Wendy Colby: 0:11

This is Wendy Colby, vice President and Associate Provost at Boston University and the host of BU Virtual Connects. It is indeed a pleasure to welcome Kamran Malik, a global business leader who has spent the last 20 years working on complex global assignments for one of the largest consulting companies in the world. Over the course of his career, he has focused on how to reskill workforces to deal with the challenges in today’s transformational age. He has also lived at the intersection of business and higher education, with a focus on how to best harness the power of education to build a better working world.

Wendy Colby: 0:48

I came to know Kam as we started to open up conversations around deepening the value and partnership between academia and industry. Particularly given the times we are in, there has never been a greater moment to explore how we can better fulfill the promise of education to create impact and reach more learners worldwide. But with that also come changes to the way we operate inside higher education and how to think more boldly to drive innovation, growth and resiliency into the future. I’m really looking forward to what I hope will be a provocative conversation. Welcome, Kam. Pleasure to have you here today.

Kamran Malik: 1:23

Thank you.

Wendy Colby: 1:31

So you, Kam, obviously have an extraordinary journey, launching new ventures and businesses inside of some of the largest consulting companies in the world, and I wonder if you can describe a bit of your journey for us. What led you to this path you’re on? What do you see as your role in impacting the future of work?

Kamran Malik: 1:43

Thanks, Wendy. And look, I’d love to say there was a grand master plan, but I think it is definitely accidental and opportunistic. So I did my undergrad at the London School of Economics and started teaching there as an undergrad just first year accounting courses, helped co-author a couple of textbooks and always had a little bit of sort of academic learning bent. I then became a chartered accountant and joined EY, one of the big sort of global consulting firms, and spent a few years trying to persuade our leadership that what they really wanted to do was build a learning business to train and educate our clients and effectively bring my sort of passion for education and learning into the workplace. And, you know, after a couple of years of them eventually getting sort of bored and saying, fine, Kam, here’s a little bit of seed money off you go.

Kamran Malik: 2:32

Myself and sort of two others started a learning business, oh gosh, about 15 years ago and, you know, we had one client ask some training, then another, then another, and what started as a very much, I’d say, an accidental opportunity turned into a quarter of a billion dollar business where we’ve educated and upskilled, millions and millions of clients around the world. To the point that you mentioned, it merged from learning content creation and building courses to actually having sort of a strategic venture model on how do you transform skills, education and learning, using different partners, using different content providers, working with academic institutions, working with tech platforms, etc. And so that’s been a huge part of what I’ve been doing, really, you know, I’d like to say the vanguard of skills and upskilling, reskilling for corporates, for governments and across higher ed for the last few years.

Wendy Colby: 3:38

You know that’s fantastic, and I really want to probe more deeply on many of those topics that you just touched on, and so, you know, one of the, as we’ve gotten to know each other over the course of the last year or two, you know you’ve been looking a lot, as you say, at the problem of upskilling, reskilling global leaders right across many client businesses, and particularly in areas like AI, data science, that are experiencing dramatic shifts and transformations. So, with all of your experience out there today, as you laid this foundation, what do you see as the biggest needs in industry today and can you talk a little bit about the kinds of shifts you’re seeing?

Kamran Malik: 4:16

Yeah, it’s really interesting. So there’s probably a couple of levels to this. And look, it doesn’t surprise you to look at the bigger skills gaps that we’re seeing. I think LinkedIn released a report last week. The World Economic Forum did before. AI is up there as the number one across every single thing that you look at.

Kamran Malik: 4:36

I would say, though, that the conversation is shifting somewhat, which is less about what skills do I need than the mindset that I need to create. So, for organizations, the big part is productivity. It’s how do I ensure a productive workforce and how do I drive productivity in my workforce, and that’s, you know, in many cases, a state of mind as much as it is technical skills. So how do I create fire in the belly for people to go and learn? You know, I’ll talk about my own examples later, but you know, as we’ve talked about before, I’m launching a few businesses of my own. I have gone and taught myself, you know, the rudiments, and I will say they are the rudiments of AI. All the information you need to learn about AI is freely available on the internet. You can get on to  ChatGPT and teach yourself how to create these engines. It’s how do you create the hunger in the belly for people to drive and move forward to do that, and I think that is the biggest challenge.

