Giving Compass' Take:

• The college-to-career pipeline is changing, along with the ecosystem of the workplace.  Employers are now focusing on acquiring talent that future employees can provide over their credentials, and are willing to devote training and development programs to employees already at companies. 

• How will this change disrupt how young people view credentials and education?

• Take a look at the success of talent-investing in the nonprofit sector and how foundations made this decision to benefit all everyone involved. 

The postsecondary education sector is on a collision course with the world of work.

Entrepreneurs and investors, government leaders, foundations and others are increasingly framing their goals around the concept of developing “talent”–or human capital–with less regard to where and how the education takes place.

Talent as the organizing principle for activity in the higher education and employment sectors is driven by the convergence of skills demands in the economy; evolutions in public policy; trends in venture and philanthropic investment; and new technology developments.

The bigger picture is that we’re going through a period of change some have called the “second machine age” that is driving a need to focus on talent, as 80 percent of “middle-skill” jobs today require digital skills.

From the perspective of corporate leaders, “talent strategy” can be thought of as encompassing both talent acquisition (hiring) and talent development (classically referred to as “training”).

However, it’s important to keep in mind that the market for experienced talent–recruiting, developing and credentialing the tens of millions of adults who are already in the workforce–is many times larger than the traditional college-to-career pipeline that captures so much attention. And the ecosystem to support professional and lifelong learning is growing to include a host of options, ranging from employers themselves to start-up providers, as well as colleges and universities.

Employers’ talent-development strategies and investments are also evolving rapidly. Companies today are increasingly likely to promote microlearning approaches that provide employees with short-form learning that may eventually stack into a larger credential.

Employers are identifying and acquiring talent through a wider range of sources, and employees and employers have more choices than ever in an open market for learning and development content and credentials—across a wide ecosystem of players and providers.

Read the full article about talent acquisition by Sean Gallagher at EdSurge