On working with governments and building a future-proof career
Some announcements
Good morning from Melbourne, Australia!
👋 Hello! I'm Aarushi Singhania, and this is the #8 issue of Edstreet. It’s a monthly newsletter that connects ideas on education, skills development, lifelong learning, and preparing for your next career move.
This issue of my newsletter is a little bit about my reflections working on education innovation projects and systems change with policymakers and government in Australia, thoughts on what does it take to build a future-proof career, and resources on cohort-based courses.
Lessons learned while influencing Australia’s education policies
When I first moved to Australia, I was curious to investigate: how to implement systems change in education? What are the steps involved in education policymaking? And in what ways can I influence education policies using data, research, and evaluation?
Between 2018-2021, I was fortunate to find answers to some of these questions and contribute to various education policy reforms and innovations in Australia as a Consultant and Senior Advisor.
My projects ranged across the Australian schooling system to higher education, lifelong learning, and workforce training. In short, I had the opportunity to work behind the scenes with governments and policymakers on influencing education reform, lobbying evidence-based policymaking, and coordinating change management using the key levers of data, evidence, leadership, and partnerships.
Working in Australia also meant I had the opportunity to witness many vivid and often untold details of Australia’s landscape, education inequity, and the Australian dream of many immigrants - that’s a story for the next issue.
So what did I learn in my work with governments on education reform policies and programs?
#1: Education policies are not built and implemented by education departments alone
I realized that there is a lot of good intention, talk, and will to improve the quality of schooling education, access to higher education, the introduction of innovative curriculums and assessments but most of this gets crushed by ideology, inertia, and ignorance of political leaders and bureaucrats running the education system.
We love using the word ‘systems reform’ or ‘systems change’ in policy circles. In simple words, it means solving complex barriers to the provision of quality education for ‘all’ children. Complex problems can’t be solved in isolation. Thus implementing systems reform means working closely with several departments of the government like treasury, education, jobs, industry, and precincts for coherent design and implementation of policies as policies are not implemented in isolation by education departments alone.
#2: Building strategic partnerships is foundational to influencing education policies
An important aspect of education policymaking involves building relationships with governments, ministers advisors, and other related stakeholders. A lot of strategic lobbying and advocacy is weaved into these relationship-building conversations.
The process of reaping the fruits of advocacy and lobbying is often very slow. For long periods, you might feel like there is no progress but then your contribution or single recommendation results in orchestrating millions of dollars in the annual budget announcements and that is the real thrill.
Building relationships demands a lot of patience, consistency, and strong communication skills. The tasks include: lining up meetings after meetings, regular check-ins/sales pitches to key government partners and minister’s advisors, writing policy briefs, coordinating, and negotiating & consensus building.
#3: Evidence-based policymaking is a myth
In the last three years, I learned that data and research on their own are not enough for influencing education policies. You don’t become proficient in influencing education policies unless you spend time in the country, learn to communicate with the locals, build relationships, show interest in culture, use the same language, & appreciate different accents.
Especially as an immigrant, you may always be conscious you’re the foreigner, and the need to be polite while maintaining a voice on the table. But you can overcome this challenge, if you engage with the domestic media, listen to how and what citizens talk about, engage in current and past public policy discourse.
Unless you have lived and worked in Australia for a few years, it will be hard for you to believe that people of Australia like to do things in a certain way. Change is hard in this country. I don’t know why it is like that but it has got something to do with what I have often heard in many of my conversations with local people and in popular documentaries - ‘the small island mentality’,‘ being a lucky country’, even more, ‘taking pride in being old school’.
So for me, this meant that I had to put aside all my aspirations of only leveraging data and evidence to influence policymaking. It meant looking at reforming education policies in a different way - by embedding the Australian value of ‘mateship’. You have to understand what it means and how it is used in work to influence change. I learned how to play it back in my conversations with stakeholders and colleagues. It works. It’s in little things - your tone, words, greetings, a little joke, and all that matters in fostering long-term relationships necessary for change management. People like it when you bring your personality and human side to work.
In Australia, Mateship means recognizing humanity in the other person. It means believing that we need each other in this lifetime. And that we as humans can tag along together, we can be together.
- Miriam Margolyes in Almost Australian, ABC documentary
In reality, a lot of evidence gets mixed up with the party agenda, funding availability, and ideology - the version of the policy that gets approved is sometimes the 10th, 15th, or 20th iteration of what started as an evidence-based review or a literature review. So the implementation of evidence-based policymaking is far from being true - as it is a mix of ideology, values, political interests, economics, data, and evidence but definitely not just evidence.
#4 Other observations about education policymaking.
The single biggest challenge in policymaking is coherence. K-12 skills & competencies don’t align with the needs of University education. Industry and Jobs departments are creating their own education and lifelong training programs. Vocational education is trying to find its identity in a market flooded with online short courses and boot camps. It is all very chaotic at the moment.