Kamran Malik: 5:36

And so when you start unpacking this, you know, so much of education has been about build it and they will come.

Kamran Malik: 5:42

You know the Kevin Costner “Field of Dreams.” We have these beautiful courses built. We have these wondrous learning experiences built and I’m seeing the paradigm shift to so what? How does this help me and when is the moment that matters for education? We are more and more seeing the moment that matter is looking for a job, getting a promotion, trying to move from this role here to that there, and so more and more. for me, I’m seeing education part and parcel of the recruitment and mobility cycle way more than the talent developmental cycle, and that’s a controversial view because actually that’s the moment that matters. That’s where people are personally invested and where they’ve got fire in the belly to make something happen. So, to me, part of the reason why, and I’ve mentioned to you before, I’m moving on to Silicon Valley, is this idea of linking recruitment, hiring, mobility and skills, because I think that’s the next unexplored part of the journey.

Wendy Colby: 6:45

Yeah, that’s really interesting. A follow-up to that, Kam, as you’re talking and I’m thinking a lot about what you’ve just shared there relative to fire in the belly among the learners today, and I love that. Flip that a little bit for me on the company side, on the industry side. I know you’ve talked to me a lot about companies that are really challenged today with skills gaps, and so how do you strike that balance between, okay, I want to have employees in my workforce who have that fire in the belly to learn, but I also have a real demand to make sure that I’m keeping up with the times and can be competitive in my space?

Kamran Malik: 7:25

Absolutely, and I think for me a lot of this is about, you know, we talk about the skill set versus mindset. I’ve seen a definite focus on mindset and mindset-led assessments as well. So, actually, how do you score on curiosity? How do you score on learning agility, the ability to unlearn and relearn new things, and now taking a greater import in some of the leadership selection criteria and other selection criteria? I do think there is also a bit of how you create the right learning journeys, because I think again, historically and you know this is a problem that we’ve talked about before it’s like learning is over here and the day job is over here, and the two don’t really mix and. And so how do you create true learning in the flow of work that allows you to say, if I’m learning about AI, okay, it’s great to learn about AI ethics, AI theory, but actually I need to go and play, I need to see how this works in practice and play with the technology to then be able to come back in a meaningful way. It has a meaningful impact on my day-to-day job.

Kamran Malik: 8:29

So, you know, one of the ventures we’re starting is an AI-enabled estate agency, and I’ve got developers working with me on that and we’re using some new technology on, you know, I think it’s n8n, and I’m learning this as well, and Amazon Polly and other things, where we’re going to create an AI call center where you can call in and you talk to a bot to effectively drive lead generation before it comes into a human  estate agent or real estate agent to come and talk to you. So it’s I’m learning that on a day-to-day basis and then that’s directly going to drive the financial performance of my business. How are companies doing that, and how are are senior leaders? It’s not the workforce. It is, in order to be a senior leader in this organization today, you need to understand enough about how this works at a granular level not to do it, but so when you’re setting your big strategy, you’re able to understand these nuances of the art of the possible and how quickly it’s moving as well.

Wendy Colby: 9:26

And how do you, Kam, and I love that phrase you use, you know, in the flow of work, right? Learning in the flow of work. I think that is so important to ensure it’s relevant and meaningful. And I’m wondering, as you talk now to business leaders as well, how do you drive the right structure inside of business to get learning in the flow of work, right? As you’ve said, there’s often been this disconnect right between industry and what I need to learn, and so, do we have a moment where we might see convergence on this going forward?

Kamran Malik: 10:00

You know, again, a really interesting, really interesting concept and topic and we are seeing it a little bit in industry again.

