Mapping the Century: Navigating Lifelong Learning in a 100-Year Life

Hi everyone and thank you for joining today's webinar, Mapping the Navigating Lifelong Learning in a one hundred Year Life. I'd like to start by thanking today's sponsor, Canvas by Instructure. Learn like a pro. I'm Jess Thompson, content producer on behalf of ATD and I will be your moderator for today. I'm very pleased to introduce today's presenter. Misty Frost is the Chief Transformation Officer at Instructure.

A seasoned executive with extensive global experience, Misty most recently served as CEO of Penn Foster following its merger with Karas in twenty twenty one. Before joining Karas in twenty eighteen, she was the CMO at Instructure where she played a key role in driving the company's growth from a startup to a publicly traded business valued over one billion dollars If you'd like to participate in today's presentation or ask questions, the chat feature is available for today's presentation. Be sure to select everyone in the drop down menu. And now I will kick it over to Misty. Thank you so much, Jess, and welcome to everyone.

As we get started, I would really love it if as you have questions, you put them in the chat and just can interrupt me or ask the questions out loud to make sure that we cover everybody's, interests and, participation, if that's alright with all of you. Let's go ahead and get started. I wanted to spend a few minutes sort of on my trajectory and why I've been a lifelong learner. And I think this is gonna be very relevant to what we're gonna be talking about today, and how the world has really evolved. So I started my career right after I graduated, from the University of Utah in anthropology.

I know. Quite strange for where I ended up, but I believe that it actually was fundamental towards really some of the passions that I've developed over my career. And in my early stage, I was working in a variety of ad agencies, and those opportunities allowed for a tremendous amount of on the job training in terms of being involved in some of the first corporate websites that have been developed, working for places that were doing the very first things in ecommerce, doing the very first things in search engine marketing. And then I ended up at a place called DATAMARK. And the reason why that was so important was they were it was the very first time or place that I'd ever heard of data science.

And what we were doing was big tremendous data models for student recruitment. So I'd had all of these tremendous opportunities to learn things on the job, which then led me to joining Instructure and working on Canvas. And that was really critical for me because it brought all of the things that I had learned to bear into my next job. And then from there, as Jess mentioned, became a CEO, then joined a bunch of boards, and now I find myself back in Instructure. And the things that I've learned along the way, I think, will absolutely make me better at the job that I currently have, even more so than when I had it several years ago.

So I think lifelong learning and career trajectory learning is critical. The challenge that I always had was the stuff I had to figure out on my own. And I think one of the changes that we're seeing in today's workforce is there's a tremendous much more focus and emphasis on learning across the career than there ever was as I was going through. So I'm quite excited to talk to you about some of the things that we've learned today. So for those of you who participated in our last quarter's webinar, you will already be really familiar with this new map of life.

And the TLDR or the too long, dimmer read is that people are living longer lives. I know nobody's surprised by that news. But the point of this study, from the Stanford Center of Longevity is really about how do we improve the quality of life as people are staying in the workforce longer, are changing jobs more often, and how education doesn't really stop at the degree. As I've learned through my own experience and through being able to talk to many, folks like you, career trajectory and learning on the job has become a more and more in area of interest, particularly for people who are entering the workforce, and they wanna see the commitment from their corporations towards that personal development. So I'm gonna jump forward and play the video from Stanford so you guys have a better sense of what we're talking about.

Our ancestors in the twentieth century handed us a gift of roughly thirty extra years of life. What we did with these years was to tack them all on at the end of life. So we get thirty extra years of life and the only stage in life that got longer was old age. And it's not working for people. It's not working well at all.

We need to rewrite that script, and that's what the new map of life is about. The overall lifespan can be altered in a way that really people can take a little more time, perhaps at different stages in their life, perhaps more for education, spending more time with their family. We can perhaps reduce some of the pitch points in life where we're trying to wrestle with jobs, our own self, relationships, children, parents. If we could make even relatively modest changes in a number of different areas of life, make elementary school a little bit longer, make work four days a week, you make some of those changes and you find that people are living higher quality lives, and productivity is going up, and people are happier, and you've reduced incarceration, you've reduced mental health problems, you've reduced physical illness. Our Whoops.

