You are listening to CEOs, you should know an iHeartRadio. Of course.
My name is Billy Harfash. We have a very special guest this week,
and I am excited to talk about this because the future of our communities really
it boils down to one thing, and that is education. I have the
Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of Phoenix, mister John Woods.
Mister Woods, welcome to the show. How are you today, Hi,
Billiam great, thanks for having me. Well, I'm happy to chat with
you, and you know a lot of us out there listening today have heard
of University of Phoenix, but I want you to dig into some of the
details. Why is the University of Phoenix different than some other universities and colleges.
I think it's a special institution, Billy. We were founded in nineteen
seventy six, and the best of my knowledge at the time, and maybe
even still to this day, the only institution that would built for working adults.
So not built for a lot of different audiences or a variety of different
folks seeking education, really built specifically for one particular audience, the adults who's
working by looking to advance their education while doing so when I was reading about
you, mister Woods, and reading about the University of Phoenix, what stood
out to me as a couple of things, And I want to start with
this. Your office really defines student learning outcomes that make sure that they align
with employer expectations. So we're talking about career relevant academics here. And to
me, in a lot of the interviews and a lot of the conversations around
education that I've had, I always go back to we need to make sure
that our curriculum, that our classes, that the programs were offering in the
end will make sure that this person gets a job, because that's what we're
trying to achieve here. Talk to me about those learning outcomes and how the
University of Phoenix is really aligning tomorrow's workforce. Yeah, there's a long history
here of what we've done to better serve working adults than the lineup with the
things that employers expect them to be able to know. When we were first
founded, our founder, doctor Spurling, he wanted a different education for working
adults and he wanted to better serve employers. He hired faculty who were practitioners
in the fields. We offered programs would help students get ahead in their careers.
We've evolved over the years as we look at where we stand today,
we don't offer any programs that don't lead to above average job prospects according to
the dure of labor statistics, which I think is really part and parcels who
we are. And then to your point about what students learned in those programs,
We've mapped all of our programs so that each course, in every single
program teaches students at least three skills that are required by employers, and a
lot of mapping has been done to figure out what those skills should be.
We've mapped those skills to find that they're in job postings, to find that
they're in job descriptions that are posted by employers looking to hire people, they're
in the beer of Labor statistics data sets, and so in every single course
someone takes, they're going to learn at least three skills that are really important
for the job they have to do upon completion. In this way, a
student can learn skills and accumulate those skills as they go and maybe be able
to progress in their career or do more in the job they're as they go
and not wait till the end, which is really important. Speaking right out
of John Woods, he's the provost and chief academic officer at the University of
Phoenix. In a John, what kind of feedback do you get from employers?
You talked about how you gather all that data together, all that information
about what they're looking for, But when they hire a University of Phoenix graduate,
what kind of feedback over the years have you gotten like, oh my
gosh, this candidate was really prepared. What sets universe see Phoenix graduates apart
well Anecdobley, We get those stories all the time. More scientifically, we
do employers surveys. We've got industry advisory councils that serve to help us evolve
our programs, and they meet regularly year round to help us do that.
We survey our alumni and we ask our alumni specific questions about how well prepared
they felt the University of Phoenix education made them. So we're always looking at
that data. We've got, as I said, some great stories from different
faculty, students, employers, industry advisory council members who all tell us what
we're teaching really hits the mark and helps our students advance, And it really
is a mix of are we getting those stories, are we getting that great
feedback, and are we also collecting the data from those different sources that tell
us the same thing. So we're always making adjustments to try and be better
in this regard. As I'm hearing you speak about the University of Phoenix and
your goals, I just kind of am laughing inside because I'm thinking of myself
as a college student when I went to university and I had this moment like
halfway through my junior year, like, oh my goodness, I'm doing this
all because I need to get a job after this is all done. And
I had all of these courses from all over the place, and I really,
if I was being honest with myself, I wasn't sure where it was
going. And I don't think that the classes I was taking was necessarily directing
me down a career path. So it's really nice to hear that the University
of Phoenix is doing something different to make sure that your students they know what
the next step is. I think that's so important when we talk about education.
Yeah, you and me both, Billy. I can remember as an
undergraduate student feeling a little lacking in direction myself, and I've got kids now
going through the process of selecting or in college one of them, and I
think college is an amazing experience for particularly for our younger people, the seventeen
to twenty one year old who can kind of go about things a little bit
differently and discover that path learn what they're interested in, and then pursue it.
Before working adults who's you know, maybe looking to make a change or
advance their career, they're feeling maybe a little bit topped out in their career.
