The Great Skills Gap: Optimizing Talent for the Future of Work. This item is unavailable.The Great Skills Gap: Optimizing Talent for the Future of Work

An extraordinary confluence of forces stemming from automation and digital technologies is transforming both the world of work and the ways we educate current and future employees to contribute productively to the workplace.

The Great Skills Gap opens with the premise that the exploding scope and pace of technological innovation in the digital age is fast transforming the fundamental nature of work. Due to these developments, the skills and preparation that employers need from their talent pool are shifting. The accelerated pace of evolution and disruption in the competitive business landscape demands that workers be not only technically proficient, but also exceptionally agile in their capacity to think and act creatively and quickly learn new skills.

This book explores how these transformative forces are―or should be―driving innovations in how colleges and universities prepare students for their careers. Focused on the impact of this confluence of forces at the nexus of work and higher education, the book's contributors―an illustrious group of leading educators, prominent employers, and other thought leaders―answer profound questions about how business and higher education can best collaborate in support of the twenty-first century workforce.

Jason Wingard is Dean Emeritus and Professor of Human Capital Management at Columbia University School of Professional Studies. He is the former Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs and Vice Dean of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Learning to Succeed: Reinventing Corporate Education in a World of Unrelenting Change, and co-author of Learning for Life: How Continuous Education Will Keep Us Competitive in the Global Knowledge Economy (both with AMACOM, 2015).Christine Farrugia is Director of Research Initiatives at Columbia University School of Professional Studies.