Sorry about that. Ancestors in the twentieth century handed us a gift. So back to what we were talking about. Apologies. Oh my what do we do with all this information? As much as I think all of us would love better work life balance for solving those pinch points in life and giving more time to other stuff, we don't often work in an environment where that is possible, or at least it's not possible in a wholesale kind of way.

So one of the things that we believe is a critical area where we can improve people's quality of lives is rethinking how we talk about education and ongoing career development in the workforce. So like with all things, we really need to start with the end in mind. What kind of growth trajectory do we really expect for employees, not only when they begin work, but as they move through their career? And one of the things that we know is that this linear path that some of us grew up with, which is you start in k twelve, and then you go to higher education, and then you have a career. And you'll probably learn some stuff on the job, but there's nothing really formal about it. And then you'd retire and you're done, is no longer really the norm for most people.

And it's not the norm for people who are currently entering the work force. So we know through some of the study with, Stanford is that adults fifty and older are the dominant force in our economy right now. And why is that? It's because we're staying in the workforce longer. And I'm super proud to count myself in that category, but we stay in the workforce longer, some of us, because we have to. Retirement has become untenable financially or because we derive a tremendous amount of personal satisfaction or purpose out of work.

And so leaving at sixty five seems way too early when we've developed all of these skills. So in addition to that, we know on the education side that nondegree programs have risen almost twenty percent since twenty sixteen. So as we see changes within education, we're also seeing changes in the work force. So for example, the state of Georgia is now allowing for free tuition for everyone over sixty two at all of its institutions, to help with skill development and or degrees, assuming people want that at that stage of life. So with all of these changes, we know that receiving a diploma at four year and cc to grow is not realistic nor is it reflective of how people actually work.

So one of the great things that we can do is provide things like certifications or micro credentials or career pathways, checkpoints of knowledge verification to really help our employees, whether they stay with us or leave for other opportunities to really grow and have provable skills as they move through their careers. So, obviously, as we think about how do we provide this in a much more tangible and effective way, we need to account for different learners being at different stages in their career and learning journeys. So when we think about, like, course design and content that's easy to consume and really provided a multiple modalities, we need to we will naturally be reaching a larger percentage of these learners. This is where tools really become important. They have to be easy to use.

They have to be intuitive, and they have to span a breadth of learning styles. So we don't wanna underestimate the power of simplicity. And I'll tell you I'll give you an example. So USA Swimming, had to provide consistent and effective education among its membership, including their twenty thousand coaches. And what they were what they currently had is really inconsistent and not very well consumed learning, and a lot of frustration from their membership who had joined to get the learning.

So the thing that they chose to solve was just creating a centralized platform so that no matter where you were in your learning journey, you only had one place to go. And they streamline their access to content through doing that. So instead of having this variety of content delivered on all sorts of different platforms and who knew what was collecting what, they were able to centralize platforms and who knew what was collecting what, they were able to centralize it and organize it in a way that people could really easily and and no matter where they were, access it from the centralized location. So they put in all of their certifications and all their continuing ed. And so what ended up happening was they started getting greater outcomes from their coaches because their coaches were being trained more consistently.

So simplicity in just making a single decision to centralize really had tremendous benefits for USA swimming. So let's talk about that. Creating the right infrastructure for lifelong learning can be really, really impactful. And so what are the things we need to consider when we're talking about that right infrastructure? Well, we need to think about it in terms of inclusive design, cohesive credentials pathways. What do we mean by credentialing? How do learners understand where they are on that pathway? And how does that provide some tangible proof points for the learners to demonstrate to new bosses or new opportunities that they actually have the skills that they have attained.

And then, of course, we can take a look at partnerships with educational institutions, for furthering on, development in ways that we may not have the resources to do our own selves. So having said that, Jess, are there any questions that people have that we can dive into? I don't see any questions right now, Misty, but I will keep watch. Excellent. Thank you, Jess. So as we've seen since the early two thousand and particularly through the COVID years, circumstances of society can change on a dime.