Kamran Malik: 10:07

I wouldn’t say there’s a consistent view but, for example, I have noticed a move away from the all-powerful central L&D functions of the past to a much more, dare I say, it’s like a hub and spoke type model where there’s more control of the learning agenda in the business unit and business unit leadership take a much greater degree of ownership around well, actually, what do our people need to know in order to hit our strategic objectives? And therefore the BUC, HRO is much more involved in those programs of activity to drive that skills gap because they know, actually, I’m not going to achieve my strategic objectives without A, B, C, D, E and therefore we need to make this happen and we’re going to take much more ownership of how it’s going to happen and how we as a business are going to incentivize people and metric people on making it happen. Because that’s the thing like, for a lot of these things, it’s does it appear on a metric that impacts comp or impact progression or impact performance? If it doesn’t, unfortunately the likelihood is other than the altruistic, you know, people want to do good, it will be a lower priority than something that affects 30% of your bonus.

Wendy Colby: 11:25

Yeah, it’s so interesting as you look at the challenges and having traversed both sides myself being on the industry side and being on the education side, and I appreciate what you’re saying about learning and development. Often those were sort of check the box inside of industry, not really that learning in the flow of work as we’re talking about, and on the university side it’s often been we have a very, you know, more traditional model of the way in which we are educating, you know, students for the future, and so I’m really probing on how we’re bringing those pieces together now. So if the learning and development model, perhaps in its earlier origins, no longer suits the purpose of tomorrow, are there ways in which you see universities and business coming together right in more meaningful ways so that there is a true partnership, and perhaps not just one that is about let’s do the internship at this particular company, but there are ways in which we’re really closely collaborating on how to solve for some of these real issues.

Kamran Malik: 12:29

I definitely think they are, and to an extent we see it in the world already with co-chairs or business. Pharmaceuticals is a great example of where you do see business and academia coming together for great success because actually it’s a joint venture bringing the best from both sides to drive research into new drugs, new solutions for that particular sector. I think the key thing here is really understanding what both sides can bring to the party and the field that you’re in and, frankly, how quickly it’s moving because with the best will in the world, no one took the topic of AI, you know, in the last three months alone on the coalface, I have seen how much some of the technology has changed and what you can do. No program is going to be able to keep up with that. But when you start thinking about the ethics of AI, when you think about, like, how you’re structuring data flows and how they need to work, academics and business together have a lot to bring to the party. So I think it’s two things. It’s firstly, recognizing how you structure those programs to allow for the rigorous course of study and the rigorous thinking and application that academia brings alongside the very, very hyper-practical. This is how you deploy it in your organization. This is how it’s real. So I think those two bits are one piece. And then let’s not forget the motivating power of badging certification and having a level playing field.

Kamran Malik: 14:03

So you know, part of the reason I will say why they’re still important is we have not yet worked out a consistent way of assessing individual skills, and so university qualifications are a shortcut to that.

Kamran Malik: 14:24

Effectively we’re saying, this person can stick out taking large tracts of information, ingesting them and summarizing them in the form of an exam, and has been able to do that on a consistent basis.

Kamran Malik: 14:38

And that transcript gives me confidence that for that subject they’re able to do that. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will be able to apply in new ways, and similarly, someone without that may well also be able to do that. But in the past, the university transcript, in my view, has been shorthand for, in some cases, a measurement of IQ for the Ivy Leagues and upper tier universities and secondly, a view of your ability to complete a rigorous course of study. I fully expect, and we were starting to talk about this before, within the next couple of years, if not sooner, that will no longer be the case, that we will be able to use technology enough to be able to truly independently assess and verify skills and capabilities. Which then leaves a very big question of what value the university degree. If I’m a corporate organization looking to attract school leavers and I’m able to partner up with a university to offer degrees, diplomas, certification as part of my corporate university, that one university I partner with will have a great number of students coming through.

Kamran Malik: 15:46

But every other university that tier, I think, may struggle when, rather than a student paying the university, they’re getting paid by their employer to get these qualifications, and it’s for free.

