Skills That Every Learner Needs

Reid Hoffman (Joi Flickr)

Yesterday, at the MIT Media Lab, I heard Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, say two things that should make every learner lean forward in their chair and listen.

The first is that social collaboration is a core skill that every person needs. He doesn’t think collaboration comes naturally, and he wonders why we don’t teach it earlier and more often in our schools. His second point was the necessity of continuous learning. He thinks the traditional “career ladder” has fallen over, and that most graduates will increasingly work independently, having numerous employers in constant search of the latest skills. The book he is writing, The Startup of You: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Building a Killer Career, talks about the this need for constant reinvention by using a large social network.

OK, so it’s not surprising that the founder of a social networking company would espouse greater use of social networks. But Reid is not your typical billionaire entrepreneur. He’s a contemplative thinker. He earned his B.S. in Symbolic Systems & Cognitive Science, and he did an M.A. in Philosophy at Oxford. He was going to be a professor, but he was disappointed by small scale for his ideas in academia. I believe that his success as an entrepreneur relies on being an expert at “reading the tea leaves” of our future. In other words, it’s less likely that he is pushing social collaboration because he founded LinkedIn and more likely that he founded LinkedIn because he knew that social collaboration would revolutionize everything.

He is one of those useful outside voices that I mentioned in my last blog post. Some stakeholders (board members, for example) who might not listen to arguments in favor of social learning, will pause when they hear it coming from him. Bookmark his talk for future use. He might be a useful tool in your “Change Toolbox.”

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