They need something a lot more specific, a lot more directives, and
they need a confidence that what they're being asked to learn is in fact the
important and relevant and will help them get ahead. So higher uccasions pretty diverse
it in that way. For us, we're looking for the most specific,
most direct, most really valuable pathway for our students to be able to apply
that knowledge right away as they're learning it on the job and maybe impressed the
boss and and you know, get a different job, a better job,
or get a new project that they might not have otherwise been able to get.
Because the skills that are learning build upon each other and they're more transparent
both the learner and the employer as they go again, not having to wait
four or five years until you're done to say I'm ready to get hired,
but with the skills they learn along the way, I'm ready to do more
the next day. Making a lot of sense on the air right now,
I'm speaking that John Woods of the University of Phoenix. This is CEOs.
You should know. My name is Billy Harfas John. You know you talk
about those jobs. I mean, we all are always talking about jobs here
in the state of Arizona, in America in general. It's no surprise to
my audience and certainly no surprise to you that the current trends in business and
technology they're changing, and they're showing that the way employees work. We're talking
about where we're talking about when even how they work have and are continuing to
change almost month over month. This thing is evolving and what our business culture
looks like for the future. So somebody in your experience, you've been in
academia for a long time, job placement at the highest levels, executive levels,
where is this thing going? I mean, are we going to be
working from home? Now? A lot of us seemingly forever. Is this
the new career path? What kind of changes do you see in the next
ten years. Yeah, I think work from home has become pretty widely accepted,
obviously out of necessity. At the start of COVID, you have seen
a lot of large organizations bring people back to their offices. I think that
has been a bit of a stub bit of a shift, and maybe a
bit of a surprise shift. Companies, I think are wanting to re establish
that connection with their employer employees. I don't think that we'll see a complete
shift to remote work. You've got those larger ones I've asked the employees to
come back. You've got employees now able to make choices of where they want
to work based on some key factors like work from home and if that's important
to them. So I think you're going to see more employee choice, employees
voting with their fee to who they want to work for, taking the type
of work they want, the style of work, the culture of work.
Those were choices that were not always available to employees. So we do see
that when we ran our soon to be our third coming up in the next
couple of months, when we run our Career Optimism Index. We see a
big, big difference in what employers are expecting of employees and what employees are
expecting of employers on things like professional development, the culture at work, and
appreciation for mental health awareness and appreciation and support for training and development. There
are a lot of gaps. I'd say, if there's one thing I would
tell you where the world of work is headed, is that employees have ever
more leverage and power to choose who they want to work for. You see
very low unemployment today, but you see an incredible amount of churns where people
are sometimes you've been willing to leave a job without a next job. Wind
up our career optimism. And next tole is that nearly two thirds of people
are taking kind of always on approach, so looking for that next position even
if they're happy where they are, and many reports that they'd be willing to
leave their job if they were unhappy, like I said, without even having
that next job ready to start in. And you know, John, you
mentioned the remote work and how that trend is shifting. Really, the University
of Phoenix has been on the cutting edge for a number of years now as
far as how we conduct classes and how we don't really need to drive,
park our car, walk into a building and sit at a desk in order
to get an education. University of Phoenix has been doing something different for a
number of years, and that's online learning. Where do you see the direction
of the University of Phoenix as far as online learning goes? And I'm assuming
you're seeing more and more people adopt that model. Yeah, many folks will
remember that when we started serving working adults, we were campus based in nineteen
seventy six. We were one of the first institutions to have fully online programs.
Those online programs eventually grew to be a majority of our student enrollment.
Pre COVID, we were seeing that trend increase. People not wanting to deal
with traffic, people not wanting to deal with the lack of flexibility of going
from work to school and spending three four hours in a classroom on a weeknight,
and so online was growing even before COVID, and then obviously with COVID
it became even much more widely accepted. Our programs, I would say,
continue to evolve. There's online education, but there are many different ways folks
can build and deliver online education. The evolution for us of most recent times
is to move into competency based online education, and these are programs that give
students even more flexibility, even greater agency to navigate through the curriculum, to
go a little bit more at their own pace. And that's a big evolution
for us. We've built of our programs now in a competency based model.
They're also even more affordable, and so we've always been pretty I think competitive
in terms of our our pricing of programs. For their competency based programs are
even lower priced and someone can get their MBA, for example, in our
competency based version in about eleven months. For I believe it's about eleven thousand
dollars. And so for the person who wants flexibility, affordability, value to
learn from faculty who our practitioners in the field, we're really good fit.
