Monday, March 14, 2011

Does/should school meet the demands of the job market?

by Shelly Blake-Plock

Job Description for an $60 - $80K per year position that I stumbled upon on LinkedIn today:
- Develop socially engaging experiences to create stickiness and loyalty.
- Identify brand evangelists and celebrity bloggers to virally spread company's value through relevant online communities
- Viral seeding: incentivize Influencers to expose brand to their fan bases
- Use Smart Monitoring Tools for action-oriented insights from all social media outlets: pages, sites, blogs, etc.
- Use Smart Management Tools (TweetDeck, etc.) to manage the communities effectively.
Just for fun, would love to hear from you all about what kinds of skills and intelligences you see needed for this position and what kind of teaching and content best prepares a student to enter into a job market where this is a job that would produce a substantial income.

For you overachievers: Does/should school meet the demands of the job market?

5 comments:

  1. This blows my mind. I just put in a grant proposal yesterday for 1:1 ipads and I wish I could have referenced this post. The kids in schools that aren't getting exposed to technology are going to be left behind. We have a responsibility to our kids to be, and teach them to be, responsible digital citizens who can choose the best tool to make their work efficient and productive. If this grant comes through, that will be my ultimate goal. Individualize!

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  2. @missr146 The irony is that kids are learning to do all of the things in the ad without your grant for controlled use of digital tools. They all use social networking (especially in independent schools!!!) and do most of those things already. They make groups (a), they follow and make people famous (b), they blog, they message, and they text (c), and more and more of them tweet.(d). The problem is they do not do any of these things in school, and that makes us very irrelevant to them. Just let them take their phones out of their pockets. You do not need ipads distributed by the school. Oh, and you need teachers who can do all of the above with their subjects. It is not complicated. Just bring you own device (byod) and use it in school.

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  3. @norman
    I think you are correct on all of this, except one key piece. I believe that our kids are familiar with these types of technologies, but I do not believe they have the knowledge to convert their "mad-skills" at twitter to be a valid use for business. What I have seen out of my kids is a very superficial use of technology. They do not know or want to know how to use facebook, twitter, or skype in an appropriate business sense. They just want to know the most current news about Beiber and his haircut, or what so-and-so said about such-and-such.

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  4. @Norman - I agree almost completely with your ideas, except I work in a school where students don't know where their next meal is coming from, let alone how to Tweet. We do have some major socioeconomic hurdles to overcome before we can say goodbye to a grant for technology. My students have the desire, not the money.

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  5. Yes, I do think our schools need to prepare our kids for the future job market. Do keep in mind, though, that the future is not only looking for social media/marketing experts, but also engineers, doctors, teachers...

    You may find this video of interest - it's Sir Ken Robinson talking about changing the education paradigms:
    http://www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg#p/u/2/zDZFcDGpL4U

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