Wendy Colby: 15:59

Yeah, you know, just another moment on the whole certificates, badges, the stackability, and I think so much of what you’re saying there, Kam, is really important that we have to be paying attention to as universities as well, because we have different types of learners, they’re learning in different ways, they have different motivations, we have mobility and flexibility, all these other things now, but how do you see industry sort of ranking certificates and badges today or the value of those as perceived by the individuals in those organizations today? Is that a way to kind of keep up? Because, again, the rate of acceleration in technology today means the degree I got 10 years ago is no longer going to serve me today?

Kamran Malik: 16:38

Yeah, it’s definitely a signaling mechanism. So you do see that more and more and, interestingly, the most important. So for most, and again I’ll go broad brush here, but for a lot of folks, their LinkedIn profile is the single most important part of their profile. It’s way more important than their internal work profile, because that is their signaling, and so certifications, diplomas, badges, all that stuff have a role to play in signaling your commitment to self-development for current and future employers, and so we do see that having importance. But, for example, it’s a does an AI badge from Google rank higher or lower than an AI badge from Oxford, ank higher or lower than an AI badge from a, you know, Nvidia? So you’re now, then, starting to get to all.

Wendy Colby: 17:27

An AI badge from BU.

Kamran Malik: 17:29

Oh, absolutely, an AI badge from BU. How do you start ranking these, and what does that look like? And so I think the individual, it’s hard to say, but it’s like the individual university element is maybe not quite as important as it was 5, 10, 15 years ago, because actually are you seen as the experts in the field, over and above the corporates, and it’s how those partnerships then work, where actually they can help you as well as the corporates as well.

Wendy Colby: 18:01

Right, it can be the entry into the degree and then you know the exit out of the degree in effect, right, so we’re starting to think about, you know, kind of that broader lifelong learning segment. So, switching gears a little bit and you touched on this at the opening cam you’ve continued to stay very active in higher education and in the higher education community. It’s clear you have a passion for education and starting these learning businesses even early on in consulting your own alma mater, the London School of Economics, and so just your own experience right in working with higher education and I always love taking the lens of someone who has come from industry and then how you look at you know, as you take a peek inside of our world in higher education and where might you have some recommendations or suggestions, right, it’s always an evolution, especially when you’re trying to bring some very traditional universities forward or helping universities evolve in these times. Where do you see those opportunities today?

Kamran Malik: 18:56

So they are, I think, many and varied, and I’ll put a, I don’t know if but is the right word, but you have a lot of institutional immunity, I will use the word immunity, you know, to and resistance to change. I think that will probably be the single biggest undoing of the higher education sector is the inability to move quickly, at pace as the market moves. And so my biggest worry in all of this is outside of the, the big brands, you know, the BUs, the LSEs, the Oxfords, et cetera, of the world, like I do worry that a lot of institutions are sleepwalking into disaster because I do not see how they’ve got a future, genuinely I don’t. So I look at, let’s look at course development. Okay, so I can now with technology having, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, when I started my learning business, I had a team of 80 instructional designers, graphic designers, guys who basically built learning programs, and I could throughput maybe the equivalent of 10, 15 academic courses a year, full-scale academic courses a year. Now I need a team of maybe 10 to do the same throughput, leaning in really hard on technology. That’s just the learning content creation.

Kamran Malik: 20:20

Then you start looking at the topics. So I’ve gone from, I had a conversation with one of my clients a couple of weeks ago, I’ve gone from that conversation to a fully formed curriculum which we are now going to talk about next week. So that’s what? Four weeks, from conversation one to fully formed curriculum. This is how it will go. This is the learning journey. These are the interventions. This is the badging. This is how it would work. These are the gamified elements. These are the bits where you come together as a cohort to learn. All of that in four weeks. That’s, you know, that’s so far beyond where most academic companies.

Wendy Colby: 21:05

Well, in core instructional design in general, right? I mean, there’s been a model around and the human element, and how do you pair faculty with instructional design and all of that? And you don’t want that human element to go away, but you want to kind of  have creativity and innovation and efficiency right, that comes out of it to support the learning.