Another key observation that I had in the last 3 years is that it takes anywhere between 5-10 years for policies to be designed, approved, implemented, and evaluated. So it is not for you if you thrive on immediate impact. Rather a place for people who like endless churn of coordination and meetings, have an opinion on everything and like to produce one-page memos and briefs.
My final comments are that all you need is a strong conviction and the ability to ask vague questions to thrive in policymaking. This might not be fully true as there are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But as Paul Graham says, ‘the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.’
On building a future-proof career
The world is moving at a tremendous rate; going no one knows where. We must prepare our children, not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for their world – the world of the future. - John Dewey, radio broadcast, early 1940s
I would think, this is also true for adults.
These days, I am exploring a question that has been on my mind for a little while - what will it take to build a future-proof career for anyone? What combination of skills, competencies, credentials, & networks do we need our young people and adults to thrive in the world of unknown unknowns.
Building a future-proof career is about knowing how to be resilient and adaptive in an ever-changing complex environment. It means integrating and enjoying the process of lifelong learning. Developing a beginner’s mindset. Knowing how to handle uncertainty & unknowns.
In my view, lifelong learning gives you an unfair competitive advantage in life and work. It plays a big role in future-proofing your career. So how do you build lifelong learning habits? There is a really nice post by Sahil Bloom discussing 20 lifelong learning habits that you can start today to help you build a future-proof career.
Knowing how to engage in snappy experiments remains key to building a successful future-proof career. For example, at any given point in time, I’m engaging with several education innovation experiments to work on complementary and interconnected experiments and projects. Working on several interconnected projects means you are on a path to building a future-proof portfolio career.
As someone who craves variety and diversity, I've always resisted job descriptions and titles and thrived when I can spend my time working on hard problems across different functions and teams. This is primarily because I believe the problems of education can’t be solved by education departments, educators, or entrepreneurs alone. The magic happens when people care about the same problem but think about solutions in different ways. That’s why I often ask myself - why can’t I be a researcher, advisor, consultant, educator, and learner at the same point.
This is where the idea of pursuing a portfolio career kicks in!
The first time my idea of pursuing a portfolio career got validated, when I accidentally Spotify-ed David Nebinski’s Portfolio Career podcast in early 2020. We didn’t know each other back then but now we do, thanks to Maven. So for this newsletter issue, I asked David a few questions based on his experience of 170+ episodes exploring what it means to pursue a portfolio career.
How did you come up with the idea of a Portfolio Career?
David: When I lived in San Francisco from 2014-2016, a common question I got was “what startup do you work at?” Upon moving to New York City in 2016, I started receiving different questions from people. Conversations were then about personal development, books, communities, life-long learning, side hustles, and creative projects. These people were taking a holistic and intentional approach to their lives and careers. It was fascinating!
Then, when I was working on multiple things in 2018, I started getting questions from people asking “how I was working on multiple things?” Around that time, I learned about The Podcasting Workshop through One Email by Seth Godin. I decided to enroll in the first-ever cohort of this Cohort-Based Course to explore this exciting Portfolio Career topic.
My first interview was with my roommate at the time and now we are here 170+ episodes later!
How do you define a portfolio career?
David: It’s up to you to decide and do what you want to make of it! There are many definitions and interpretations of being an educator, freelancer, creator, artist, and entrepreneur. I think the same is available for you here [in portfolio career].
One way to think about it is that this person is not defined by their job. They create. They teach. They build communities. They want to educate, inspire, and help people!
Has your definition of a Portfolio career shifted between when you started this podcast and now?
David: The opportunity to create a Portfolio Career has grown since I started the podcast. Technology is increasingly making it easier to start a blog, newsletter, podcast, and more.
One other exciting trend is also the rise and growth of Cohort-Based Courses. Through companies like Maven, recognized experts can create a Cohort-Based Course to monetize their work while profoundly impacting others. This creates more financial incentives for people to start developing a body of work and to share their ideas. Further, each Cohort-Based Course creates an ecosystem around it enabling people to start projects, build relationships, and more together.
Currently, a growing amount of people are spending more time online through various social media platforms and in Slack channels as an example. This is allowing people to discover and connect with others more so than I saw in 2018. You can’t be what you can’t see and this is helping people discover and start taking action on a life that they want, compared to what they learned growing up.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has also reminded us how quickly things can change. By developing your own body of work, working on projects, and building relationships beyond your main job or client, you will be more resilient and adaptable going forward!
Resources on cohort-based courses
If you are planning to enhance your online course delivery, I will highly encourage you to check out course delivery in Harvard’s most famous course CS50. It will be delivered LIVE and free starting tomorrow, check out.
Looking for ideas on how to run a workshop for your online course - check out David Perell’s workshop for Write of Passage and Cam Houser’s workshop on Minimum Viable Video.
If you haven’t already checked out, my article on 10 success signals for cohort-based courses, sharing again here.
Thank you! Very insightful!