Redefining Expertise

[00:00:00] Hi, this is Matt. Just before we start the show, I want to tell you about a free white paper that I've just published on AI and talent acquisition. We all know that AI is going to dramatically change recruiting. But what will that really

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[00:00:54] paper at matalder.me slash transform. That's matalder.me slash transform. Hi there, welcome to episode 622 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alda. It's been clear for a long time that the way we traditionally think about skills and

[00:01:35] expertise is out of step with our fast changing and volatile world. This issue runs through the education system in many countries and also influences how employers attract and upskill talent. So what are the innovative approaches that could solve this problem? My guest this week is Ed Fido, co-founder

[00:01:58] and CEO of the London Interdisciplinary School or LIS. LIS has been described as the most radical new university to open in decades. It offers degrees that use an interdisciplinary approach to solving some of the complex problems that business and society face.

[00:02:17] There are some interesting lessons here for employers around the concept of inter-actional expertise. Hi Ed and welcome to the podcast. Hi Matt, nice to be here. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

[00:02:34] Yeah sure, I'm Ed Fido. I'm the chief executive and co-founder at the London Interdisciplinary School which is one of the UK's newest universities. Fantastic. Tell us more about that. Why did you set it up? What does it teach?

[00:02:47] What type of students do you have? Give us the whole backstory. A lot of why we set it up is to sort of address that frustration that I'm sure lots of people listening have. I certainly had it when I was at school which is that you have to

[00:02:58] drop lots of subjects as you move through school. You have to narrow down to GCSEs, you have to narrow down to A levels and then when you go to university you have to pick just one subject and for lots of young people that is quite a painful

[00:03:10] choice to have to make, a very difficult choice. And it just occurred to me why do we have our education system designed like that? So we've started LAS to provide an interdisciplinary degree for our undergraduate students at our

[00:03:25] master's students. We've launched a masters two years ago and rather than being organized around a single discipline, this degree is organized around complex problems which require you to be able to learn about and understand data science, anthropology, linguistics, mathematics and a whole range of things besides.

[00:03:42] Fantastic. I mean, tell us a little bit more about the... So first of all this is a proper university isn't it? Like properly accredited? It is properly accredited. Yeah, we're the first new university to open with our own degree awarding powers since the 1960s actually.

[00:03:54] So obviously people study a range of subjects. How do you choose those subjects and how are they organized to sort of make sense to go together? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the sort of organizing vehicle each

[00:04:06] term is a complex problem that the students are looking at. So let's say in their second year, in the first term, they'll be looking at a problem involving AI and ethics. And then during that term, they'll be taught some

[00:04:20] of the ethics part by a philosopher, a philosopher that joined us from LSE and he was a philosopher there. And they're also being taught elements of law. They'll be being taught some machine learning. They'll be being taught some data science from a data scientist who joined us from

[00:04:33] Berkeley. And they're trying to bring all those different lenses and those tools to bear on the problem of thinking about AI and ethics. That's how we kind of make sense of it all. And that's that's how it's different actually from a liberal arts and sciences degree, which is

[00:04:47] a bit more of a pick and mix model where you can have a mixture of French poetry, history and calculus. This is the organizing principle here is this complex problem. I think that's really interesting because certainly in the UK, we

[00:05:01] specialize very early. So most people who go to university study one topic from the age of 16, they study three or four, it kind of narrows down from there. And, you know, as you say, there are kind

[00:05:11] of more general paths of study in other countries like the US but this is all about thinking differently about expertise, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. I mean, first of all, it's important to say that it's really important for us in the UK to have people and the

[00:05:25] rest of the world to have people who have studied one specific subject for a long time, you know, you want people with real narrow expertise in parts of biology, for example, you know, when COVID hit, we needed people that had been thinking about

[00:05:37] how you model does he spread for the previous 10 years? That's really, really important. But we have a model in the UK where everybody goes narrow for three or four years and this seems peculiar. So we think we need to think about

[00:05:49] expertise in a slightly different way. And rather than thinking about depth, which is not really the right term as far as we can see it, people's knowledge is a really a network of knowledge, we've all got this quite broad, interconnected,

[00:06:03] quite unique set of knowledge that we've developed through school, but also just through being in the world and through reading books and watching things on television. Through our workplace, we develop this kind of broad network of knowledge, interconnected knowledge. And that's a much

[00:06:17] more interesting way to think about it. And I think both as a learner, broadening out and building up your network of knowledge rather than worrying about being a narrow expert, but also employers when they're looking at hiring people. Yeah, absolutely. I suppose that brings me to my next

[00:06:31] question. Has this kind of been designed around employability? Are these sort of problems that people are solving very relevant to the corporate and the business world right now? Yeah, we're completely focused on these problems being the kinds of problems that organisations are looking at.

