S03E21 - Ken Eisner on Global Trends in Education, the Workforce, and Leadership | Ken Eisner

In this episode of Build Momentum, Sarah and Katie are joined by Ken Eisner. Ken is currently a Consulting Advisor with Avathon Capital, a Special Partner at Good Harbor Partners, and a Senior Advisor at New Markets Venture Partners. He is the former Director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services’ Global Learning Systems.

Some Questions We Ask:

• What have you been up to since leaving Amazon earlier this year? (00:56)
• What do you think about the shifts in higher education? (03:23)
• What is the most effective way to evaluate microcredentials? (09:05)
• How can you apply the lessons you’ve learned through working in education with the government and private sectors? (16:21)
• What tips can you share for those who want to secure investments? 
• What is your advice for those who want to elevate their profile and establish their platform within the education sphere? 
• What are your predictions for education in the future? 

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• About Ken’s life after Amazon (01:00)
• His thoughts about higher education (03:57)
• To evaluate microcredentials (09:23)
• How Ken applied the lessons he learned in education (16:51)
• His advice and tips for securing funds 
• His advice for those who want to establish a platform in education 
• Ken’s thoughts and predictions for education in the future 

Quotes:

“There are two systems of learning: Education from elementary school to middle school to secondary school to higher ed, and then there's corporate training, which really should be the lifelong learning path. Higher ed traditionally focuses on civic mindedness and an elite education—at least, that's the roots of it— while corporate training puts the round peg of learning into the square hole of people who are selling widgets or services.”

“We know that the ‘sage on the stage’ is a foregone educational experiment. It worked for a period of time, for various reasons, but it needs to evolve.” 

“‘Have backbone, disagree, and commit’ is one of my favorite leadership principles. As a leader, how are you encouraging debate within your organization? How are you reaching out to every person in your organization and ensuring their voice is heard?”

Connect with Ken:
Ken Eisner's LinkedIn
ken.eisner@gmail.com

Stay in touch with Sarah Williamson:
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About "The Secret to Transformational Leadership," which Sarah co-authored with Dr. Quintin Shepherd:
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Transcript

Sarah Williamson  00:04
Hello and welcome to Build Momentum, a show where we explore thought leadership and education. I'm Sarah Williamson, the founder of SWPR Group.

Katie Lash  00:13
And I'm Katie Lash, the director of the East Central Educational Service Center.

Sarah Williamson  00:17
Together, we explore how to leverage key partners, your constituencies, and the media to authentically impact your organizations and the leaders who champion them. We can't wait to get started. So let's dive into today's show. On today's episode, we have Ken Eisner, who was most recently the Director of Worldwide Education Programs for Amazon Web Services, where he founded Amazon Educate. Amazon's global initiative to dramatically accelerate cloud learning and prepare students for a cloud enabled workforce. Wow, we're so lucky to have you on the show today. Welcome, Ken.

Ken Eisner  00:54
Thanks. Great to be here.

Katie Lash  00:56
Can we know that you recently left Amazon? So share with us now what you're up to?

Ken Eisner  01:00
Yeah, absolutely. I left Amazon back in January, after almost a decade there. My primary work done was with Amazon Web Services Educate or AWS Educate, which I founded and built, I also got a chance to work on Amazon's next generation learning system, which was at the intersection of skill development and learning science and AI. And then I got an up close and personal view with some of Amazon's big things in the space, whether it was apprenticeships, education is benefit through the Career Choice Program online learning marketplaces, Amazon business iterations, and even various assortment of Amazon university offerings that never came to light. But it was fantastic to see Amazon going through that. And then a guy connection with Amazon processes from our learning from the leadership principles like think big, or it's trust, bias for action, have backbone, disagree and commit. And that tie in with the narrative structure, I just wanted to give that context for where I go, because Amazon's an interesting place. It's an exciting place. It's a difficult place. But there's so many really cool things that you bring from there to the next place. So right now, yeah, I've been deeply passionate about the education and workspace, career readiness, space, HR tech, and that connection between a learner and their career, what they really want most from education, no matter how many people push back and say no, it's about that civic mindedness. And being an erudite individual, really what they want is a career. And that's what I'm devoting, my my life my career towards. So I'm working at the intersection between advisory services and investment, advising or sitting on boards for various education entities, and also working with the education capital sector to develop an educational work thesis, I work in hand in hand with Avathon capital in the private equity space, new markets, Venture Partners in the venture capital space, and with Good Harbor partners on sellside, mergers and acquisitions.

