How is the pandemic is reshaping jobs and careers and how education can respond? A conversation with the Project on Workforce
Professor on Workforce Faculty Co-Directors Peter Blair and David Deming were joined by Harvard Business School Professor Raffaella Sadun for a conversation with the Harvard Graduate School of Education on how the pandemic is reshaping jobs and careers and how education can respond.
Well before the pandemic, a group of educators and economists saw glitches on the pathway from school to career. Workplaces — increasingly collaborative and digital — needed skills, capacities, and mindsets that job candidates weren’t bringing. For too many job seekers, access to the job market was blocked by inequity, discrimination, and licensing barriers, putting meaningful careers out of reach. And jobs themselves were changing, requiring new leadership skills and candidates who could thrive in uncertainty.
And then the pandemic arrived, to upend and reinvent our workplaces right in front of us. Did the pandemic usher us into a future that was already coming? How can we shape that future so that barriers are lowered and opportunity is broad? How should educators and school leaders prepare their students — and what are the skills that will matter most in the workplaces of today and tomorrow?