[00:06:45] And so to do that, when we bring organisations in with real problems, so our students are often in terms, say for example, they'll be working on sustainability problems, retailers thinking about or that the local council is thinking about and they'll be trying to apply their

[00:06:57] academic thinking to those problems. So that keeps us that keeps us real. But it's also a way of connecting people's academic learning to the workplace, I think there's a problem in the UK and probably beyond where graduates come out and they've they've been doing quite advanced

[00:07:13] academic work in a specific subject, let's say history or physics. And then they they're quite frustrated when they go into the workplace because that's not really recognised, they start at the bottom with some quite basic tasks. The flip side is that the employers you

[00:07:25] often hear a sort of moaning that graduates don't know what to do, they can't you know, they're left and they're right. And of course, that's not really true. But they've not they've not got the right kind of expertise. Whereas what we're finding, we're starting

[00:07:39] to find now is that employers look at our graduates and think, oh, well, you know something about sustainability, that's actually really useful to me. And then the graduates and the employers can have a conversation whether that employer is from a hedge fund

[00:07:50] from the NHS, from John Lewis, they can have a conversation about sustainability in quite a sophisticated way. They can also have a conversation about AI, they can have a conversation about how they think about inequality or diversity in their companies. Because these are the problems our

[00:08:03] students have been thinking about. And they can say, well, I know some tools to manipulate the data to think about that, or I can think about this from a philosophical perspective or a data science perspective. And this is really, you know,

[00:08:13] this kind of is very, very helpful and useful for the employers. And they can see ways to connect the students learning to their actual business. Yeah, I think that's really interesting, because you know, I've seen people join organisations straight from universities, even with degrees

[00:08:26] that you might consider to be vocational, say, for example, marketing, and still kind of struggle to sort of make that connection with it with the job and the employer to get the best out of them. So yeah, it's been a real problem for a long time. Talk us

[00:08:41] through the outcomes that you're getting for the students. Are they finding it easy to get these jobs that may be easier than if they don't have a very narrow topic at a more traditional university? Well, our students are starting to get fantastic jobs. It's important to say we

[00:08:53] don't have any graduates from our undergraduate course until this summer. So that's when our founding co who were brave enough to join us in 2021. They graduate this summer in 2024. Some of them are already getting jobs. I mean, some of them are getting jobs at quite elite selective

[00:09:08] institutions like Goldman Sachs. One of them has got a job as head of growth at an AI company. And there are a lot of them are busily applying for jobs, but they're getting interviews and they're getting offers. And this is what's really

[00:09:20] exciting. But we you know, the proof will be in the pudding. We'll see later this year. I mean, what part of the we're very cognizant that these young people took a risk by coming to us because the brands of a university is inextricably

[00:09:33] linked to how old it is and we're completely new. So what we wanted to do is make a commitment to young people to help get them internships every year. So they're coming off the back of a couple of years of having done placements with innocent smoothies or

[00:09:46] you know, firms like KPMG or local authorities, startups. And and so they've done, you know, at least five weeks each summer, working on a complex problem at those organizations. So they've got that basis. But we will see this summer how they get on. I

[00:10:02] mean, this is this is essentially an experiment. How do you select students for this? Because you know, as you say, there's obviously, you need students who are going to think about things in the right way, but also at the same time, they're gonna have to be pretty sort

[00:10:14] of brave to join early on. So how did that selection? How does that selection process work? Yeah, well, I'll say first of all about who we're looking for. I mean, we're looking for students that are intellectually curious. I mean, if you're not interested in lots of

[00:10:24] things, this is not the degree for you. And so and this isn't a degree for everybody. So if you want to be a lawyer or a doctor or study history for three years, then LIS is not the place for you. But we're so we're looking for that intellectual

[00:10:34] curiosity. We're also looking for people who care about problems. So care about something that's just bigger than themselves. They're not just coming to university so that they can get the best starting salary, they actually want to make a difference. And because our whole

