Watch Her TED Talk
About Michelle
Author of the acclaimed book Long Life Learning: Preparing For Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet (Wiley, 2021), Dr. Michelle Weise is refocusing the conversation about the future of work to center on the future of workers.
Weise leverages the framework of a learning ecosystem to reveal the five principles that enable working learners to thrive in an uncertain world of work. These principles around career navigation, wraparound supports, targeted education, integrated earn and learn opportunities, and fair and transparent hiring practices are the keys to unlocking business model innovation and a virtuous cycle of continuous returns to learning throughout a longer work life.
Byron Auguste, CEO
Opportunity@Work
“Michelle Weise has a knack for distilling the complexities of education, labor, and policy into an integrated approach to building a more hopeful future of work. Weise skillfully links the individual stories of working-age adults to the underlying patterns of dysfunction in the U.S. labor market. In Long-life Learning, Weise shows that the future of work is here, and that we need to act now to construct a learning-to-earning system that works for everyone.”
Maria Flynn, CEO
Jobs for the Future
“By examining economic trends, innovations in education and hiring, and the lived experiences of working learners, Weise reveals the shortcomings of our fragmented education and workforce systems and challenges us to reimagine the future of learning. Weise demonstrates how and why we must all become working learners, and presents a clear, optimistic vision for a new learning ecosystem in which we can all take part.”
Joseph B. Fuller, Professor, Harvard Business School
“Weise brings sky-high projections about the future of work down to earth with forward-looking and actionable steps to advance career-focused learning and training. Her examination of higher education goes beyond the usual calls for change to demonstrate how burgeoning innovations are laying the foundation of a learning ecosystem of the future—flexible enough for all people—to move consistently in and out of learning and work.”
Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO, Futuro Health
“Without hand-wringing about the rise of automation, or finger-pointing at our current systems of education and employment, Long-Life Learning advances a vision of the future that puts the needs of workers at the center. Recasting us all as 'working learners,' Michelle Weise illustrates not just the value of repeated returns to learning, but the critical importance of seamlessly interweaving education and work throughout our careers.”
Praise for Long-Life Learning
"Michelle makes a brilliant case not just for the necessity of adults investing in learning throughout their lives, but also for the creation of a new system that systematically supports them across their lives as they do so. This book begins to lay out the puzzle pieces of what that new system should look like."
Michael B. Horn, Author of Choosing College
“In Long-Life Learning, Michelle Weise articulates the critical need for adults to access an ever evolving menu of learning and workforce skills development to remain relevant in the future economy and a 100-year work life.”
Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner, GSV Ventures
"Long-Life Learning is a lifeboat for those of us swimming in the sea of confusing--and often contradicting--narratives about the future of learning, working, and living. Throughout, Michelle brings thoughtful and diverse evidence to bear on a host of pressing challenges facing not just schools but all of society and offers a deeply integrative set of insights from her years as a student of disruptive innovation to chart a better way forward—robots and all."
Brian Fleming, Vice President of Innovation and Strategy, Southern New Hampshire University
