Page 191 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

170 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

` the Future oF moBIle employees mAy stArt
rIght In our puBlIC sChools

Mike Cook is the executive director of the Educational Services
and Staff Development Association of Central Kansas (ESSDACK),
which is a nonprofit educational service center. As an educational
10
research and development organization, ESSDACK helps school dis-
tricts in the state and on a national level to establish programs that
are collaborative in nature and thus more efficient and cost effective.
Mike speaks the obvious, powerfully, about where talent and
technology connect. We all know that students will need to be bet-
ter trained and equipped to be competitive in a global talent market.
Businesses will need to have a supply of technologically savvy talent
around which to build their corporate visions. According to Mike,
“When you talk about a mobile workforce and the tools that they
use, the first thing I see is that we’re not developing the skills kids
are going to need when they get into jobs that don’t yet exist. It’s re-
ally interesting to see larger institutions that have been around forever
struggle to capture and maximize some of these tools. The part that
scares me the most is business is demanding we use them and schools
are demanding we lock them out.”
Mike told us about his early development as a child, growing up
on the farm. His father taught him to look at something, analyze it,
tear it apart, and put it back together, fixing the issue. He learned by
doing. He states that the focus today is to get content scores and basic
memory recall. The real skills that are needed, he feels, are simply not
the priority.
For example, he thinks students at the high school level are not
engaged in their schools because they are losing the ability to be cre-
ative and innovative, and to learn while using their hands and brains
in solving problems. Students are fully engaged in Twitter and Face-
book, but those things aren’t allowed on many school campuses. Why,
he wonders? Those are the learning tools of student choice, and the
future, and schools don’t use them.