[00:10:46] degree is organized around that. And so that's really important. And then and then still we're looking for people who are brave, and people who are brave enough to say I'm not going to follow the crowd. And in fact, some of them take a view that not following the

[00:10:59] crowd is less risky, because there are hundreds of thousands of people I mean, something like 500,000 people are graduating every year from undergraduate courses across the UK. And you know, we're in a pretty tough economy at the moment. How do we select for them? Well, that's an interesting

[00:11:15] one. Because of course, as we've just been talking about in the UK, most of these students have done a very narrow set of A levels. I mean, some of them have done an interesting, you know, and they're quite sheepish. They say to me,

[00:11:24] I've done a weird set of, you know, A levels of biology. I've done maths, and I've done art. And we go, that's completely brilliant. We love that mixture. But we understand that most of the students wouldn't have done that. So we interview everybody

[00:11:35] that applies. And there we are testing, we're testing for your intellectual curiosity. We're trying to understand the way you think about problem solving. And we we throw some questions at you, which are reflective of the sorts of things you can have to think about on the degree. So

[00:11:48] we're testing to see whether people can be successful on the course. And, and then we'll make an offer a very, very contextual offer based on your circumstances and your particular grades and everything. So we're really proud that it's probably the broadest academic range of people on

[00:12:04] any degree in the country. So we've got some people on our degree with four A stars at A level, which is perfect set of A levels. And some people who are way off that because they demonstrated to us that there are reasons they didn't do well

[00:12:15] in their A levels and they've they've done really interesting things since and then they did brilliantly in the interview. And but it means we've got any other way we've got academic diversity is we've got some people who were applying also to fine art schools, and some

[00:12:26] people that dropped out of Imperial College doing electrical engineering and they're on the same degree together. So it's this kind of amazing mixture. Yeah, amazing. So kind of diversity of thought and background and all that kind of stuff and also a very realistic way of

[00:12:38] thinking about people's potential and not hanging it onto how they did on one particular day in their in their exams. What about the master's degree? Tell us a bit more about that. Well, the master's degree is really exciting. We've got one master's degree and we're

[00:12:52] launching another one in a couple of years because and that one will be targeted at taking on the business schools. I can come to that in a second if you like. The current masters is is essentially saying to if you've done a narrow degree,

[00:13:05] which many people have so we've got people who've joined us from computer science degrees or humanities degrees. Again, they're on the same masters. They're learning a bunch of different methods and they take a they choose a problem area that they're passionate about. And they work on that problem

[00:13:19] throughout the year using our interdisciplinary set of tools and concepts to interrogate that problem. And a lot of those problems now as you'd expect involve applying AI to well one I was hearing about yesterday was applying AI and modeling methods to cancer research essentially.

[00:13:36] They were but equally they can be much more design focused. One involved looking at how poetry affects society. And so the range of these projects that people are looking at is really exciting and this is a group of 20, 30 master students who are all doing the same program but

[00:13:54] they've got wildly different backgrounds and looking at wildly different things. But they're using very similar interdisciplinary tools to kind of move their work forward. I think that's really interesting as well because just in terms of how we categorize people and how we think they think at a

[00:14:09] relatively early age. I mean, how do you find someone with a humanities degree, I don't know English literature or drama or something like that their capability to learn how to learn programming languages for example? That's the killer question because I think that what we

[00:14:25] found is that the people who have got more of a qualitative background so the humanities or the arts find the quantitative work data science, the coding harder than the other way around. But they also, once they work through it, are really, really grateful and

[00:14:43] pleased that they have done that because they really feel so that the student who is applying for fine arts schools, who has now in her third year, is able to use coding and apply that to some of her work in the arts. And this

[00:14:58] is something that she would never if not made to do it essentially, she would probably not have kind of really got to grips with that. And that is now hugely differential, a big differentiating factor for her. She can say to people yeah, I can code. Yeah, I

[00:15:12] can do data science, I can do statistical analysis and I'm an artist. This is really, really exciting intersection of skills, but it's very hard to teach. So it's hard to teach that range of capabilities on a quantitative level. But we've got, we've kind of

[00:15:28] cracked over the last year or two, but we're initially in our first year, we're like, how do you teach this massive range of maths? Basically, how could there be such a huge range of mathematical capabilities? But no, we've cracked it now. Hi, it's Matt, and we

