Course Careers (Troy Buckholdt)

[Paul Terlemezian]

Troy Buckholdt https://www.linkedin.com/in/troybuckholdt/ will lead this conversation.

[Troy Buckholdt]

I will be talking about the book that I recently published, The Lean Career. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1691555827/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_i...

Feel free to click the Preview button on Amazon to get an idea of what the conversation will be about. Some things to ponder are: 

Causation vs Correlation. Is college the cause of success, or is it just correlated with successful people? 

Is there a benefit to hearing a lecture in class instead of in a video? 

[Bill Crose]

Hi Troy,

It was good to catch up with you. I have to be honest & say I didn't really see how we could be on the same page until our Thursday discussion. As it turns out, I agree with you that there are ways to start & advance a meaningful careers without college. Here I am developing a system that helps people develop skills without training -by verbally delivering step-by-step instructions and didn't consider it as a way to circumvent at least some formal learning experiences. Thank you! OK, Now I need to read your book. Let me know if there's any way we could collaborate; I'd be happy to apply our Pythia system to prove some of your ideas.  www.adytonusa.com

[Troy Buckholdt]

Thanks, Bill.

It was great to catch up with you. I think too often people forget that on the job training is the best type of education. Relevant education combined with real-world application. 

If you're interested in reading the book to see how you could do your part in building the future of higher education, here is the link. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1691555827

[Bill Crose]

My wife is Director of Continuing Ed for a Michigan public University. Last night we had another conversation about how higher ed must change and I mentioned what you're doing. We reviewed & agreed Education is for distant future work, Training is for near future work, Learning is for working now/in the workflow, and Performance Assurance may or may not have any anything to do with education, training, or learning, but is just as or more important to performance than the 3 others depending on the situation. What I'm working on is Performance Assurance and I'll have to read the book & continue this conversation with you to fully understand your perspective -but I'm definitely moving toward "getting it". 

My wife, Lori, has been very successful at customizing performance improvement programs for local businesses mainly because she creates programs focused on a single need, then builds education, training, & learning components around the need. One of her organization's most successful programs is project management. Like the GeorgiaLEARNS' ALO framework, her PM program adapts Mindset, Toolset, and Skillset to client organizations.

Through our discussion we found we still greatly value our higher education. Here's a couple reasons why... We both grew up in rural Illinois, small schools, in a county of 20,000 people, 100% WASP+C, no interstate highway... We literally lived in the big cornfield. Nobody came in, very few people went out even for vacation (closest airport was St. Louis -a 3 hour drive in good traffic/weather), and NOBODY went back after they left. My professors included more diverse people than I knew existed and I wouldn't have experienced them if I hadn't continued my education. I grabbed the knowledge I could from them, but moreover, I learned to respect people with all labels including those wearing things I had made fun of just a couple years prior. My favorite professor turned out to be a Yugoslav native with a very thick accent who had an abortion at the medical office where my future wife worked. (The professor didn't know I knew...) I also lived in a dorm that housed 99.9% people from Chicago, where I learned to empathize and value the experiences of so many other people; something I would have otherwise gotten only through serious travel. So, the university experience for my wife and I wasn't simply androgogy, it was a door to the world. My diploma doesn't mean I know everything about a field of study as much as it means I understand and can function productively in "the world". Another way of looking at higher ed is to look back at lower ed. We all learned about our families at home, towns in first grade, county in second & third grades, state in 4th grade, country in 5th grade, Canada & Mexico in 6th grade, and that was where the Social Studies curriculum ended in public schools. Higher ed takes students from North America to the world.

My wife and I now live in Detroit metro, less than an hour from Canada, within a mile of our house is a Sikh temple (fantastic people!), 2 Caldean churches, Greek Orthodox church, Muslim mosque; Buddhist temple... we have a trans daughter who got a Human of the Year Award from Motherboard Media, who is married 10 years to the same woman with 2 children -you can see her in 2 exhibits at the new International Spy Museum in DC. Another daughter is a pediatrics intensive care room nurse and I don't know how she does it. A humanities education is far more than memorizing facts; it makes you understand 7 appreciate humanity.