Looking for a New Job? Try Edtech

From K-12 to higher education, the demand for educational technologies and people with the expertise needed to develop and implement edtech systems continues to grow. In January 2018, TechCrunch reported that in the first 10 months of 2017, investors put a staggering $8.15 billion into edtech companies around the world. This means that edtech jobs, which include educational technologist, instructional designers, implementation specialists, as well as people with expertise in machine learning, are also currently on the rise and expected to continue growing over the next decade. This article details just three factors driving the current upsurge in edtech and explains edtech jobs will grow over the coming decade.

Three Reasons Edtech Jobs Will Grow in the Next Decade

Emerging Economies Are Embracing Edtech

There are multiple factors currently driving the growth of edtech jobs on a global scale. To begin, edtech offers scalable educational solutions. Offering a traditional classroom-based course to 100 students rather than 20 students can be a challenge. Space, available instructors, and even textbooks may pose an obstacle to quickly scaling up the size of a course. Online, most of these obstacles vanish. In heavily populated areas of the word, including Africa and Asia, and especially in nations with under-developed K-12 and postsecondary education systems, new tech-driven educational solutions are being embraced as a potential way to respond to the need to rapidly scale up educational offerings. Evidence that edtech is being embraced as a solution to the global demand for quality education can be found in Africa’s booming eLearning sector. Several NGO projects, including targeted United Nation Technology Innovation Labs (UNTIL) initiatives focused on edtech, also reveal that increasingly the NGO community is turning to edtech to ensure that children and young adults around the world have access to the educational opportunities they deserve.

Private and Public Sector Support

Another key reason the edtech sector continues to grow is related to its investment base. Many parts of the tech sector rely mostly or entirely on private investment. While this is certainly not a problem, it does mean that future growth is contingent on continued interest and a strong economy. By contrast, edtech is an industry that continues to receive a healthy mix of private and public sector support. Among other advantages, this mix of investment support means that even if the economy slumps in the future, edtech companies are likely to continue thriving since at least part of their base comes from public funding sources.

Market Demand from Students

Perhaps, the most critical reason why edtech jobs seem bound to continue growing over the next decade is connected to market demand. As reported in Educause’s 2017 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, for the fourth year in a row, students who prefer blended learning over simply online or on-site learning environments has risen. Likewise, students preferring a face-to-face learning environment continues to decline. The same report found that at the postsecondary level, one of students most common complaints was the lack of Wi-Fi in outdoor spaces.

What’s especially notable about these statistics is that while online learning enrollments continue to surge, on campus enrollments continue to drop. In fact, as reported in the 2018 Babson Survey of online education, “Distance education enrollments increased for the fourteenth straight year, growing faster than they have for the past several years. From 2002 to 2012 both distance and overall enrollments grew annually, but since 2012 distance growth has continued its steady increase in an environment that saw overall enrollments decline for four straight years and the largest for-profit distance education institutions continue to face serious issues and lose their enrollments.” According to the Babson Survey, as of Fall 2016, there were 6,359,121 students taking at least one distance education course, which accounts for 31.6% of all higher education enrollments.

Of course, postsecondary-level students aren’t the only student now arriving in school with an expectation that they will be able to engage in learning online. Children as young as kindergarten increasingly arrive in school with their own digital devices, at least some level of computer literacy, and an assumption that learning is something that naturally happens on the screen and not simply on the page.