The authors example of your Career Portfolio being similar to how "Artists throw open their portfolio to show works they're really proud of — the canvas of their lives." Is exactly in line with our thinking at Readocracy, but for knowledge economy folks instead. Love this!

There was just too much worth learning and doing. To settle on one pursuit seemed like a mistake.

At the heart of it is a shift from pursuing a “career path” to creating your “career portfolio.” This term was originally coined by philosopher and organizational behavior expert Charles Handy in the 1990s, and is poised to finally enter its prime today.

"Career portfolio" is so on point with your Readocract "knowledge portfolio" in that we don't have one specific interest in life or (for most if us) one career path. We are more that one single interest and nurturing that berth of interests and possibilities is enlitened.

Artists throw open their portfolio to show works they’re really proud of — the canvas of their lives.

again a similarity to Readocracy knowledge portfolio being a way to showcase continuous learning.

Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing social and economic inequality. All these problems could be alleviated, the authors say, if employers focused on job candidates’ skills instead of their degree status.

Drawing on their interviews with corporate leaders, along with their own experience in academia and the business world, the authors outline a “skills-first” approach to hiring and managing talent. It involves writing job descriptions that emphasize capabilities, not credentials; creating apprenticeships, internships, and training programs for people without college degrees; collaborating with educational institutions and other outside partners to expand the talent pool; helping hiring managers embrace skills-first thinking; bringing on board a critical mass of non­degreed workers; and building a supportive organizational culture. IBM, Aon, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and Merck are among the companies taking this approach—and demonstrating its benefits for firms, workers, and society as a whole.

Moreover, degree requirements undermine organizational commitments to improving racial diversity. Although U.S. Census data from 2021 shows that a majority (about 65%) of Americans who are 25 or older do not have a bachelor’s, the proportions are highest among Black Americans (72%), indigenous populations (80%), and those who identify as Hispanic or Latinx (79%). An unnecessary insistence on credentials is, in short, blocking employers’ access to a diverse, capable pool of talent, and the workers who are taking the biggest hit are those who are already marginalized.

And Ginni is a former CEO of IBM who expanded opportunities there for people of diverse backgrounds and who now serves as a cochair of OneTen, a coalition of employers committed to hiring Black workers without four-year degrees into family-sustaining jobs.

Connect with Ginni and look at OneTen

To widen its excessively narrow talent funnel, the company launched what Ginni referred to as the SkillsFirst initiative: IBM overhauled its hiring practices to create on-ramps for people who were previously overlooked and to build a pipeline of capable nondegreed workers. For any organization with the same goals, the process involves action on multiple fronts.

One way that IBM grew its tech talent pool was by creating internships for students and graduates of a program known as P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School). The program enables students to take classes in STEM fields and earn credits toward an associate’s degree in applied science while completing high school. It started as a partnership among IBM, the City University of New York, and the New York City Department of Education and was launched in a single Brooklyn high school in 2011. Since then it has expanded rapidly: In 2022 more than 300 P-TECH schools in 27 countries provided interns, apprentices, and employees to businesses worldwide. Employing students and graduates of P-TECH has been a key element of IBM’s talent strategy.

Retraining managers.Hiring managers are a critical part of the skills-first equation. It’s crucial to stop them from using traditional degrees or prior work experience as proxies for a candidate’s capability. To help managers effectively assess applicants for jobs that don’t require degrees, companies need to give them appropriate tools—including standardized, job-relevant evaluation rubrics—and train them to recognize interviewer biases.

Companies shouldn’t expect workers hired through a skills-first approach to assimilate to their new environment without appropriate support. Leaders should therefore update their corporate norms and practices to embed skills-first thinking throughout talent management. That’s how they’ll get the most from both their new employees and their existing workforce.

A Skills-Based Culture

Love this term - use in messaging

Fundamentally, a skills-first approach is about building rather than buying talent. Creating entry points and on-ramps for newcomers of varied backgrounds is an important first step. But by taking a skills-based approach to promotion and development for all employees, companies can advance overlooked talent and increase racial and socioeconomic diversity in the entire workforce and the leadership pipeline.