Sarah Williamson  03:23
That's so great. I think it's so important for us to think about the future for these kids, but in a way that's actually going to be meaningful to them. Because we can prepare kids how to do math, all these things, but let's get them ready for the real world and careers and how that's changing so quickly. And I want to talk about that in the next question. So I'm curious, Ken, what you think about higher ed? Because that's been shifting so much in terms of what is the value of a degree? I know, I think college will always be important to many people. But how is that changing? I feel like it's changing at a rapid pace too

Ken Eisner  03:57
Yeah, I think what we really need to do when looking at career readiness is first talk about what is the need or opportunity and what gap currently is there between what higher ed provides primarily in terms of that degree, and what learners need? Obviously, there's a giant skill cap, there are new careers that are coming about like a massive growth in robotics, actually. Yeah, at Amazon a few years back, I looked at the number one search term in terms of what was going on in the workspace. And if the biggest growth was in robotics, disappearing careers like those are that are honestly will be, are being automated away the things that don't tend to differentiate under differentiated skill sets, and the things that we're not preparing people for at the level that we're need like a technical product manager or nursing. There are two systems of learning that I say it's the staccato based at Education from elementary school to middle school to secondary school to higher ed are post secondary. And then there's corporate training, which really should be the Lifelong Learning Path. Higher Ed traditionally focus on civic mindedness and an elite education, at least that's the roots and corporate training, which is putting the round peg of learning into the square hole of people who are selling widgets or services. But now they're becoming learning entities. It's currently institution focus within higher ed institutions, which traditionally been focused on a large bundle of stuff called a degree. Within the corporation, you have corporations that Bill bring in technical subject matter experts that are coming out of various departments within the organization being repurpose for learning. But most importantly, there's nothing connecting these two systems together. So you have a higher ed institution, and you have workforce, and all this stuff in the middle is missing. In a true readiness, career readiness effort. Your two biggest customers are your learner, and that is the most important customer. And then actually, it's the corporation. This doesn't mean that the educational institution are the educator is lower down the totem pole, actually, they should be elevated and providing learning throughout a learner's life, which is then going into the corporation, and providing that learning that's traditionally provided by a corporate training department that's not really ideally situated to do that. And also bringing the infrastructure into that organization. This causes the learning to be scalable, it needs to scale to meet mass learner needs, it needs to drive impact that's driving learner capability development, but it's also driving impact into the organization such as, is a software developer gain quicker to their 15th code commit or is a salesperson getting on boarded so quickly, that they're in front of their customer nearly immediately after joining a company in their building, pipeline, and so on. How do you actually connect that skill development that capability and competency development to the impact of that learner on the organization? How are they driving value, it elevates the role of the educator and learning throughout the learners life because you're constantly switching jobs constantly switching careers, constantly needing to know new stuff. Lifelong learning is often something that we say, but we don't really have true stuff to leverage against that meaning, again, degrees are a bundle of stuff. And often it's not career aligned stuff. Often it's indecipherable. And, most often, it's not measurable and certainly not measurable to the work outcome. We are seeing some progress in this. Governments are aligning to that workforce outcome. We're seeing scaling of education, obviously within the WGUs and Southern New Hampshire's and ASUs and abroad, we're seeing that as well. We're seeing growth and competency based education, work based learning and scaling of apprenticeships and virtual internships, education as a benefit programs are growing, micro credentialing and portable learning records are growing. But we're really at an incipient stage in what I see. Is this true educational work architecture?

Katie Lash  09:05
Yes, you segue to sell perfectly? It's my question. This is actually something that my agency we've been involved in trying to help in the K 12 space. So how do you recommend effectively evaluating microcredentials? Or, more broadly speaking, all credentialing to whether or not they're actually data driven? How do you give them currency of sorts?