Thinking about how quickly educators had to adapt to an online learning environment was groundbreaking in terms of how we had to handle education. So people who are focused on delivering educational experiences to students rather than the checkbox methodology of mimicking what happened in classroom tended to have better outcomes and better results from their learners. So if you think about that against the backdrop of technology, our working environments are just getting more sophisticated over time. So I'm sure you've all been part of or read or listened to the focus on AI. So the World Economic Forum believes that in their last study that twenty three percent of global jobs will change due to the industry transformation around AI and other text in image voice processing.

In addition to that, we know that excuse me. They expect one point one billion jobs, wanna make sure I get those those data points correct, to be radically transformed by technology in the next decade. So the obvious conclusion is that our work environments are gonna need to provide tangible ways for employees to sharpen skills, develop new competencies, and foster self growth. As people are not feeling like they're developing, they're definitely leaving jobs for different jobs, sometimes for similar or even lower, compensation because personal growth is such a high value to our entering workforce. So how do we take these lessons learned from academia and having to radically change and thinking about that more in the world of corporate learning or ongoing skill development.

So when we think about inclusive design as one of the things that we need to contemplate, we have to realize that it's more than force design for people who self identify as needing accommodations. It's helpful. And that's a good way of thinking about it. We obviously want to be as inclusive as possible, but there are also many layers why someone may want multiple modalities of course content and making it more consumable. So let's take the the example of captions.

So, obviously, folks who are deaf or hard of hearing utilize captions, but you're seeing them being utilized more on platforms like YouTube and Instagram for people who may not have headphones but still want to consume video content. They may be taking a break from work or watching lunch, and they don't necessarily want to participate in having everyone hear what they're doing. So captions can certainly be broader than just an accommodation. Or I'm sure you've all been in a meeting, maybe even this one, where you look at a slide and you're like, I cannot possibly read that. The font is so tiny.

And for those of us who are maybe in that fifty plus group, we may have some more challenges with that than the rest of you. But are we providing useful headings? Are we thinking about readability? Are we, considering people who are looking at content on a very tiny screen? Or maybe there it's a sunny day. Right? When we focus on thinking about inclusive design and simple structures at the outset of course development, it makes it much easier for our learners to be able to consume the content because they're not blocked out by things that we could have addressed. It also makes it much easier if we're thinking about a blueprint from the start to clone aspects of other courses so learners know exactly what kind of flow to expect. Right? One of my biggest pet peeves personally is that every time you go to the gas station, you have to figure out a new user interface.

Why? I have no idea. It doesn't make any sense. But if you think about it, if you establish a good UI experience from your general course perspective and you can apply that blueprint to all of your courses, you've made it much, much easier on the learner. So in that same vein of creating a repeatable structure, let's talk a bit about how pathways can come into play to improve lifelong learning. Financial pathways can be incredibly useful for learners to track their progress and to tie it back to specific skill sets and growth that they want to experience.

It's the same notion as having a consistent UI is having a consistent way we think about pathways. Historically, we've always looked at role based hiring approaches. You go to school, you get your four year degree, and now you qualify as a job as, for example, a software engineer. But now when we see this focus on away from a four year degree and onto skills attainment, you may have a learner who's come up with a nontraditional way of acquiring skills, but they're really great at Python and JavaScript and CSS and all the skills that are relevant for that even though they did not come out of a four year degree program. So as we leverage hiring credentials instead of role based, we can think about things in terms of providing learners the ability to demonstrate those showcases, which allows us to hire a little bit more smart.

We might be able to take someone who we would never have considered before who might be a tremendous employee if we're looking at it from a skills based perspective. It's also beneficial for designers and educators to give concrete examples of what skills learners should be able to take from their investment of time and apply it to their actual career growth. So as we think about delivering educational programs and marry it with this notion of personal development, we really get to a place where we can reach learners more effectively, and we also let learners get more out of their investment in learning. So a really great example of these pathways is a partnership with L'Oreal, and Mason Community College and Arizona State. So they developed two specific programs with these partners to allow beauty professionals to take the next step in their career.