And you know, I think people make choices based on what they're looking for,
and if those are some of the things that appeal to them, they'll
choose us. Well, we know that you're dealing with adults here. Adults
are busy. Adults are also sometimes parents, and they have a job,
but they also want to up their skills and they want to get further their
education process. So these competency based programs, it's my understanding that they really
help with timing. In other words, you can go as faster as slow
as you want. Do I have that correct? Yeah, you can really
vary your speed in a competency based program. As I said, you can
finish in as quickly as eleven months. You can go a little bit longer
if you want. Some of our students take breaks. The thing about the
competency based programs and they have a slightly higher work requirement as an entrance requirement.
But the thing about comptency based programs is you're doing application based assignments that
ask you to draw on what you're learning in combination with your work and world
experience. And most people report it doesn't seem like a lot of busy work
to them. These assignments seem very practical, very applicable to what they're what
they're asked to do on the job. And in addition to the flexibility and
being able to go faster, the student satisfaction in these programs has been really
high. I gotta tell you we're going to finish up with this and thank
you for being on the show today, But this last topic. I'm really
excited to talk with you about it because I'm not sure how I feel,
and I'm not sure how the audience feels. But here's a fact. So
fifty two percent of American workers say they are easily replaceable in their job or
position. Forty one percent of workers worry about losing their jobs. So if
we go off those numbers, it's my belief that we're not talking about losing
your job in the traditional sense, always like a layoff, we're getting fired.
But right now we have things happening like chat GPT. I'm sure you're
aware of an AI based programs, and it was the thought a number of
years ago, really just a couple of years ago, that these would replace
more blue collar jobs. And now we're getting data and we're talking to experts
that say, not so fast, my friend. These could also be replacing
even more so white collar jobs. When we talk about Americans that are worried
about losing their jobs, we have to also worry about technology, which is
a great thing to have in our lives, but it might take some of
those jobs away. At the University of Phoenix and you, personally, I
mean, how do you look about this? New phenomenon that the workplace is
getting ready to experience. Yeah, I think Bill, you're onto something there.
The studies that are written about where we see the world of work going
by the like the Gardener Group or Forbes, they talk about the skills that
are required regardless of the technology advance, as regardless of things like artificial intelligence
as you mentioned, and chat GPT. There are skills that will really help
somebody be successful no matter what happens in the world of work, no matter
how work evolves. The skills that are mentioned things like being able to collaborate
and work in teams, or appreciate differences in people, or be a good
communicator. Those are sometimes called soft skills. But whenever these studies are released
at the top of the list of what employers are expecting and hoping for in
their workers, because they make somebody who is adaptable, who is able to
evolve even as the world of work changes and evolves. So I guess my
answer for that would be, not only have we mapped the technical skills in
our programs, but we've mapped those skills which are, as I said,
sometimes called soft skills, but they're vitally important. So if you're a student
at the University of Menix, you'll find out where those skills are being taught
as well. You'll be measured on your attainment, your learning level against those
skill requirements, and you'll even get to be awarded for your learning with a
badge. People can share those badges if they want places like ZIP recruiter profiles
or linked in profiles, and the badges are validated the data that we collected
to measure the learning that took place. So even as the world of work
evolves and changes, those skills will be I think we'll say durable, and
we're trying to make them so that they're more easily translated to a student and
to an employer. So that's understand exactly where they were learned and the level
of attainment that was reached. The University of Phoenix is on the cutting edge
of education. It was such a pleasure to have you on the show,
mister John Woods. Could you just give my audience some information as someone's out
there listening and maybe they are apparent, maybe they already have a job,
they want to further their education, they might want to change your career,
they might want a promotion at work and they just need some more skills.
Where can my audience get involved and learn more about the University Phoenix. Well,
the website has a lot of great information Phoenix Doddu. I would point
folks specifically to one of the following things on the website, because you know
a website, you can go just about anywhere and learn all kinds of stuff.
Certainly, there's information about our programs, but we write an academic annual
report that tells everybody, and I think a really clear and transparent way about
all the things that we're doing and the success of our students our alumni.
I would check that out. You can also go to our Career Optimism Index
from the Phoenix website, and as I said, that shares with the world
a lot of information we've collected about how work is evolving and how worker perceptions
of their career prospects are changing. And that career Optimism Index also reflects what
employers are thinking and saying. So a few places on our website to find
out about our programs, our approach, and are really important career Optimism Index
that we do every year, and of course you can go to Phoenix dot
edu Phoenix dot edu for all of that and more learn about the University of
Phoenix. Fascinating conversation. Mister Woods, Thank you so much for being on
the show, and we'll talk to you down the road. Thanks. Billy
appreciated the time. This has been CEOs you should know an iHeartRadio. My
name is Billy Harfash. This has been CEOs you should know, showcasing businesses
that are driving our regional economy. Part of iHeartMedia's commitment to the communities we
serve. I'm your host, Billy Harfosh, Thanks for listening.