Ken Eisner  09:23
Yeah, I want to credit like Joe May, just the other day he posted I think he wrote an article Joe May the Chancellor Emeritus of Dallas college that has done some fantastic work within the community college space and has really been an advocate as have a number of other people within that connection between educational work and he puts the question, you know really well around, how are we evaluating and measuring? There has been a proliferation of micro credentials on one, two tons of stuff. And then too many varietals of the same thing. This is most often probably come up in data analytics where you have I don't know how many flavors of data analytics, it's great to see the bundling of skills. But one, what are the underlying skills to those micro credentials? Or credential? What is the job skill map? What is the underlying taxonomy or ontology that underlies that? And how do those aligned to jobs? Are you clearly publishing what those elements are? And are you testing them to ensure that when you get placement within side companies, too, you get acceleration of opportunities within side, those companies, three, their stack to enable people to climb up? So it's not an ending credential? And most importantly, again, are they creating an impact? So what's the structure? And how are we measuring them is absolutely vital. And I think people are missing those intermediate steps far too often, in the vein of saying, I've got a new badge, I've got a new credential. And also, it's not brain science to figure out what the main structure of data analytics are a healthcare x, or a financial support, why skill set are and the thing that I use skills very broadly to say knowledge, skills, and abilities or knowledge and capabilities or competencies. So on there are absolutely hard and soft, you know, again, I love the term soft skills, either that bring all this together, but it's not brain science to say these are those elements that compose that, yes, you're learning science that is applied to that can get into much more higher levels of learning. But what are they? And are they measurable? And are we measuring to the right thing?

Katie Lash  12:20
Yeah, measuring at scale to like to make them a shared language among all of the stakeholders that need to be involved, right. That's something that our work daily we're trying to think about. So if we can get that school building to adopt the language, what about the school district? And then what about across the region? And then what about making that information, you know, that the K 12 language align with the higher ed partners and employers and

Ken Eisner  12:44
absolutely, and the other thing, and this is one thing that's in massive failures that people publish these credentials, regions publish credentials, this was done it within the Washington, DC, your region around a whole bunch of schools, make sure in order for them to actually be currency, somebody has to be buying, using as exchange. So companies need to have skin in the game in terms of hiring. When I was with AWS Educate, we did something called an interview accelerator, which says, You know x student, if you have shown competency in a bundle of skills, microcredentials online pathway, whatever, then you get first in the line for job. Now there's various reasons why it first in the line for job that follow HR rules, as opposed to actually get a job. But you need the employer on the other side, and a collection of employer saying we are going to put these people first in the line for interviews or hire them.

Katie Lash  13:53
I also sorry, I'm sabotaging this Sara, your question is next. But I also think about this philosophically, it's all over the board in terms of what people are willing to credential or what people are willing to badge if you will. And you know, sometimes it's just like, you sat in this room. So you got the badge. And that's hard. When that's happening, right? Are we actually validating a skill set? And then that's a whole different conversation. And so I bring that up to say what some people are calling a badge or what some people are calling a micro credential or credential is not necessarily what I personally would perceive as something that we can validate and demonstrate competency. Those are so different.

Ken Eisner  14:27
Yeah. 100%. What I think is missing in a lot of this is what I call the middleware that exists b It's kind of like your when you saw in the old days, you had the I think I have to date myself.

Sarah Williamson  14:42
The old days, they love it.

Ken Eisner  14:44
Yeah, this is the old days for me. We moved into the cell and mobile world, you had control of that ecosystem. You're in the hardware, you know, ie the device, so a Motorola device would onboard you as some onboarding software but you had control there, and then you had the carrier, Verizon AT&T would have what was coming through their channel, you need it that this middle, this OS in the middle, you needed Apple to come in with the iPhone and create this operating system that fundamentally changed mobile. What you need now is this middleware that exists between education, the corporation, and in that middleware is this job skills, taxonomy or ontology, the learner record, and the portability of that learner record? Absolutely. Those assessment engines that are validating those skills, and then the flow of data that exists between the learner accomplishments and what they're doing. You're on in the flow work and often, like, these solutions are point solutions instead of thinking of that overall architecture.

Sarah Williamson  16:03
Yeah, that's great. Well, I'll date myself real quick. When my dad had a pager. And my mom, I remember her angrily paging him on a regular basis. That was funny thinking about those days.

Ken Eisner  16:18
I had the luggage phone. Yeah.