[00:15:43] will be back to the interview very shortly. In several decades of working in this industry, I've never seen a time of greater disruption and change. And we really are still only at the beginning. With technology advancing as quickly as it is now, there's a tendency to believe that

[00:16:02] we have no control over the future. This is wrong. And I passionately believe that this is the precise time when we should be inventing the future. I want to see talent acquisition thrive and I want recruiting to be transformational in getting everyone into the right

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[00:16:38] robust model to help you understand, plan for, influence and invent the future. Trendspotting is for everyone in talent acquisition. It will help you future proof your career, create future-focused talent acquisition strategies and build your influence within your business. I've split Trendspotting into nine short lessons

[00:16:58] to easily fit into the flow of your busy day. The feedback from the TA leaders who've taken the course so far has been amazing. You can find out more by going to mattalder.me slash course. That's mattalder.me slash course. So moving back to employers, employability

[00:17:20] and those kind of things over the last sort of couple of years, employers have kind of been rethinking their approach to early careers. So we've seen some employers sort of scrap the requirement for a degree and focus more on apprenticeships and those kind of things.

[00:17:34] Do you think this is a way of redefining the value of a degree to employers or certainly taking people from this kind of pathway? One of the things I've felt strongly is that more people going to university is only a good thing if we really think they're

[00:17:50] getting a lot of value from those three years. And I'm afraid to say I'm not sure that lots of students are getting value from those three years. And I don't just include kind of lower ranked in adverted commerce universities. I mean, I did a mechanical engineering

[00:18:02] degree at Imperial, which was very useful, I'm sure for lots of people. But I was never going to be an engineer afterwards. And therefore very little of that degree I've been able to transition to my later life. And so was it useful for me to go

[00:18:14] there? Well, of course it was useful in terms of brand name. It helped me, you know, it demonstrates that I can do hard maths and hand working on time and all of that. But is it useful enough? We need to interrogate if we're going to have

[00:18:26] almost half of young people in this country going to university for three years and paying lots of money. But it's more the time actually from my perspective, it needs to be worth it. We need to interrogate what they're doing, you know, whilst they're there. Too much of

[00:18:38] the debate about universities in my view is about who gets access and what are the fees? Well, that's fine. But it's really important what happens when you're there for three years, because if it's not actually a value adding thing, do we care about who

[00:18:48] gets to go? And so what we sat down and said at the beginning is okay, if we don't even really believe that necessarily we need more people going to university, what we believe is that we need more choice, we need more variety. And if you're going to have

[00:19:01] people come to you for three years, what is it that you could do? Which is why we throw everything out of these students across the three years, you know, this range of expertise, internships, working with employers during the term, all of this stuff. It's like, let's create

[00:19:13] a bachelor's degree that's worthy of the fees, that's worthy of the time that these young people are dedicating and get them ready to go and have an impact in the world, right? That's unashamedly, you know, can be a bit sheepish about that sometimes. But that's reality, particularly now

[00:19:28] young people are coming in to make sure they get onto the next stage. Yeah, and I think that's again, that's fascinating because I think that the whole debate around the value of degrees is done in such simplistic terms. So anything that sounds like almost might be fun,

[00:19:43] drama, English, all those kinds of things, that's obviously low value. And then people are judging, judging success by how much people are earning after a certain period of time. And what that doesn't do is it doesn't really explore the value in some of those subjects. And it

[00:19:58] also doesn't explore how people are making a difference. So it's great to hear, you know, someone challenging that kind of very simplistic way of thinking about degrees. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it is crazy that more arts based degrees are not seen as valuable and

[00:20:15] yet we have this huge thriving arts economy in the UK. But you know, and there's a slightly separate point, but you mentioned earnings. I mean, the economy pretty much only rewards numeracy at the moment. And that's partly because, you know, bankers salaries are so high. But

[00:20:30] if you've got a numeric degree or degree that involves numeracy, you will tend to be starting on a much higher salary than someone from it with a humanities degree. And actually, it's actually becoming even bigger that gap because the salaries for bankers and professional services is going up

[00:20:49] faster than other salaries. And actually in the arts, you know, often people have to work sometimes for no money or terrible money for quite a long period of time, which means that it's not accessible to, you know, a broad range of people that got a massive diversity problem.