Kamran Malik: 21:22

And also part of this then goes into like the ultimate mindset, which is for a lot of my clients, this is not, what you deliver is not the final outcome. So you know much like a product, what’s the MVP? What’s the MVP of learning? And how can you then, over two or three iterations of the program or the first thousand users, update, change, tweak, so it gets better and better. But if you can deploy me something in four, six, eight, ten weeks that I can then move with, that, that’s great. So that for me, I think, is a big shift.

Kamran Malik: 21:54

The other big shift, and you touched on this, actually we, we had some fun playing around with stackability is why, you know, is delineating the idea between accreditation and content for 101 level content. There is so much free stuff out there, why do institutions insist that it has to be there? So you know, being an accountant, double entry bookkeeping, whether I went to the LSE or Boston, it’s the same, and I can go on to YouTube and find enough courses that are right on double entry booking, as long as you put an exam at the end where you’re checking someone’s actual knowledge, who cares where the content comes from, and so how open are institutions to having a very different approach? And this is a real thing. If I wanted to do this 10 years ago ago and probably today, there would be a one-year negotiation between, let’s say, a BU or an LSE to say, let’s negotiate the terms of this. What would the page look like, what would the certificate look like? And by that time, we’ve already got three cohorts through it, doing it a very live way. So that speed and that ability to innovate is there.

Kamran Malik: 23:09

And I think the big thing that, for me, academia will probably need to look at is risk aversion. I do get risk aversion brand. I used to work for like an accounting firm, so believe me, the auditor opinion of being a qualified chartered accountant and auditor myself, I get risk aversion and professional skepticism, but it’s now, I think, getting to a stage where it’s detracting from the opportunity out there, the opportunity to educate, the opportunity to help society be ready for the future.

Wendy Colby: 23:42

And if you were sitting, Kam, on my side of the fence here, you’ve been sitting really on the side of industry for a long time and you’re looking in the window here, and I agree with so much of what you’ve said here, and we talk about this internally, too, agility, nimbleness, how to structurally change things, which can be hard in a system like this, where you have just years of tradition and systems that have worked in a certain way, and so I’m wondering, you know, a lot of the way I view my own role here is on education and how to best bring people along, and so I’m wondering how you think about that again, if you were sitting in my seat, what would you try to do to help, you know, university leaders and academics and deans, together with students frankly, because I think what’s driving us a lot right now is the changing behavior in students, right, who expect us to be working in different ways, and can you comment a little bit about that?

Kamran Malik: 24:38

Yeah. So look again, with this there are sort of the two let’s call it the carrot and the stick. So the carrot is very clear. It’s like showing the art of the possible. I think there is a whole thing and we do this a lot with companies. We’ve never actually, it’s funny, I’ve never actually done this with higher ed that we talked about this before, this idea of how well do you actually understand, as a dean, the art of the possible, what you can do, how quickly things can move, how you can still retain control and ownership, but how the technology allows you to really fulfill what students want, what clients want, the ability for a student to, you know, take someone like me. I struggle with large tracts of academic text. If I use things like Napkin AI, which takes text and converts it to infographics, I learn way better. How much is that part and parcel of a tool that is out there for students? So, you do nothing else but help them take PDFs and turn it into easier formats. Well, students with ADHD, there are now tools out there that allow you to bold certain words that means it’s easier for you to understand. So you go from the very, very basic, just take what you have, and use these tools to help the student learn all the way through to I can take a student, I can identify their skills gaps using AI and I can come up with a learning journey for them that is bespoke on how they learn, on demand, with what they need, based on all the content that exists at BU like that, and that is not something brand new. I mean, that exists today. There’s a real like, there’s an easy play there. So that’s the sort of the carrot, look at what’s out there and work out what you can do. The stick is the what are the KPIs?

