures rather than trying to park them somewhere until they are so unmotivated that they leave or to even let them go.

Jill Finlayson: So I have amazing appreciation for the work that you do and the way you're approaching these opportunities to really upskill and support people in their career growth. I take away for companies that if they want to be innovative, they have to lead transformation. They have to play a part in engaging their employees and retaining those employees through growth and opportunities.

And for the individuals, I take away the idea that you need to raise your hand, that you need to move if you're uncomfortable or even more importantly, move before you're uncomfortable. Follow your curiosity and take advantage of these education opportunities. Because they're more than education. They're networking and they're growth opportunities. And they're going to allow you to have more impact and be more fulfilled in your career.

Frederick Wehrle: Thank you very much, Jill, for the invitation. I really loved chatting with you. As you've seen, this is really a passion of mine. And at the same time, I feel it's a very urgent topic. And I'm glad that people might find the opportunities through the inspiration to our discussion to look into the many, many opportunities they have within the organizations, corporations to continue learning and to engage in this new reality that we are all in in the fourth Industrial Revolution moving to the fifth, which is to just continuously grow and continuously learn.

Jill Finlayson: Thank you for filling our skills gap and our knowledge gaps today, really appreciate that. And with that, I hope our audience enjoyed this latest in our long series of podcasts that we're sending their way every month. Please share this with your friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this future of work journey with us. And make sure you check out Extension.berkley.edu find courses to fill your gaps in your skill set. And to see what's coming up at EDGE in Tech visit Edge.berkley.edu.

Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next month to talk about our increased demand to have not only hard skills, but those soft skills, or as I prefer to call them, essential skills or as Frederick called them, power skills, to do the job and be an effective leader. Until next time.

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