[00:21:00] But that's probably a separate, that's probably for another podcast. Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, so I suppose coming back to employers because there's obviously lots of talent acquisition, HR people listening into the show. I think it's interesting because I think that that whole that whole kind of pigeon

[00:21:16] holding of people into specializations is something companies do as well in terms of, you know, not moving people, you know, internally and also when they're hiring, not looking at sort of comparable skills in other industries. So it's it's a mindset that that kind of continues.

[00:21:36] What would your advice be to companies in terms of how they could sort of think differently about hiring and skills development and moving people internally using some of the principles that you've that you're working with? I think for employers, a really useful idea is this idea of

[00:21:52] interactional expertise, which is essentially a label, a way of talking about that level of expertise that we all have, which is somewhere between, you know, nothing and being a kind of contributory expert, someone who's contributing to the cutting edge of the field, which very few people are right.

[00:22:08] So most of us exist in between on this scale in between. But we're a little shy unless we're a true expert in something. Sometimes we're a little shy about saying we have some expertise in that area. But that kind of expertise, that level of expertise is called interaction

[00:22:21] expertise, and it's really important. It's the kind of expertise that a science journalist has in science. So they're able to talk to scientists, but they won't necessarily be doing the science, but they'll understand some of the scientists jokes or they but they may also have interaction

[00:22:35] expertise in another area like economics or politics. And it's and then they're able to cross populate and talk across those fields, make connections in ways that the scientists are not able to do. So it's very, very important. And in the knowledge economy for employers, these sorts of roles

[00:22:51] proliferate everywhere. But but we don't have ways of talking about it. So if you're an employer looking to hire somebody or looking and moving people internally, try and think about what's that interaction expertise here? Where have they got some expertise that could be useful? What's that combination

[00:23:05] of expertise, their network of expertise that they can put together rather than just what's the one bucket I have to put this person in? Are they an expert marketer or are they a you know, they've got a PhD in physics, so that's their thing. Well, almost certainly

[00:23:19] they've got this broad range of interaction expertise. So try to uncover that. No, absolutely, absolutely. So a final question for you. And I've saved the biggest question to last. What is the future look like? I suppose particularly with the reference to AI, how is AI influencing

[00:23:37] the way that we learn the way that we develop expertise and how's that likely to sort of play out in the future? Well, I mean, I like everybody else have been surprised by the progress of AI over the last 18 months or so. And these large language models,

[00:23:50] they're so much more sophisticated, so much more quickly than any of us thought. So in the education sector, we're trying to respond as quickly as we can. But we're embracing them. I think the first thing to say I was speaking to some lawyers

[00:24:01] maybe it was six months ago and they still haven't used chat GPT. And I thought this was quite surprising and they said their firm didn't really allow it. I mean, I think the first thing is we have to embrace it and therefore in the education system

[00:24:12] we have to embrace it. Otherwise, young people are going to be coming into the workforce, not able to use these tools. I think I think in terms of building expertise, the question for the sort of education sector and for training people that are doing training in corporacies.

[00:24:27] What are the skills now that humans actually need? So, for example, being able to write reports, I think is a that is a not a skill that will that will look the same in the sort of six, 12 months as it did four or five years ago.

[00:24:42] So what is the skill? So, you know, what's the skill that's required? Is it being able to understand what kind of inputs are needed to put into that report? Is it being able to say this is the first draft of the report?

[00:24:53] I can pass it, go through it, really try and understand and where where chats got it right and got it wrong. But, you know, to I think they have to to think again about what those skills are. And of course, that means who do we need?

[00:25:08] And my my bet is referencing sort of interdisciplinarity. Of course, I would say this, but, you know, having that breadth of expertise means you'll have fewer blind spots. And that's the problem that AI will have. AI has blind spots. Even generative AI has many blind spots.

[00:25:23] We know it's 98 percent whatever it is effective. That two percent is really important. So having fewer blind spots when you're working with these tools will be will be really vital. Ed, thank you very much for joining me. Of course, I enjoyed it. Thanks very much, Matt.

[00:25:38] My thanks to Ed. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to Matt Alder dot TV. You can search all the past episodes at RecruitingFuture dot com. On that site,

[00:25:59] you can also subscribe to our newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track about everything that's coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time. And I hope you'll join me. This is my show.