So generally speaking, beauty professionals have to be fairly self driven, and the training that they receive in aesthetics often doesn't translate to training about how to be a good business person even though you're self employed. So they developed two programs. One, for beauty professionals of the future, which are people who are just getting into their careers, and they're teaching them four fundamentals about how to run your own business within the salon, for example. And then the second is they're beauty professionals embracing transformation, which is for, individuals who've maybe been working several years, but they're ready to open their own place or they're looking to head the salon that they've been working at for a while. And so it's allowing them the ability to grow their own trajectory and, in fact, make more money.

So that partnership has really paid off for several people. And what L'Oreal gets out of it is the more people that they've had a hand in partnering with, the better they're able to work with those professionals, in their own best interest of selling product and additional ongoing training. So thinking about that, that's amazing, but maybe your organization isn't in a place to do those kind of partnerships, and that's okay. Sometimes starting small is the best possible way to develop over time. So one of the things that HR has been talking about for a really long time and a conversation that I've been involved with many times is how do we develop a culture of learning, and what does that even mean? Right? So for many years, we talked about it as a nice tab that it can potentially reward our employees or keep them more engaged and help us with retention.

And as we've seen this change in workforce, what we've realized is that a culture of learning is no longer a nice to have. It's actually become more of an imperative, as HR becomes a more strategic part of every company's, offering to really attract and retain our highest skilled employees. So Emeritus wrote a piece on the how of creating a culture of learning can really impact culture. And one of the things that they think to make this successful is you have to ensure the buy in from leaders to support this culture of learning. And, obviously, we could be talking about that for hours and hours and hours, but it doesn't have to be the executive team as a whole.

Maybe it's leaders of a particular department or a particular discipline. And if they're invested in this capturing higher value talent and keeping it for longer, they're gonna carve out time for learning, And they're gonna make that accessible to the people in their downstream, and hopefully support this career pathing because learning is nice, but learning that doesn't lead someone somewhere isn't perceived as as valuable. So as we think about this culture of learning and providing pathways and feedback and check-in and make sure our learner learners are bought in as well as our leaders, we can start to measure and reward the learning efforts. So one of the best ways to do this, I think, is really to highlight the stories of people who are taking risks and seeing success and the big learnings that they're getting from that. Because sometimes learning what doesn't work is even better than learning what does.

So how do we take these cultures of learning and use them to empower career changes and pivots? Because there are inevitably people who are going to find things as they move through their career trajectory about disciplines they haven't previously considered. I found marking. I had never considered it as a natural outgrowth of my interest in anthropology, but it turned out it actually was. And according to Stanford's research, more than sixty percent of undergraduates are now over the age of twenty five working full time and meeting family obligations or enrolled in the military. So, again, finding that this traditional path of education and then I'm done isn't really realistic for what we have going on in our workforce today, which means that they're not likely to consider themselves as a student full time.

We know that they're not, and they don't identify as just being a student. And sometimes they can't afford to just be a student. So we'll talk about that more in terms of focus later on. But one of the things that I wanted to point out is that we're seeing organizations like FedEx and Starbucks and Target giving their employees more opportunities to grow, especially if they can't really be spending that much time as students. And these are used as methods of retaining more employees and focusing on employ growth as an organizational priority.

And we're starting to see unique ways of filling labor shortages. The rise of return ships for people who are retired part part time or need more flexibility. Perhaps they've left the workforce for a family obligation, and we can return them to a workforce because they're such a valuable employee, but in a different way than they left. We also see more people on a skills based environment be giving more projects that may not be in their official job role, but gives them exposure to things that they are interested in and maybe would not have had a chance to try on before. So for those of you who were present for Melissa Lobel's, ATD webinar, the underlying piece about being a learner is really more of a skills based approach.

For many, many years, we thought about it as students and employees. But if we think about it from a skills based perspective, we're really talking about learning that happens at school and learning that happens in the workforce. So as we think about that, that's inherently based on skills, because it you get skills are what get us ready for the jobs that don't just exist now. They are the ones that are going to exist in the future. So thinking thinking about passing, we really want to talk about aligning to skills.

If we are working in a more traditional environment, we really see, matching employees with the skills they need for that particular job. And so it's not very flexible, and it looks much more like a ladder. So you grade, you get a job, you get your certification skills that are aligned to that job, and then you're sort of locked in forever. But those who are interested in evolving leap or evolving their, learning environment can really develop something that looks both like a ladder and a bridge. Right? So if you're thinking about evolving, you can take people who are instead of grading, you're talking about skills acquisition, maybe a broadband so you can work in this kind of band.

