Apple University

Many of you know that I believe the struc­ture of work as we know it is chang­ing dramatically.

A gen­er­a­tion ago, our employ­ers pro­vided a sec­ond home. A sec­ond fam­ily. A sec­ond school. We’d get a full time pay­check, with ben­e­fits. We’d have a choice of career devel­op­ment, and almost guar­an­teed employ­ment. Our co-workers were our neigh­bors, and our friends. They were our extended family.

That’s changed. Many jobs go to free­lancers. Peo­ple who don’t get ben­e­fits. Peo­ple who don’t cost the com­pany much more than the hourly wage they’re being paid, unlike you and I who cost the com­pany approx­i­mately twice what they pay us in salary.

While some com­pa­nies offer career devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, it’s not nearly what it needs to be. We, “the peo­ple”, need to be care­ful. Unlike in the past, career devel­op­ment has become our respon­si­bil­ity. It’s on us to go get train­ing, to get fur­ther expe­ri­ence, and to net­work. And, not only is it our respon­si­bil­ity to make time, more and more often it’s our respon­si­bil­ity to bear the costs of our own career development.

Enter Apple’s new uni­ver­sity / edu­ca­tion push. They’re tar­get­ing tra­di­tional schools (K-12 today), but there’s a huge oppor­tu­nity here. I can go to iTunes and take a class. May not seem like much. In fact, we’ve been able to do it for quite some time now. I believe that Apple will finally start to improve this plat­form for edu­ca­tion. I hope that their pas­sion around this topic infects some cre­ative minds to start bring­ing some inno­va­tion around career devel­op­ment into the iTunes community.

There’s a lot hap­pen­ing here. MIT recently announced a whole lotta free online courses, but there are com­mer­cial and “open-source” oppor­tu­ni­ties too.

Don’t believe that Apple’s announce­ment yes­ter­day was only rel­e­vant to peo­ple with chil­dren in school. This is another oppor­tu­nity to get mind-share in the enter­prise as even peo­ple with pay­checks real­ize that we need to take respon­si­bil­ity for our own career devel­op­ment, and need a com­mu­nity to helps us do just that.

[“editor’s note”: Not my best writ­ing, apolo­gies. I wanted to get this thought out there though, as I think it’s excit­ing to see we’ll be able to explore our own edu­ca­tion with “uni­ver­sity qual­ity mate­ri­als” long after grad­u­at­ing from a for­mal school.]