Michelle Weise
Future of Education & Workforce Strategist
Teaches:
Opportunity On-ramps: Targeted Education for the Jobs of the Future
Tech is advancing; jobs are morphing, and job tenure is shorter; retirement is delayed or gone entirely; and education has to be continuous. Education and workforce strategist Dr. Michelle R. Weise talks about the infrastructure we need to build for a future filled with 20, 30, or more job changes. Part of that involves building more on-ramps to better economic opportunities, which are not always going to mirror the educational experiences we recognize today. During this session, Dr. Weise will share an array of new approaches to skills building for the jobs of today and tomorrow.
masterclass DESCRIPTION
Dr. Michelle Weise is the founder of Long Life Learning Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations prepare working-age adults for a rapidly evolving and longer future of work. She is the author of the award-winning book Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet, which was named the most outstanding continuing education publication of 2021 by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. That same year, Thinkers50 recognized her as one of the world’s top 30 management and leadership thinkers to watch.
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Michelle brings a wealth of experience from leading strategy and innovation at major institutions, including National University System, Strada Education Network, Southern New Hampshire University, and the Christensen Institute, where she co-authored Hire Education with Clayton Christensen. Her insights on education, workforce development, and lifelong learning have been featured in The Economist, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and on PBS NewsHour. A former Fulbright Scholar, Michelle holds degrees from Harvard and Stanford, where she earned her doctorate in 2008. In 2024, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Indiana Tech.
MASTERCLASS TRAILER
Program
The Future of Learning
The Future of Learning is a cutting-edge masterclass program that explores how emerging technologies, workforce shifts, and global megatrends are reshaping the educational landscape. Through provocative and insightful sessions on artificial intelligence, the metaverse, and the evolution of work, participants will gain a strategic view of what lies ahead for learners, educators, and institutions. This series equips education leaders with the foresight and tools to adapt curriculum, learning environments, and pathways to opportunity—ensuring students are not only prepared for the future but empowered to shape it.
Getting to Know Michelle
1
What was your first job experience?
What did you learn from it?
My very first job experience in life was babysitting, so I learned quickly a lot about patience and caring for others before yourself. When I was in high school, I was a teaching assistant for middle school math classes, which taught me how hard it is to teach so that learners really grasp a concept. I also interned for a large consulting firm and learned how to take on any task with a „yes, and“ attitude, even when it meant filing a lot of paperwork. I think all of these kinds of informal work experiences really helped me understand how important it is for people to be able translate and transfer their “hidden skills“ into the language of the labor
2
What sparked your interest in work-based learning?
As I‘ve learned about more innovations and models
over the years that do an excellent job of work-based or work-integrated learning, I just wish I had had more opportunities like that when I was going through school. These opportunities are not available at scale, and they are not distributed broadly and systematically across all parts of learning ecosystem, including within the flow of actual paid work. I know I have always learned best in the context of solving a real- world problem, and in order to create more nimble agents of the future, we need to get a whole lot more creative about how we make problem- based learning the core of all teaching and learning, rather than mere anomalies in the education system.
3
What missteps would you caution others to avoid as they work to promote or develop work-based learning opportunities?
It‘s critical to backwards-map from the needs of the employer without getting too caught up in custom builds that are impossible to replicate. The creation of learning pathways for emerging jobs will likely require a kind of mass customization. Consider that with the food selections within a single Chipotle restaurant, you can actually come up with something like 65,000 different combinations of a meal. We need to be able to do that with skills-building or competency- building opportunities for the future. How do we take a learner, measure where they are in terms of the skills they bring to help them acquire the specific skills they need to compete for the job that they want? How do we build those precise and targeted educational experiences that get them where they need to go? This involves modularizing our curriculum into skills-based and competency-based pathways. It requires a real re-engineering of our learning experiences-not just taking existing content and repackaging it for the workforce. This is hard, time-consuming work, but something that will pay off in the future.
“Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention“.
Robert Greene (Mastery)