And then you have accountability and role. You have the skills linked role, and then you have some more cross functional career path pathing. And that can be evolved even further. So we shift to something that's really, really linear to something that's much more flexible. And as we think through that, we're really giving people a greater opportunity to check-in with us, to think about more broad based career pathing.

And they may be able to stay with us longer and use those skills more broadly, which benefits us as corporations. So I'm gonna stop for a moment and ask Jess if we have any questions we wanna talk about. Hi, Misty. So one question that came in, a little while back is, can you talk a little bit about how lived and life experiences factor into lifelong learning? Absolutely. This is actually one of my favorite topics, because I think lived experience and life experience should count towards your overall learning package.

Right? It obviously does. My lived experience has clearly, been a huge part of my own career trajectory. So one of the things that we've seen a real rise in in the academic side of the house in the last ten years is this notion of competency based learning. So if you're talking about an institution like Western Governors, for example, they allow for credits or skills attainment based on life experience, and that applies towards the degree or the certification of the program that they're offering. So you can essentially clep out of, that's an old term and maybe, you don't own it, but you can basically bypass certain learning objectives if you've already proven that your life experience has taught you that lesson.

So I think that's a very, very important part of thinking through learning development, particularly on the corporate side. You're not gonna be providing someone who's had ten years of experience and a set of roles the same learning you're gonna be providing someone who's just starting out. And you may not necessarily be able to do a competency based program, but you can infer certain things by the level of experience someone has had that can go into where you drop them into a course, or you can guide them into a specific group of courses that are more designed for where they find themselves. So, hopefully, that answered that question. Yeah.

And so some other questions are coming in around, sort of we're talking about skills based hiring and skills alignment. So one of the questions that came in is just more around recommendations for, let's say, someone or a student who may not be, you know, as motivated, maybe you're interested in learning who's just, you know, more focused on on earning that degree. Sure. I think and I get in trouble when I say things like this occasionally, so bear with me. People are in it for themselves.

Right? We we all know this, and learning is one more thing where people are going to invest in learning because they believe there's an outcome that learning gets them. Right? And for many, many years, it was, I'm gonna go get the degree. And still, that's an important part for many many individuals. But if they're not invested in the learning, they're invested in the outcome. So why is this individual learning? Is it mandated? Because we've all been through, mandated training, and we all know how effective that can be or how engaging that can be versus learning something because it's gonna help us be better at our job or it's gonna help us get that next job, or we just have incredibly high personal interest in the topic.

So if the person is phoning it in in terms of the learning, my recommendation is how do you find the thing that that person ultimately wants? What's the benefit of the learning? And help align that interest or that benefit to what they're being asked to do. Because I think you're gonna get a lot more engagement that way, just because of human nature. Right? I make this investment, and I expect to get something out of it. Okay. What do you what are you looking to get out of it, and how can we make your investment the most relevant? Thank you, Misty.

Another question came in. In skills based hiring, are talent acquisition professionals and HR teams getting better attuned to identifying candidates? Will skills sans a degree? What kinds of skills validation are companies actually valuing when screening candidates? I think it depends on the role. So we know we're in terms of software engineers. There's been a huge movement away from the degree, and I'm speaking very broadly, and much more focus on skills attainment. Whereas, for example, in marketing, less so or sales less so.

But even in more, we'll call them soft skills for lack of a better term, we are seeing a higher degree of skills based questioning in terms of the interview process. So I do think, by and large, most industries are getting better about skills versus degree. But I think often and for most of it, it's still both. Right? I I remember ten years ago having conversations about whether or not we should even hire people if they didn't have a degree. I don't think I've had that conversation in ten years, but we definitely have conversations about, I don't think this person has experience in this skill or that skill, and we think those skills are critical towards them being able to provide this role in our organization.