Kamran Malik: 26:29

Like, you know, in a lot of my experience, you know, tenure is research driven. The KPI has got nothing to do with learning, skills development, ability to get a job in the job market and salary in the job market. It’s down to the research produced and so that drives the behaviors. So, and again, it’s hard with tenure, but, you know, I think your president is having a good go at shaking things up there a bit. It’s like who is metricked on the ultimate KPI of getting a job for a student? Who is metricked, and what proportion of academic salaries are contingent on their students and the salaries they earn and the jobs they get because ultimately, as I’ve said before, if it’s not metricked, it’s a nice to have, and so that’s a controversial view, but I’m sure there’s a degree of human behavioral, psychology, and theory in there. Where’s the metrics?

Wendy Colby: 27:26

I appreciate your bringing the business acumen into this. I think these are the kinds of things we do need to be thinking about going forward, and I love these ideas. You know, for those who may be listening here is how we start to think about metrics around you know students getting jobs and what those salaries are and can we track some of those things for, you know, to measure our impact and success. Okay, let me move on a bit. I did want to make sure we really touch on the global piece of this as well, given how much of this is in your own wheelhouse and experience, Kam, and traveling all over the world and working all over the world.

Wendy Colby: 28:03

I recently myself returned from a visit to India and it was, you know, really staggering to me, right, the opportunities that exist. I think the number shared with me, just even on MBAs, that need to be trained in India in the coming years is over 5 million, and they don’t have the capacity to do that today. And so, you know, as universities, we are also starting to think about what do we do differently globally, right? Is it still about setting up hubs in different countries overseas, or are there different models? How do we expand our borders? Certainly, we’re doing that with online today, expanding our borders, but how do we address some of these gaps, and I’m wondering if you might have some advice or counsel here too, on you know best ways to approach that.

Kamran Malik: 28:46

Yeah, that’s interesting as well and I think it’s funny. For me, I think there there has definitely been a shift away from the export model of the past. So you know, again we go back maybe 20 years where, you know, the western institutions were seen as the preeminent institutions and so there was, you know, a ready business model and money to be made frankly on exporting those that brand overseas. And you know it’s funny, we’ve actually seen it a lot in the secondary school market as well. So there are notable secondary schools, I know. I think last week Rugby School in the UK, which is a private school here, opened a branch out in Lagos in Nigeria. So there are, you know, that whole export of education and export of brand is definitely a well-trodden path.

Kamran Malik: 29:38

For me, I think the shift is to partnerships, and they’ve always been around, so you’ve always had things like sister universities or other things, but it’s a much stronger, more symbiotic partnership on a much more equal footing. It’s, you know, who’s got skin in the game? What are we jointly contributing, adding a corporate or a industry point of view into those partnerships? And again, it comes back to what’s the KPI? What are we actually trying to achieve here, and what’s best for the student? Do most students come into these institutions looking for a job at the outcome, and if so, then let’s pivot way more, and there are some you know, I think, Minerva are doing a lot in that space at the moment as well. There are others who are doing more in that space. For me, it always comes back to what’s the metric we’re trying to change.

Kamran Malik: 30:30

How are we going to do it? And also, I think, you know, BU and others have a great opportunity to lift societal capabilities through this, too. I think we talked before about the, you know, 11 to 13 program I’m building all for AI skills, a freely available program for everyone. 16 plus program. It’s where are institutions, you know. You’ve been big on like scholarships and the bursary programs, but it’s looking at what can we do to help society as well. That will have a trickle flow into some of these programs too.

Wendy Colby: 31:08

Yeah, it’s fascinating, and I love that you’re starting to address even this K-12 market, right, and, with these offerings, reminds me of, like, the Khan Academies of the world, right, and now it’s about AI, and so, while we’re addressing this from the higher ed spectrum, we have to recognize that this world is changing with students coming into university today, right, so really important to be thinking about that.

Kamran Malik: 31:30

I think for this topic, actually, the bigger age gap is the 40 plus. Interestingly, the 40 plus are probably more comfortable with the idea of going back to a university other than the online programs, and so it’s interesting understanding that market and like where you’re playing, where you’re playing there again, that far in the belly is great if you know how to navigate where you need to navigate to learn those skills, and if you don’t, you’re aware of this big amorphous AI thing that’s taking over the world, but where do you go from there? So I do think there’s more to be done there. Let’s not discount, you know, the Gen Xers like my good self, who are there, ready and willing to contribute to society as well.

