Future Education: The Brief

Across edtech.com, HigherEdJobs.com, EdTechJobs.io, and Tes.com, there are roughly 105,000 active job listings in education and EdTech right now. That is not a projection. It is today's observable hiring demand across the largest platforms in the sector. Behind those listings sits a workforce of 2.55 million annual professional transitions globally - people moving into, through, and out of roles in higher education, K-12, international schools, and EdTech companies. Most of them are moving without structured preparation for what those roles now require. Data literacy appears in 40% or more of all listings across every platform. AI fluency is mentioned in 21% of EdTech postings and rising fast. The training market has not caught up. In most cases, it has not started.

The course had a good run. For most of the twentieth century it was the right container: a defined period of time, a body of content, a test at the end, a credential on the way out. It organised learning into something administrable. That was not nothing. But Dr Philippa Hardman, Cambridge scholar and OpenAI education advisor, made a pointed observation in her recent newsletter: agentic AI tools have begun completing asynchronous online courses autonomously, clicking through modules, answering quizzes, and passing assessments without a human learner present. Institutions are scrambling to respond with security measures. Hardman's argument is that they are solving the wrong problem. If an AI can complete your course without anyone learning anything, the issue was never the AI. It was always the course.

There is a job waiting to be filled in almost every HEI and EdTech company that no one has a name for yet. It sits at the intersection of pedagogy, data, and process design. The institution calls it 'coordinator' or 'analyst' and pays accordingly. The EdTech company calls it 'product manager' and hires from tech, where candidates have never sat through a faculty senate meeting or understood why a curriculum approval takes nine months. Both are hiring the wrong people for roles that do not yet exist in any job description, for a transformation they cannot execute without them. The talent shortage in education is not a numbers problem. It is a definition problem - and the window to address it is narrowing fast.

The language of institutional change in higher education is surprisingly honest about its own failure. Strategies describe transformation. Roadmaps set milestones. Executive teams endorse visions. And then, quietly, the organisation continues operating in ways that predate the strategy, the roadmap, and the vision by a decade or more. This is not cynicism or resistance in its simple form. It is something more fundamental: the people responsible for executing the change have not been given the thinking frameworks, the process disciplines, or the adaptive habits that change actually requires. Announcing a new direction and building the capability to travel in it are different acts. Most institutions have only done the first one.