So I think one of the things that we can do better as we hire is not is it skills versus degrees, but think of it as potentially degrees and skills, or degrees plus skills allows you to say, look. We definitely need someone who knows how to do x, y, and z, and we're gonna we're gonna scream for that before we get to the hiring manager so that we're really only providing candidates who actually have the skills that hiring manager needs even if that hiring manager doesn't necessarily think in terms of skills. So, hopefully, that made sense. Yeah. Thank you, Misty.

So I will go ahead and kick it back over to you, and I will round up a few more questions for another time. Okay. So one of the things that I wanted to sort of wrap us up with is another example. So FedEx had a miserable time in twenty eighteen. And I know this is gonna sound familiar to many of you because many of us live through this challenge of retain retention costs were going through roof because people it was the great resignation.

People were it was the beginning of it. People were leaving. There were better paying jobs. And in FedEx's case, people didn't really feel like FedEx was invested in them, particularly because FedEx was hiring a lot of folks in logistics, and they didn't necessarily have high school diplomas, and they weren't really ready for college. So how could they solve investing in that type of learner to really give them skills that would make them leave less often? So they partnered with the University of Memphis to create a program catered specifically to FedEx employees.

So you could only get access to this program if you worked for FedEx, and you could they developed a performance based admission pathway. So they allowed for four courses that you took. And if you did well enough in those four courses, you would qualify then to get your bachelor's degree through, University of Memphis Global on a six year time frame. So the intent was really you could get your bachelor's degree, through partnering, and setting yourself up, but, through this four course filtering program, but you didn't have to do it in four years. So you could remain working and still do this in a reasonable time frame.

So what they've got now that the program's been running for a while, more than eighty percent of the graduates have advanced within FedEx and did not leave the company. So recruit it's also become a huge, advantage for them in terms of recruitment. They're they're seeing a higher quality of folks and, have aren't really experienced some of the same talent shortfalls that their competitors are because they have this program in place. And, obviously, you can see what it did to retention. So I think learning is fundamental to the way people want to work today.

And examples like the USA Swimming or FedEx can demonstrate how important or if you're familiar with Guild or have worked with Guild, obviously, they're doing exciting stuff. And, you know, when I was at Penn Foster, one of the critical programs that we offered was high school completion to places like FedEx, who are hiring people who didn't have high school diplomas. We could step in and allow those workers to get that degree that they so so critically needed to go on and do other stuff. So I think that for corporations who haven't considered providing learning opportunities as investments for people to really develop their own careers are really missing a recruitment and retention opportunity. So whatever your organization's challenges are, I believe that those focused on evolving the learning experience for the workforce are already on the right path.

No matter how big or how small your attempts are in this area, you still have a lot to contribute. You can be the catalyst for creating environments where the learner that you're delivering this content to are finding opportunities to grow wherever they're at in their careers. And with this rising shift of job functions baked project alignment, I know that organizations are gonna start thriving in this area. Wouldn't we all benefit from understanding that people who are maybe in engineering have a ton to contribute to a a a project that product is doing. And if we understand what those skill sets are, we can get an even greater benefit for the organization even if it doesn't require people moving from job to job.

So with all of that being said, I know we have some more time for questions and more time for discussion. So, Jess, is there anything else people wanted to talk about? Yeah. Absolutely. I have some questions here in the chat. When does having too much credential become counterproductive? Are there recommendations to determine which skills would be beneficial? Well, again, this sort of depends on the job category or the the role category.

There are definitely some roles where you can't have enough skills. I'm particularly thinking around programming, software development, those kind of things, where the more skills you have, the more hirable you are. But there are a lot of people in my experience who pursue credentials or skills based attainment because they think they're going to get an outcome that may not necessarily line up. And that's true personally and professionally. So MBA where they're employed may not help them with career progression, and it may not be relevant necessarily in their career pathway.

They just get an MBA because they think an MBA is gonna help. Right? Mhmm. So I think we need to be mindful about that investment and that return. Right? So if people are gonna invest in learning, they need to get a benefit out of it. And I think understanding that helps us narrow down what are the skills.

Another way of thinking about that, and particularly, in course development, is even if you can't partner with an educational or institution or another employer, talking to competitors or people who are in the same area or academic institutions can really help us determine what skills may be transferable from our organization to other organizations or from other organizations to us. Wow. Those guys are looking for this skill, and maybe that's something that would be really important for us. And we wanna make that part of our our learning journey for x role. So I think that's another take on it.