Wendy Colby: 32:22

Yeah, you know, what I think is really interesting? You’re touching on another subject that is near and dear to my heart and that is around segmentation and around the portfolios, right, that we offer. And so to your point, right, there are segments which may prefer online or hybrid or in-person, and how do we accommodate those? And then, in addition, it’s also back to your KPI point. It’s thinking about the portfolios of what we offer today. You and I were talking the other day about sort of the growth of AI in business and where that could be taking us in the near to long term. So, just a moment on that. I mean, as you think about you know and I know we’re thinking deeply about this here too like, what do we offer? Maybe some of the programs that we’ve had in the past are not the programs we should have in the future?

Kamran Malik: 33:10

Yeah, definitely. I think it comes back to what’s driving and motivating individuals. So is the three-year degree program a thing of the past? Is the short, sharp intervention over periods in your, you know, the lifelong BU skills program, you know, where you effectively have over the course of the next 20 years, there are touch points where you make sure you’re sort of kept up to date and upskilled.

Kamran Malik: 33:38

I don’t know, but I do think there is a big shift, and it’s also a big shift in where and how people learn, so it needs to be in the flow of life.

Wendy Colby: 33:52

Ah, the flow of work and the flow of life. I like that.

Kamran Malik: 33:54

So it’s very much like how and where you learn different skills and you know, in life, new parents you go from, you know, just the two of you quite happily walking into a hospital one day, coming out with this child. I think Bob Keegan at Harvard talks about the plateaus of human development and how effectively these life-changing events cause a shift in the plateau of human development. So the learning that parents go through is huge. There’s no play. You might go to an NCT class, you might read, you know, the Idiot’s Guide to Parenting or whatever. But like, you go through this big shift and change. During life, there are these processes how can and, you know, parenting is a sort of left-field example, but, you know, take that of starting your own business or, you know, taking a new job. How does society shape these big developmental lifts?

Kamran Malik: 34:53

And where can academia get involved? Should academia get involved? Or actually does the role of academia change to be more honed in on research? That’s the core business of academia. And actually, do we see a shift where the ancillary learning elements fall off and be picked up by other places, and academia becomes a real targeted research, pushing humanity forward type of institution? You know, these are big questions that I couldn’t hope to have the answer to.

Wendy Colby: 35:27

Well, wow, Kam, that might be a way to bring us to a close here. That has been, this has been a fascinating conversation. Is there anything else you would like to share before we close today?

Kamran Malik: 35:39

No, no, I think we’ve had a merry old journey through the world. Look some of my personal perspectives. I do think you know you can look at the world through a utopian or dystopian lens, and you know so either, basically, AI and technology is going to take over all our jobs and we’ll all be homeless, or actually we will grow and evolve through that. I have a utopian view with a caveat, which is I do think humanity will evolve, but we need the fire in the belly and the drive to do it, and I think without that we do risk the dystopian view. My hope is and, you do see, I’m refreshed every day when I go and I see and I teach and I work with folks, and I see people grasping and hungry to learn these new skills. So I’d like to sort of finish by saying that I believe in the utopian view, but there’s a thin line between the utopia and dystopia.

Wendy Colby: 36:44

Well, let’s keep optimism alive. I’m with you. I am eager to partner with more innovators and collaborators like you and really have enjoyed this conversation and look forward to all the great things you’re going to do, going forward to help us get to utopia. Thank you, Kam. Thank you for joining us for this BU Virtual Connects podcast. Special thanks to my colleagues at BU Virtual and to our media team who produces this podcast under the leadership of our studio director, George Vago. To keep up with our BU Virtual Connect series, be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. You can also learn more about our portfolio of online programs at BU Virtual by visiting bu.edu/virtual.