Access before the course

Efforts to bring new skills to people who lack them tend to begin with content. That is understandable. Content is what organizations know how to make, and a course is easy to count and easy to show. But a course on a screen assumes the screen. It assumes power to charge it, a connection to reach it, and enough computing power to run what the course asks of it.

For a large part of the world, none of that can be assumed. About a third of the world, some 2.6 billion people, is still offline, by the count of the International Telecommunication Union. For them, the most carefully designed curriculum is a door painted on a wall.

This is innovation debt in its plainest form. The capability exists; the reach does not. What technology can do only counts if people can reach it, and for those who are offline the first barrier is not motivation or talent. It is access.

The Hyve Foundation works in three moves, in this order.

The first is devices and computing power, delivered where access is not a given. This is not a gesture of goodwill. It is the floor everything else stands on.

The second is learning on top of them. It will be built on Learn, iSYNCSO’s learning proposition, which launches later. Learning comes second because it depends on the first move: until the devices are there, it has nowhere to run.

The third is directions worked out in advance: which skills a place will be short of, with incentives behind those directions so that following them is worth someone’s time.

Each move is incomplete on its own, and so is each pair. Any two without the third fail, and they fail in recognizable ways.

Devices and learning without directions produce a hobby. People gain skills, sometimes impressive ones, but nothing connects those skills to work a place needs done. The effort is real and the benefit stays personal. That has value, but it does not change what a place can do.

Learning and directions without devices produce a brochure. The plan is sound and the curriculum exists, but the people it was written for cannot reach it. It reads well and changes nothing.

Devices and directions without learning produce hardware in a cupboard. The machines arrive, the priorities are clear, and nobody has been taught to use the one in service of the other. The equipment ages behind a locked door while everyone agrees it was a good idea.

All three have to be present for any of them to matter. That is why we treat them as one piece of work in three parts, not three separate initiatives.

The third move sits at the top of the stack, but it cannot come last in time. Directions have to be worked out before anyone enrolls.

The reason is that learning spends something scarce: the learner’s time. Someone who gives a year to a course has given a year of their life, and they cannot recover it if the skill leads nowhere. A program that works out afterward what its graduates should do with their training has already spent that year on their behalf, without asking.

Working out directions in advance means asking an unglamorous question first: which skills will this place be short of? Not every shortage can be foreseen, but some are already visible. In the skilled trades, for example, the work keeps growing while experienced hands retire, and the masters who could teach are the ones retiring. A shortage like that is not a forecast. It is arithmetic that has not finished yet.

Incentives are the other half. A direction nobody is rewarded for following is only a suggestion. Putting incentives behind the directions is what turns an informed view of the future into a path a person can reasonably choose.

The Hyve Foundation is being built. It has no programs running yet, and we would rather say so plainly than describe work that does not exist. We announce late on purpose; the Foundation will speak about what it does once it is doing it.

What we can describe is the shape of the commitment. Access first, because nothing else runs without it. Learning on top, because a device with nothing to learn on it is only a device. Directions settled before enrollment, with incentives behind them, because a skill that leads nowhere is a cost to the person who learned it.

The outcome we are working toward is simple to state and hard to achieve: over time, more people who can do what we already know we will lack tomorrow.