#41 - Ray Blackwood, VP Product Management at Campus Management - On how AI helps grow the employability of Students

In this podcast, I’ll focus on product innovation in the Higher Education space, and my guest is Ray Blackwood, Vice President of Product Management at Campus Management Corp

Ray is a futurist who is passionate about technology, business intelligence and leadership. He’s particularly passionate about solving problems in higher education through technology. As he puts it on his LinkedIn profile: “I invent solutions that run colleges”.

Ray received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Advancing Technology in Multimedia and Digital Animation and Production and his Master In Business Administration and Technology Management from the University of Phoenix.

In my hunt for compelling stories about the value we can unlock when technology and people blend in the right way, I stumbled upon Campus Management’s new product: Occupation Insight. It’s promise: “How institutions can better align academic programs and student skills with industry needs”. This triggered me, hence I invited Ray to my podcast.

We explore the big changes in the education space, where the focus is now shifting from graduation to employability as the ultimate outcome. We discuss product innovation approaches on how technology can play a meaningful role to help students stay on the optimal path to achieve their aspirations in a world where teachers are a scarce resource.

Here are some of his quotes:

“It's hard for students to choose the right thing, or we have so much advisement to coach the student that it can be overwhelming.

I wanted to know what I was going to learn in a class more than what classes I needed to take.

How cool would it be if I was a student, and I was sitting there and I just wasn't being told what to take because I needed a certain number of credits, but I could actually see what skills I'm going to learn and what careers could I be interested in while I'm in school and be thinking about that."

Technology is changing so rapidly. What you're going to learn in the classroom your freshman year might even be irrelevant by the time you graduate. The skill that technologists need to learn is not the technology itself, but it's how to learn. It's how to solve problems and how to think.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why the challenge is not to solve the problem at hand, but to prevent it altogether.
2. How you can create larger impact and circumvent scarcity by changing behavior – and one thing to do that is to inspire curiosity.
3. What mindset you should create as a business software vendor to transform and accelerate your success.