So, hopefully, that's helpful too. Mhmm. Thank you. Yeah. So another question that I'm seeing here in the chat is, on the topic of the difference between a learner and then being educated and being credentialed and the difference between all of those things.

So what is your definition or sort of how would you answer that? I would say a a learner is forever. Right? We are all learners all the time. We Yeah. From day one, we start to learn. Right? Whereas becoming educated or being educated is more around getting that specific credential, which in this case is a diploma.

Right? So Yeah. We have historically really thought of education as a box. Education is evolving to out of that box. So even though it was sort of our conversation about, degree versus skills, For many of us, you need both, and that's because that our world has been structured on needing degrees. So I think we're gonna see a lot more evolution towards skills over time, but I think we're kind of in that mid range where you kinda need both.

Yeah. Great point. Thank you, Misty. So another question that I have for you is, is there any room in this world for what we what we used to know and call as, like, the liberal arts education? Right? So where one person ends up with this broader, more well rounded worldview and just in addition to just the focused work skill. Oh, I hope so.

I I would die if there weren't because I have one of those liberal arts degrees. Right? And so do I. Right? You're like, how do I have history over here in English? Right? Yes. Because learning in a formal environment is also beneficial. Right? Having a broad view and being exposed to different ideas and different thought leaders even and the history of of how things have come to be helps you make connections with more concrete skills.

The broader you think, the more you can apply those skills. So skills can be relevant in addition to just very concrete things, and they can also build on top of a more broad foundation. So I think that that's critical. I would be horribly sad in my own experience if I had only had skills attainment, whereas my husband, as an engineer, couldn't be bothered with a more liberal education. Right? It's all about what you can do and build in skills.

And that's just Yeah. You know, the different paths we've chosen. Right. Yeah. Thank you, Misty.

So what I'll do is I will kick it back to you, to share any thing that is forthcoming or anything exciting, any new research maybe that's going on at Instructure that you may wanna share with our attendees while I round up any last minute questions in the chat. Okay. Well, thank you so much. That was really the end of the presentation. We are actually constantly partnering with research partners to understand more about the evolution of degrees versus skills versus this pathway where people are coming in and out of formal education and really expecting a lot of education in the workforce.

So, hopefully, we'll have some more data to be able to share with you guys in the upcoming quarters as we as we are always asking those question. Alright. So I am looking through, and I don't see any other questions in the chat. So, actually, I do see one last question about, therapists and counselors. What do you think? What what do you think peep what do you think people like therapists and counselors would be required to have? That's the last question that came in.

I think on that particular discipline, it's not a discipline I claim any knowledge of. But I do believe that there is the formal education and the practical education. Right? And so today, that's structured as in learning, and then you have whatever requirement for clinical hours, which is the practical piece. The clinical hours, as far as I understand right now, don't necessarily tie to or result in skills credentialing, but I think I think that they should evolve to that because counseling is a skill. Being able to, read between the lines is a skill.

There are all kinds of skills that people learn on the job, but we may or may not quantify those yet. But I think that in the future, those things are gonna become more quantifiable so that people who are, say, really good at reading between the lines can become better at, say, their delivery, right, or how they bring people along, etcetera, etcetera. So I think there's always gonna be room for school, and there's always gonna be room for non traditional learning. And how that balances is gonna depend on where you are and what you wanna know. Thank you so much, Misty.

Alright. And I don't see any other questions in the chat, so I will go ahead and close this out for today. Thank you so much, Misty, and thank you to Instructure for today's presentation. Thank you to all of our attendees for your questions and your participation, and I hope everyone has a great day. Thank you again.

Thank you, Jess. I really appreciate, and I'm honored to have been here, and I wanna thank everyone who participated. It was an absolute delight. And now I'm gonna turn it over to Regina. Alright.

Perfect. Thank you so much. This actually concludes today's webinar. Thank you all for attending. The recording will be available at webcast dot t d dot o r g. We will send all registrants an email tomorrow with that link. And please visit our event calendar to sign up for future webcast.