Ryan Lufkin

the master's degree, they are still the preferred currency in hiring.

And then there's a reason for that because they're not just about the hard skills generally, the math, they include the soft skills, working with groups, being empathetic, building consensus, communication, like all those things that are incredibly important, those human skills that we're talking about, they embody all of those.

A year or two ago, you saw a lot of businesses kind of pro that they were taking out a degree as a requirement for hiring.

hiring.

And what you saw is a lot of them slowly reintroduced that because it really is the best barometer of whether or not a person is prepared to enter the modern workforce.

That said, because of this pace of change, we live in a world that we all need to be lifelong learners, every single one of us.

That means go to school for 12 years or 16 years or 20 years.

Then we would go to a job, often the same job for 30 years.

Then we would retire with our pension.

And that was our

parents' generation.

That doesn't exist anymore.

The average tenure at a job is about three years.

They're saying, well, we're going to work until we die.

There's no pensions anymore.

It's incumbent on us to prepare ourselves to be upwardly mobile within the job market by constantly training new skills.

And in most cases, employers aren't owning that.

The college and university system still owns...

That upskilling and reskilling of adult learners.

And they really have done an amazing job post COVID, especially of rolling out new credential programs, because you can actually roll out a credential program, a certificate program without all of the regulatory requirements for an accreditation that a standard college program needs.