The path from education to employment used to be straightforward, but with fewer permanent jobs available and a glut of graduates, youth unemployment is a now major issue. Around 25% of under-25s in the Eurozone were reported to be unemployed at the end of 2013, while in the UK, there are 3.74 times more jobless under-25s than the national average. At the same time, higher education costs are rocketing – in the US, these have gone up 400% since 1980.

For the majority of young people, the traditional go-to-university, get-a-job, build-a-career life plan clearly isn’t working any more. We’ve already seen in our Generation Risk story on page 50 how this climate is changing attitudes, with a new set of workers opting to take matters into their own hands and invent jobs.

According to Enternships data, over half of all graduates don’t feel that higher education has prepared them for the world of work and over half of all employers agree. Whether they’re UK students paying out £9,000 for a university education, or those in the US racking up the country’s $1 trillion in student debt, it’s now imperative that learners get value for money.

“Students are now clients and they are voting with their feet – they’re demanding more out of their education, and will go wherever offers the best value,” comments Gensler senior associate Maria Nesdale. According to a poll by Time Magazine and the Carnegie Corporation, 80% of US adults believe that the education received at most colleges is not worth the financial cost incurred; 41% of college presidents and senior administrators agree.

One of the key elements of the new value equation is the question “Will this course land me a job?”, so brand-savvy students are looking or opportunities to bridge the gap between business and education in innovative ways. “The relationship between learning and work is getting closer every year,” says Nesdale. “Universities are starting to adopt corporate methods, while big companies are getting more involved with learning.”


Femi Bola MBE, director of employability and student enterprise at the University of East London, is collaborating with major London businesses to give students insight into the real requirements of the modern workplace. “The skills needed by employers are rarely fostered in traditional education: they’re looking for business acumen, great written and spoken communication, and an entrepreneurial attitude,” she says.

Entrepreneurial spirit is not lacking in the current crop of university students and graduates. A 2013 survey by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that 54% of US Millennials want to start their own business or have already started one, while Bank of Montreal data suggests that 46% of students want to start their own business. The new wave of learning institutions aims to address that entrepreneurial pursuit of creativity, freedom and autonomy.


The UK’s Enternships and New York-based Enstitute help entrepreneurial students and graduates find internships and apprenticeships with startups, to help inform their own plans and business sense. Chicago’s Starter School and the Boston-based Startup Institute are reinventing traditional business schools for entrepreneurs by offering courses that focus less on management theory and more on knowledge that’s directly applicable to current

Companies want graduates to be ‘oven\-ready and self\-basting’. They don’t just expect them to have academic skills but to hit the ground running

market needs. Starter School’s nine-month course on the coding, design and business skills to build web apps is not cheap at $33,000, but still beats the six-figure fees for leading MBA courses. Both schools emphasise their connection to industry. Startup Institute students work with real startups, while Starter School participants spend three days a week working on projects for businesses such as Twitter’s Bluefin Labs.

It’s not just about breaking out on your own, though: many students and graduates are looking for innovative courses that augment traditional qualifications and boost their employment options. Hyper Island and General Assembly are very modern learning institutions, offering courses in highly marketable skills including app development, data analysis, digital strategy and user experience design.

Matt Cynamon, regional director at General Assembly, says: “Our curriculum is based on the skills employers are currently looking for, so the support we offer our students is about not just teaching them, but helping them find employment and using what they’ve learnt in a practical way.” The idea seems to be working: General Assembly reports that 97% of the graduates of its 12-week immersive programmes find paid work within 90 days of graduating, and it now has campuses in innovation capitals including Sydney, London, New York, San Francisco and Berlin.

These kinds of education incubators – to borrow a term from the startup world – are just part of education’s new guard. As Megan Cole, Mozilla’s marketing and community strategy lead, points out: “Today, modern learning institutions are empowering learning to go beyond just the traditional classroom and thrive in the online environment. They rely on technology as a way to help extend and transform learning all across the world.” Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been hailed as the future of education, with venerable institutions from Harvard and MIT to Princeton and King’s College London throwing their hats into the ring.

