USA Universities Failing to Adapt to GBS Needs

There’s a notable intersection between business and knowledge process outsourcing and academics — and Bill Hefley’s life experiences meet right in the middle.

After spending years working in both realms, Hefley is using his experience to blow the whistle on academia’s inability to keep up with the global business services industry, noting that by-and-large universities have failed to transition to a teaching model that moves away from agriculture and manufacturing.

“The market is changing, and services employment is going up,” he said. “But we still teach the way we used to teach. We teach agriculture. We teach mechanical engineering. We teach industrial engineering. … People actually buy services.”

According to data from the International Labour Organization,  in 1991 43% of the global workforce worked in agriculture, yet today that percentage stands at 26%. Services sector employees have drastically increased over the same time period, accounting for just 35% of the workforce in 1991 and growing to nearly 50% at present day.

To Hefley, who now works as a clinical professor at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas, this realization has come naturally after spending more than 40 years in the industry. The more difficult problem, he says, is trying to find the solution.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “You’re talking about the people who are writing the textbooks and designing the curriculum who don’t have that background.”

Interestingly enough, he said he believes the global recession in 2008 may have also had a lasting effect on academia’s ability to adapt amid a changing technology climate that came to widespread notice during the dot-com boom.

Hefley had organized the launch of a master’s degree program in IT service management from Carnegie Mellon in 2008, which was axed due to growing fears about the strength of the economy.

“We had a big vision of launching it, getting the curriculum going for a couple of years on campus and then moving to a cohort-based design where we actually would do some hybrid on-location sessions. You know, let’s do a week in India, let’s do a week in Qatar.”

Hefley’s unfortunate timing resulted in him finding a calling back to the classroom, where he could have a direct effect on students — a return to roots, so to speak.

Filling in the gaps
Technology companies have long had their own training programs aimed at developing talent beyond secondary education levels. Hefley taught for the Executive Consulting Institute in the 1990s, IBM’s showcase training program for customers and consultants.

“Years ago, when you walked around IBM and you’d be talking to somebody, you’d say, ‘Hey, how long have you been around?’ and they would explain just how many different areas of expertise they held during their career with the same company,” Hefley said.

More recently, companies started laying off employees instead of retraining, he added, due to a focus on “upskilling” as opposed to “reskilling,” which often pins employees down to a single part of a business in hopes of catering to a market that is increasingly calling for more specialization.

Corporate education programs, however, have not gone away. Instead, they are becoming more widespread despite the shift away from reskilling, which Hefley attributes to a need for better education from the ground up in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“Latin America is developing its own corporate universities and colleges, because what they’re finding is there’s a need for breadth … and they’re not getting what they need from the schoolhouse,” he said.

Sofka Technologies CEO Esteban Alonso said during the company’s annual Tech Day event on Thursday that corporate learning is a necessity to promote growth.

“They are the ones leading through generative AI through training,” he said. “To prepare them and to give them a framework and a practical type of training so that they can learn how to adapt to this technology.”