When news broke in January that investment in Ed Tech had reached $9.53 billion in 2017, the likes of Forbes started to see more predictions on Ed Tech’s future and potential growth, drawing attention from major investors to the developments within the industry.
Despite potential challenges, many industry experts foresee opportunities for accelerated growth, strong government support, and an appetite for the product and technological innovation that can further support a tech-enabled population.
This investment into the industry has begun to put stress on talent pipelines and a candidate shortage is now being realized as HR teams scramble to accommodate the requirements set by companies looking to capitalize on this growth. This lack of talent is already being experienced by organizations seeking to increase their technical recruiting. In addition, as the talent pipelines in Ed Tech begin to dwindle, TRN is now starting to see more hiring managers becoming dishearten at the lack of available talent in commercial and customer facing roles.
Strong government backing and a developing culture of self-improvement through continued learning have collectively made Ed Tech an attractive industry for both investors and employees. The drive to continuously develop has meant that organizations are being forced to broaden their reach in search of suitable commercial talent that meets their requirements. As previously stated, Ed Tech is an attractive proposition for many workers and the growing interest has seen candidates looking to migrate from other industries. However, this brings new complications such as aligning compensation and benefit expectations from established industries and a lack of unique market knowledge required for a variety of specific Ed Tech verticals.
Additional challenges are also facing talent already established within the industry. As Educational products become digitalized and the Ed Tech market becomes standardized and more defined, traditional expertise is being required to retrain and adapt to new selling models. This has resulted in Ed Tech experiencing a transitioning talent pool of established industry professionals that need to retrain, along with new talent from outside the industry that needs time to ramp up and understand the complexity of the education market. This has resulted in a current lack of talent availability and readiness.
Ed Tech’s aggressive growth has also exposed traditional, reactive recruiting strategies as inadequate. Organizations that are proactive and innovative are accessing the best talent, establishing networks of talent and diving deeper when evaluating potential candidates. These organizations are able to better adjust their employees’ work-life balance, evaluate possible growth paths for employees and provide better incentives.
When looking forward to 2019, hiring managers should be regularly assessing the top of the candidate funnel, continuously building their talent network and improving candidate awareness and making sure that their chosen recruitment operation is proving a healthy blend of outreach and inbound applications.