Harnessing the power of a skills-centric approach requires a paradigm shift in how firms think about talent. Maurice Jones, the CEO of OneTen

Sent LI connection -

When we’ve talked to chief executives at companies leaning in to skills-first talent management, all have echoed the need to elevate and legitimize what is essentially a cultural transformation. Tomislav Mihaljevic, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, told us that he’s tried to make sure that everybody in his organization understands the “why.” A skills-first approach, he says, “cannot be ‘mandated’ in the classical sense of the word. It has to be explained.

reach out to Tomislav Mihaljevic

For too long, four-year-degree requirements have been easy, if ineffective, shortcuts that made managers feel they were weeding out less-qualified talent. Data and time have proven this assumption false. What’s more, it artificially constrains companies’ efforts to advance racial diversity, cultivate employee engagement, and generate strong performance.

Without even realizing it, we are pumping out unbelievable amounts of data onto the web every day. By “unbelievable” here I mean around 2.5 quintillion bytes — that’s a 1 with 18 zeros after it. If you have hard time grasping how much that is, you’re far from alone.

Information overload has many alternative names — “infoxication”, “infobesity”, and data smog.

To illustrate the disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions, consider, for example, the following headline: ‘Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests’. This was rated as accurate by 15.7% of Republicans in our study, but 51.1% of Republicans said they would consider sharing it. Thus, the results from study 1 suggest that the confusion-based account cannot fully explain the sharing of misinformation: our participants were more than twice as likely to consider sharing false but politically concordant headlines (37.4%) as they were to rate such headlines as accurate

people care about accuracy much less than other factors (such as partisanship), and therefore knowingly share misinformation. The fact that participants in study 1 were willing to share ideologically consistent but false headlines could thus be reasonably construed as revealing their preference for weighting non-accuracy dimensions (such as ideology) over accuracy.

Why, then, were the participants in study 1—along with millions of other American people in recent years—willing to share misinformation? In answer, we advance the inattention-based account, in which (i) people do care more about accuracy than other content dimensions, but accuracy nonetheless often has little effect on sharing, because (ii) the social media context focuses their attention on other factors such as the desire to attract and please followers/friends or to signal one’s group membership

Together, these studies suggest that when deciding what to share on social media, people are often distracted from considering the accuracy of the content. Therefore, shifting attention to the concept of accuracy can cause people to improve the quality of the news that they share. Furthermore, we found a dissociation between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions that suggests that people may share news that they do not necessarily have a firm belief in. As a consequence, people’s beliefs may not be as partisan as their social media feeds seem to indicate.

Our results suggest that the current design of social media platforms—in which users scroll quickly through a mixture of serious news and emotionally engaging content, and receive instantaneous quantified social feedback on their sharing—may discourage people from reflecting on accuracy.

I have worked to educate and help people understand the direct effects of climate change for a significant part of my career. Misinformation ("Information Pollution") has been an obstacle since the beginning of the conversation. Working to overcome this is one of the main reasons I joined the Readocracy team. Have a read of Mario's article. I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

But a person's attention remains a limited cognitive resource that is only too quickly overwhelmed when confronted with an unlimited supply of information sources. Furthermore, not everything that's online is what it claims to be, and alongside an abundance of high-quality information, people are also lured into the traps of low-quality, distracting, false, and manipulative information.

Absolutely love the idea of "CRITICAL IGNORING!  

It is not simply about disregarding information, but rather, it involves developing mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overload.

Self-nudging

a common self-nudge is to remove addictive social media apps from the home screen or to set time limits on their use.