Sarah Williamson  16:21
Okay, so I'm curious. Through your work, you've done a lot of really large scale public private partnerships, globally. So I'd love to understand how you think all the lessons you've learned through that working with government and working with the private sector, How can we apply those same principles to help students advanced technology, resources and opportunity for students just help them learn through these collaborations and creative ways to work together with those entities?

Ken Eisner  16:51
Yeah, we had a lot of success with public private partnerships with AWS Educate. Yeah. And it's probably a similar methodology that I'd use in any world. And actually, the companies that I'm advising in the capital opportunities, you're sitting on boards, so it started with some amazing people who really cared about their students in their community inside Los Angeles. We started working with the Los Angeles Community Colleges began with Santa Monica College, I got shoutouts to Patricia Ramos, who was the Dean of Academic and workforce or the dean of workforce at the time, and Howard Stahl is heading the computer science and Co to call who was this amazing teacher, you know, who really cared about getting their students, which were, obviously majority, you know minority students within side that college with pathways into cloud computing. So we had developed this innovation called the cloud competency framework, which was that backwards from work skills, taxonomy. So that taxonomy turns out that it's a translation debate vice between workforce and education. We research the 28 most in demand jobs in the cloud and cloud architecture and web development. And the data sciences and AI and cloud Ops is including cybersecurity and the level one through three, knowledge, skill and ability to attain those jobs. We worked with Santa Monica College to map some of their beginning curriculum. First, it was a couple courses to this framework. They brought other colleges community colleges within the Los Angeles, this was supported at the time by Yeah, I believe Obama-Biden's some of the work that they were doing with these high tech public private partnerships, and they were supporting some of those community colleges with funding and investment and various companies within the area on this LA high tech coalition. Fast forward the work round, they rolled out some certificate programs, so multiple course programs that were really successful at recruiting people in high demand occupations with a bunch of companies surrounding them waiting to hire their students and collaborate on their curriculum, as well as the lever of the mayor of LA and so on. And you include federal workforce dollars to make this happen because of the success and because of the willingness of all players from education to companies to government to collaborate with other communities. We came up with a program called the Cloud Degree Program. And this program we worked with states and countries to map their existing and new degree and non degree curriculum to the cloud and partner with economic and workforce development agencies, the government, governors and lieutenant governors inside these states and country ministers abroad as well as sometimes with nonprofits to create large and scalable educational workforce program across the entire state of Virginia. We did this Oh, we also work with community colleges. Yeah. And Amazon, you try to create flywheels. And so we were creating a flywheel from community colleges to four year institutions, back to high school with early college, pre college programs, and direct into the workforce because of their edge, their workforce nature. And we wouldn't go with the whole sector at once we pick a couple places or a couple colleges, companies that really were willing to move fast had some top down leadership and bottoms up by end around creating these programs in the nature of benefiting their learners, as well as benefiting local workforce development. We did across the entire state of Virginia, we did it across the entire state of Texas, Louisiana, Utah, we did it you to a large extent within Ohio, we worked with HBCUs historically black colleges and Universities and MSI within these states than we've brought abroad to the UK with Career College trust, India, and Andhra Prakash, Singapore, Malaysia, Bahrain, Colombia. And that model was replicable. It was scalable, we used online players in it as well. But workforce development is something that all of these communities can get behind. In Kentucky, where you had this coal to code initiative in Ohio, where manufacturing was being displace up across all of these sectors, there was this tremendous buy in and technology is not just within the high tech industry, manufacturing, health care, yet financial services, they're all being impacted by technology. So it doesn't have to be that campaign is around driving high tech workers can be around driving your workforce, in advanced manufacturing, and so on non automatable skills at all. But you get a point where many sectors wanting to move, you get, you know, individuals and leaders who are committed and committed to saying we've got to go this way. And we've got to go fast. You get government tie in for a whole number of reasons from political and PR, but also to that community development be and you can make things move, you're at high levels, and I was so excited to work constantly with leaders who were devoted to making change.

