The risks, rewards of the coronavirus career makeover
Last March, as her final semester at Georgetown Law School was winding down, Madelle Kangha was feeling optimistic about the future. The 30-year- old would continue working as a senior paralegal to cover costs while she studied for the bar exam. Then, once credentialed, she’d find a higher-paying legal job — one that would provide for her 15-month-old daughter and chip away at her massive student debt.
Then the pandemic arrived, and like so many people she knew, Kangha was furloughed. “It happened to attorneys and family members who worked in IT,” she says. “It was a wake-up call: A lot of jobs aren’t as secure as you think they are. I’ve been nursing this dream of entrepreneurship for a long time. Covid gave me the perfect combination of necessity and push to take the next step.”
Kangha, who lives in Manassas, Va., wanted to start a beauty product company for women of color. She called Score, a nonprofit resource partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration, and began reading about business plans and watching the organization’s marketing webinars. She also applied for amentor, a Score volunteer who could lead Kangha through her launch. Suddenly, she was back in the role she thought she’d left behind: the student.
Since early Apr i l , Kangha has signed on to regular Google Meets or phone calls with Ann Lim, a Loudoun County, Va.based consultant with an extensive background in international business. Lim, 50, has given her protege a virtual crash course in entrepreneurship, complete with assigned readings and worksheets before every session. And yet the process is nothing like traditional business school or even a community college entrepreneurship course. It has been exclusively practical, exploring how Kangha can clarify her company’s value proposition and source beauty suppliers.
It has also been fast. “Ann asked me, ‘Do you have a business plan?’ but I wanted to get started,” Kangha says. In just a few weeks, with the plan still unwritten, Kangha had spent $3,000 in savings plus a $500 gift from her family on inventory and marketing. “Your timeline is very aggressive,” Lim told her during one of the online sessions that I attended with the women. She sounded a little concerned, but part of her job, she understood, was to prioritize her student’s sense of urgency. “We should do a to-do list so we can achieve that timeline,” Lim added.
Some of Kangha’s friends and familyweremore skeptical. “They ask, you’re going to take the bar and not work as a lawyer?” But relying on Lim allowed her to dismiss those concerns. “Ann said, ‘ This is such a great market; you’re right on trend.’ It was such an encouraging and inspiring moment for me,” Kangha says. “To know I’m not crazy.”
Historically, recessions have forced laid-off workers to reinvent themselves, often sending them back to school. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, two- and fouryear colleges saw a significant uptick in enrollments within six to 12 months after the 2001 recession, and again after the 2008 crash. This time, the educational landscape looks different. Now colleges in all sectors have watched undergraduate enrollments drop, according to the Clearinghouse. At the same time, enrollment at shorter-term graduate programs offering certificates and master’s degrees have increased, especially at for-profit institutions. These include coding boot camps, massive open online courses ( MOOCs), small-business mentorship programs and online learning communities.
Score says that in 2019, 91 percent of clients who came to the organization for help starting or expanding their business were still operating a year later. Whether that record will persist during a pandemic and recession is unclear, but Bridget Weston, Score’s CEO, says would-be entrepreneurs have little to lose: “Despite our complete transparency about it being completely free, some people just don’t believe that at first.”
Between April and July, demand for Score classes and mentors more than doubled. Typically, 20 to 30 students would show up to local workshops; now the average remote workshop has 80 students. Pre-pandemic the organization’s national webinars averaged 800 people a session; now it’s 1,300. Coursera, one of the world’s largestMOOCs, saw a 400 percent increase in registered learners between the spring and summer of 2019 and the same period this year.
Engagement on LinkedIn Learning, an online educational platform affiliated with the career networking site, tripled between July 2019 and July 2020. Traffic for Course Report, a coding boot camp directory and review site, has skyrocketed since March.
In recent months, pandemic-fueled anxiety has pushed laid- off workers into an educational sprint. Like fast food and fast fashion before it, there is now fast education, modes of virtual learning and upskilling that allow — and even encourage — students to absorb asmuch information as they can as quickly as possible, often with the promise of a new career. But are these educational platforms overpromising?
Even MOOCs hosted by top universities have low completion rates. Some allow students to buy badges or certificates, which may look good on a résumé but have little to do with actual learning. And students who eventually decide they’d like to earn a more traditional degree find that traditional schools often won’t take online credits.
Beth Stein, who co-led a congressional investigation into for-profit colleges after the Great Recession and now works at the Institute for College Access & Success, says the MOOC and boot camp industry was too often a “black hole.” “There’s no quality assurance, no one checking that faculty knows what they’re doing or that students are having a good experience,” she says. “And because they’re not taking Title IV loans, they don’t have protections inherent in the federal aid system.”
And yet learners like Kangha aren’t concerned about a lack of oversight or quality control. Kangha isn’t paying Score or her mentor; in fact, many of these courses are free or have expanded their free trials and scholarship offerings since the nation went into lockdown. But even when there’s money on the line these pandemic learners are primarily concerned with taking action. Yes, they say, maybe there are no quick fixes. Butwhat other option is there? “Having a daughter and getting furloughed: This is really real,” Kangha says. “I need to make sure I create a stable situation for her.”