Leading MOOCs include Udacity, with over 750,000 registered users worldwide; edX, which offers over 100 short online courses to its 1.8m students; and Coursera, which serves four million learners. While each site has a different approach to teaching, all offer short, degree-level online courses that help to boost users’ knowledge for free, in subjects from artificial intelligence for robotics to the science of everyday thinking. American institutions are leading the way, with recent estimates suggesting that 32% of US students have taken at least one online course.

Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of the Open University, which is behind the UK’s FutureLearn MOOC site, says: “Time and again we have seen the disruptive impact the internet can have on industries – driving innovation and enhancing the customer experience. I have no doubt MOOCs will do the same for education – offering people new and exciting ways to learn.”

While some of the initial excitement around MOOCs has died down, partly due to the large numbers of people who drop out of courses before the end, new elements are being introduced to give them greater relevance to business, from new qualification standards such as Mozilla’s Open Badges to brand- sponsored courses. Udacity is working with six major companies, including Google and Microsoft, to create classes in high-value skills such as 3D graphics and Android app development, while branding giant Wolff Olins has partnered with FutureLearn to develop a course called The Secret Power of Brands.

Illustrations by Viktor Hachmang

The relationship between brands and learning is also becoming more powerful. The Red Bull Music Academy brings together aspiring musicians with lectures by music luminaries, studio mentoring and performing opportunities. The academy, which lands in a different global city every few months is pitched as “a place that’s equal parts science lab, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Kraftwerk’s home studio”.

In a similar vein, Converse is offering new skills and inspiration to young people through its Rubber Tracks initiative, which allows young musicians to record at a state-of-the art studio with the support of experienced engineers. Rubber Tracks has expanded to Asia, Europe and Latin America and the brand has also launched its CONS series as a way to offer new skills, with talks and hands-on workshops including How to Make a Music Video, How to Make Beats and How to Record Rock Music.

As part of its MakeOurMark programme, denim brand Levi’s has partnered with online learning community Skillshare to offer short $10 courses in niche skills from leading practitioners. These include Brock Davis’s animating stop-motion video classes and New York tattoo star Bang Bang’s course on designing meaningful tattoos.

But it’s not merely nice-to-know subjects that brands are getting involved with – they’re also attempting to boost need-to-know skills including literacy, business acumen and even basic web usage. Intel’s She Will Connect programme aims to close the gender gap in tech iteracy by offering a gamified online learning platform and launching a global peer network, so that women can share experiences and learn from each other. The programme aims to reach five million women worldwide and reduce the web-usage gender gap by 50%.


Less altruistic, but also offering key skills, are the growing number of corporate degrees, which help young people gain the skills needed by a company as part of their degree, rather than once they leave education. As Femi Bola puts it, “companies want graduates to be ‘oven-ready and self-basting’. They don’t just expect them to have academic skills but to hit the ground running.” This is why companies as diverse as KPMG, Rolls-Royce, Barclays, Tesco and Harrods are all sponsoring undergraduate degrees for school-leavers. Graduates get the exact knowledge needed by the company, simultaneous work experience and a guaranteed job at the end of it.

While learning is getting more focused on niche and marketable skills, experts agree that there’s still a place for traditional college education. “Higher education can give people the opportunity to understand themselves, as well as how to learn and reflect on their ideas,” says Bola. The future of education will see learners creating their own combinations of formal education, brand interventions, specialist online courses, entrepreneurial training and commercial connections.

“Learning today looks very different than previously imagined,” observes Cole. “Learning is not just ‘seat time’ within schools, but extends across multiple contexts, experiences and interactions. It is no longer just an isolated or individual concept, but is inclusive, social, informal, participatory, creative and lifelong.”