Sarah Williamson  23:16
Are you looking to build brand awareness and expand your impact as an organization, but maybe you're struggling to find the ROI with your general marketing and PR efforts, it could be time to try something a little different. At SWPR Group, we approach every organization through the lens of how we can help them add the most value to the conversations that are happening in education today for one of our clients, the Institute for Education innovation, this led to the launch of Supe's choice, an award that we co created to build incredible brand awareness and his firmly established organization as an industry leader driving impact growth and awareness on every level. What will your success story be? Let me know when you're ready to get started. Reach out at Sarah with an H at sarah@swpr-group.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Katie Lash  24:10
That's fantastic. Can we be friends after this? I want to pick your brain on a bunch of things. 

Ken Eisner  24:15
 Of course, we can definitely be friends.

Katie Lash  24:18
So your role now you mentioned that you're a little bit more on the side of consulting and working with investors. So if listeners are looking to secure funding, put on your investor hat share with us what they need to consider as they approached venture groups. 

Ken Eisner  24:31
I want to highlight the two companies on the investment side that I'm working with most directly: Avathon Capital and Good Harbor Partners. In addition to my role as a senior advisor to new markets venture partners, what was important to me was focusing on entities that were diving deep into education to work, which necessarily involves both the changing nature of education and the future of work. These NS entities focus on that bullseye to give your listener. 

Here's a quick overview. Avathon capital is a $400 million investment firm focused on fostering innovation and impact across the Education Workforce Management markets. The purpose-driven firm backs founder-led or founder-run organizations that have approached an inflection point and are looking for growth capital to accelerate needed investments, scale profitability, and expand impact. Avathon focus areas include globalizing education, leveraging advanced analytics, reshaping learner experience with AI, and promoting workforce development via partnerships and collaborations between education government and corporations. 

Good Harbor Partners, or GHP, is a boutique M&A advisory and outsource corporate development firm focused on the education, education work, and talent development ecosystem. GHP's work spans the education and learning sectors from K-12 to post-secondary to corporate training and lifelong learning along with the interconnected tool systems and platforms that support these sectors. GHP leverages decades of operational success in these sectors—taking a long view and a very passionate hands-on approach to deliver a track record of successful outcomes for its clients. 

I've got four quick takeaways for founders. First of all, and really importantly, explore opportunities before you need to maximize your optionality and flexibility. While firms such as Avathon and GHP are going to be great at the transaction point, they also ask the right questions that can open doors to potential partners and set you up for the best opportunity. GHP's outsource corporate development function, which is aligned to this M&A practice, does exactly that. 

Two, think about your story. Does it scale? Is it comprehensive? What technology do you need? Do you have the right people in place to deliver on your vision? Is a fundraise the right path? And or would it make sense to partner or align with something bigger? 

Three, what's your data and impacts story? Good investors are going to dig behind a good narrative into the data and the data models that underlie it. 

And lastly, develop relationships with these potential advisors. Earning trust is a two-way street. And spending time to get to know your investors and how they can add value is vital. Like Amazon's have backbone, disagree, and commit principle. You want to be able to have a thoughtful, open, data-driven discussions and debates with your investors that increase your impact. The best relationships I've seen foster that type of interaction.

Sarah Williamson  27:52
And that's really good advice. So I'm also curious, can you have really established yourself as a thought leader in the space much due to your own success in hard work and dedication? You're clearly passionate about what you do. But a lot of our listeners on the show are trying to do the same. They're trying to establish a platform within the education sphere, either their district leaders looking to maybe launch consulting gigs, or a tech company C suite looking to elevate their profile within the market. What's your advice to them?

Ken Eisner  28:22
So yeah, I think letting go of the sacred cows is probably one of the most important, constantly challenging yourself challenging the notion of higher ed, as it exists now challenging the notion of lifelong learning, as it exists now challenging whether you are really measuring what the impact of your work, have backbone, disagree, and commit was one of my favorite, there was a lot of wonderful leadership principles. But have backbone, disagree, and commit was one of my favorite ones as a leader, how are you encouraging debate within inside your organization? How are you reaching out to every person within your organization and ensuring that they're a leader, ensuring that their voice is heard debating with data, holding people to high standards in obviously yourself, but hold your team to those highest standards and those high standards are not just an output they're in thought and challenging you? There was on the other side of Amazon's have backbone, disagree and commit was commit quickly your team has to learn how to commit and they have to get behind those ideas. If they are not And they're not swimming in that same direction. That's either a failure on you as a leader, or a failure on that team member. And unfortunately, that team members probably not right for your organization. So making some hard and fast moves in that space, you gotta be able to deal with ambiguity. The best leaders are those that welcome ambiguity because it provides giant opportunities for impact giant opportunities for trends, transformational leadership, and giant opportunities to provide clarity around where to go. And so yeah, I find that those leaders embrace those things. And really quickly get rid of things that get in the way of great leadership, including politics, social distortion, and other things that magnify the bad side accompanies, but you know, above all, great leaders create visions that people want to follow.

