Friday Five: Closing the Guidance Gap

1. Springboard jobs. A new report from JFF evaluates career advancement prospects of people entering middle-skill jobs through the unprecedented analysis of nearly 4 million resumes of middle-skill jobseekers. It highlights the types of occupations that offer the strongest opportunities for financial stability and true economic advancement. We appreciate how they highlighted “springboard jobs” that offer a decent starting wage and upside potential.

2. Alt postsec. The Guardian highlighted college alternative including degree apprenticeships where you work while you learn. Video producer Joe Wilson said about his employees, “I don’t know any of their qualifications. I know their experience. I can list the shows they’ve worked on. But I don’t know if they went to university – because that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is what you bring to the table.”

It’s increasingly a show what you know world.

3. Co-construction. Pike Road Schools serves a suburb of Montgomery, Alabama. The K-9 system (is adding a grade a year) seeks to “create a culture of intellectual curiosity where all students have ownership over their learning and are inspired to think, innovate, and create.”

An Education Reimagined profile described how high school students will engage in “service projects and authentic learning experiences with community leaders as well as furthering partnerships with higher education. This will allow for mentoring by adults who share learners’ passions and interests. These business and industry partners will co-design and co-facilitate with lead learners.”  

4. AI-construction. I spoke to a college sophomore in video production this week. She hadn’t heard of automated content creation. For a couple years, AI has been kicking out pretty good video trailers. Every field has been augmented.

Now poetry. Microsoft used AI to write poetry in Mandarin. Jack Clark said it’s becoming easy to “train machines to create synthetic media in a variety of different mediums.”

“Where it gets interesting will be what happens when young human writers become inspired by poetry or fiction they have read which has been generated entirely via an AI system,” added Clark. “Let the human-machine art-recursion begin!”

5. AI+Advisor. Brooklyn based Concourse Global Enrollment just raised $2 million to build a guidance system to match high school students with international postsecondary opportunities. “We have built the industry’s first matching technology platform that enables high schools and universities to collaborate to find opportunities for students,” said Joe Morrison, Concourse CEO.

5 Discoveries

Org: YouScience combines your aptitudes and interest to help build a personalized career path. YouScience is a Nashville startup that has raised $17.7 million in three rounds.

Resources: Cardonex, new school scheduling software (@CardonexSaves) from Education Advanced in Tyler Texas.

Book: That’s What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together, a new book by Joanne Lipman, former editor-in-chief of USA Today.

Event: The iNACOL Symposium will be held on October 21-24, 2018 in Nashville. The theme is “Driving the Transformation of Learning.” It’s the best convening on personalized and competency-based learning.

Pic: Active learning on the first day of school at the Young Women’s STEAM Preparatory Academy in El Paso. The second-year school is the first single sex school in the New Tech Network and ninth NTN school in EPISD.

See last week’s Friday Five: Career Ed Rising