Simply looking at a single website or social media post is not enough to determine its trustworthiness. Without having relevant background knowledge or reliable trust indicators, the best strategy to decide whether to believe a source is to research the author or organization and their claims elsewhere.

key point for Readocracy too implement the ability to follow trusted sources (journalists) and have them populate your feed. ie build your own algorithm

"do-not-feed-the-trolls" strategy is an essential aspect of critical ignoring

Navigating this digital universe successfully requires new competencies that should be taught in school.

making the case for Readocracy in schools

Over the course of your life, you will spend as much time consuming content as you would studying for about four college degrees, and we need to change how we show that, writes Readocracy CEO Mario Vasilescu.AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to LinkedInShare to TwitterShare to Copy Link

There are over 1 billion people globally who can’t afford to be part of that $1 trillion spent, yet have access to the internet’s wealth of information, full of expert content and recommendations. What would it mean to them, to be able to easily formalize their self-directed learning in a presentable way? What about the untold number of ultra-talented individuals who simply don’t fit into the education system as we know it, usually because they’re autodidactic and grossly mislabeled by a system that sees them as inadequate or unqualified.

Signaling Knowledge

This reframing of our data and relationship with information is ultimately a democratization of how we signal knowledge—and that has economic power, far more than simply using your data to also sell yourself out for a few advertising dollars.

“Bridging-based ranking” is an alternative kind of algorithm for ranking content in social media feeds that explicitly aims to build mutual understanding and trust across differing perspectives.

How it worksCurrent engagement-based algorithms make predictions about which posts are most likely to generate clicks, likes, shares or views — and use these predictions to rank the most engaging content at the top of your feed. This tends to amplify the most polarising voices, because divisive perspectives are very engaging.Bridging-based ranking uses a different set of signals to determine which content gets ranked highly. One approach is to increase the rank of content that receives positive feedback from people who normally disagree. This creates an incentive for content producers to be mindful of how their content will land with “the other side.”

Comments with positive engagement from diverse audiences were found to be of higher quality, and “much less likely” to be reported for bullying, hate or inciting violence. A similar strategy is used in Community Notes, a crowd-sourced fact-checking feature on X, to identify notes that are helpful to people on both sides of politics.

Demonstrating a willingness to make their algorithms less divisive would also build goodwill among regulators, reducing the risk of reputational and legal damage.

Making the case for Readocracy all the way back in the 1930's

Wells made a daring proposition: Saving humanity from itself calls for the creation of a new system for “universal organisation and clarification of knowledge and ideas.” He called it a “World Brain” — a “permanent central Encyclopaedic organisation with a local habitat and a world-wide range,” decentralizing and democratizing that supreme antidote to propaganda and manipulation: knowledge.

But for the World Brain to work, Wells cautions, we must also be educated into being Competent Receivers, which would require a deliberate transcendence of our reflexive reactions.

Such hasty destructiveness, Wells acknowledges, is the first and most instinctual response to the recognition that change is needed

It is becoming apparent that the real clue to that reconciliation of freedom and sustained initiative with the more elaborate social organisation which is being demanded from us, lies in raising and unifying, and so implementing and making more effective, the general intelligence services of the world.

Making the case for Readocracy.

The world is a Phoenix. It perishes in flames and even as it dies it is born again. This synthesis of knowledge is the necessary beginning to the new world.

He envisions the World Brain as the path to freedom, peace, and a harmonious humanity

An open space where we can humanity share ideas and find common ground 

They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems.

thinking of Elon Musk as I read this point.

We’re now in an era of omnipresent CAPTCHA called “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” that’s instead an invisible test that runs in the background of participating websites and determines our humanity based on our own behavior — something, eventually, computers will outsmart, too. 

Readocracy does something similar to this as we verify your attention to a pice of content. Very interesting.

Tim Knowles, discusses the imperative need to be able to validate what children are learning i.e., new kinds of transcripts/tools that codify and make legible (to post-secondary schools and employers) what young people know and can do. Amit Sevak, so much of what a student knows is missed in an individual's diploma. "We need skills-based assessments." "We need individual credentials. Employers are looking at the brand = school's reputation, not the individual's learning. "We need civility, empathy, and the ability to talk in a civil way. Need a way for social signaling specific competencies. How are we preparing to "be human". We don't do a complete enough job of assessing an individual's true knowledge. Students are slipping through the cracks (because of standardized tests) and signaling an individual's actual potential! Tim - key takeaway - learning is happening everywhere - as a highschool student as I've achieved a critical skill, a 3rd party can credential and make sharable on my phone how I'm progressing along with insights.