HP Innovation Journal Issue 12: Summer 2019 | Page 54

Q & A W I T H A I M S M CG U I N N E S S
What is the message that
business leaders need to hear
about the future workforce?
You have a major vested interest in the fundamental knowl-
edge and skills of the breadth of the population, particularly
the growing minority majority populations. For you to
ignore those disparities will mean you have an increasingly
narrow pool of educated people. A business cannot afford
to cherry-pick.
The second thing is that it’s important to help create
systemic change in the places where you’re hoping to do
business, and that means dealing not only with the basic
disparities but helping community colleges and four-year
institutions change to a whole different mode of provision
of education. The third thing is to develop partnerships
with institutions in every form, but particularly in
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HP Innovation Journal Issue 12
internships—any way for technology transfer to occur
through the interaction between instruction, students,
and work experiences, so that students are growing and
learning in partnership with employers and getting a
real-life understanding of the dynamics that any kind of
competitive business is experiencing.
What is the message that the future
workforce needs to hear?
You’re not going to be employed in one place, and there-
fore you really need to find employers who will provide
this combination of learning and work experience. If you
go to a four-year institution that’s not going to engage
you through internships and work experience of some
type, that’s the wrong place to go. Because today’s liberal
education is in fact a combining of the traditional liberal
education with engagement in the real-life experience. I