Katie Lash  31:09
I love that. I wrote down, have backbone, disagree and commit, I love that. So my last question for you, you already went here and answered the AI part. But tell me what your predictions are for the future of education and how you think it's going to continue to shift?

Ken Eisner  31:25
Yeah, so first of all, and I want to pre acknowledge this from the last question. That was as I was fortunate to gain the opportunity to be surrounded by unbelievable individuals. Amazon's is a factory of amazing intelligence in a diverse array of places. And yeah, a fabric in terms of its leadership principles that enable those unbelievable debates in the production of great narratives and so on. I also look to the leader of Microsoft Bill Gates for something that I've followed for years, which was, yeah, I think he wrote in 1996, we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. That next 10. Yeah, it has flexibility. Sometimes it flexes earlier, sometimes it flexes later, personalization and adaptive learning. But let's say especially personalization, human in the loop AI will be a maximum force in many ways. On education, sometimes it will be used incorrectly. And that gets back to the what's the underlying taxonomy, and what level of granularity we're capturing things in order to alter learning experiences in order to create that proper data flow. And in order to leverage the right role of the human in the loop. It's such a vital area, we know that the sage on the stage is a foregone educational experiment, it worked for a period of time for various reasons, it needs to evolve and the opportunity for the educator as a much more important, you provide a much greater level of impact upon an individual's lives needs to change. Second, you know, I'd say our learning systems are woefully under developed to deliver upon that need. A learning management system is a management system. It administers learning, the key functions of a learning management system are the exterior of learning the outer loop, scheduling, prerequisites and so on. There have been a move towards that center with learning experience platforms that start to provide a user interface a whole lot of learning. The next generation of learning systems go outside in from that capability, that core of capability development on outward and collect data at a level that can really be transformational and truly track a learner from their gaining of knowledge and capabilities to their execution on the job. I think there's a great opportunity for advancements in that overall, this systems administer learning, and again, a growth in the middleware in between your education learning and that's where I see the most major growth of shift whether it's called the new operating system for learning the educational work architecture, or that overall middleware component. And then lastly, from the side that I'm most wary at, is the struggle for social media and its impact upon youth. It's overuse within education. And it's our inability to structure our lives around children in a way that's truly productive. That doesn't suck them or keep them outside of the activities and the outdoor activities that demand the most, and doesn't turn them from Truly Social human beings into insular ones that are tied on their screen. Yeah, there we have a rule with our children that says they don't get mobile devices until they enter high school. They don't gain social media access until they are 18 or older. We'll see how it goes. But that's the area while there's other areas that find you tremendous opportunities be provided. Your innovative companies are developing at scale. And you have great data strategies aligned to those. My biggest fear remains around social media, and its interaction with education learning.

Sarah Williamson  36:27
Yeah, having three kids that are pretty young, we're gonna keep them off cell phones and social media as long as we can. That's my goal. We'll see how long it lasts. But Ken, thank you so much for your time today. This has been really incredible discussion, and you're so impressive. Appreciate it. Would you share with our listeners where they can follow you and learn more about you?

Ken Eisner  36:47
Sure. The first way is through LinkedIn just linkedin.com/in I guess you have to put that slash Ken Eisner K E N E I S N E R My email address is ken.eisner@gmail.com

Sarah Williamson  37:03
Thank you, Ken. Appreciate it.  If you're looking for more of this thought leadership goodness for your organization, you're in the right place. Visit us at swpr-group.com To learn more about how we work with education organizations and their leaders, superintendents and influencers to increase your impact. Again, that's swpr-group.com. Thanks for tuning in today and we will see you next time on Build Momentum.