Since many of you understand the notion of next acropolis, it’s time to think outside the box. Next Acropolis is designed to allow recruiters to search for student talent, then make connections — ie, invite a job application, inform someone of an event… These are all expected outcomes of using the system.

Yet the most important aspect of the system will be not only how recruiters recruit, it will be how they shape the future workforce, through mentoring, and giving students directions for future research.

I was reading the New York Times’ piece on John Seeley Brown’s innocentive, which is a site where companies post problems they are trying to solve, and offer a reward to innovators who can solve them. They think that by harnessing the power of communal networks, that important problems will be solved, by breaking traditional silos for communication and creating a more transparent relationships, where organizations literally admit they are having problems.

The same sort of communication is possible inside of Next Acropolis. Companies will be able to use the search functions in our network to locate people working on industrial problems close to their industry. Then, they can offer directions, suggestions, and even virtual internships, where research topics are farmed out to students, virtually.

In this sitation, the silo of the university is broken, economic problems and industrial questions are shared, and young minds become oriented toward larger problems outside the quadrangle. In optimal scenarios, students who are trying to write research papers that propel them into prominent positions will get the extra push from mentors, who can position them with feedback, and set their sights on goals they should try to solve. For the sake of industry, this is the perfect means to incubate talent, and secure future placements. And for industry to take a personal interest in the academic progress of young people is to offer an additional layer of support to students that has never been offered.

The potentials of openness, transparency, and extra-silo communications will deepen the integrations between actors in the economy and the aspirations of people looking to become them, the students.

This recent article on msnbc underscores the paradox in modern corporations: the need to gather talent, despite the odds. McKinsey polled firms on how easy it was to conduct talent searches, and despite the nuber of online resources, it hasn’t gotten easier to constantly recruit people.

As Jack Welch liked to put it, he’s always on the lookout for good talent, and hence, he recommends, always see yourself in an interview. People tend to rely on their own circles for opportunity, and employers resemble the employed in this regard: when an employer meets somebody they really like, it’s an opportunity. As a CEO now, I understand this.

In other news, one reads of students fearing the perceived crisis in the economy, minimizing job growth. Apparently, jobs in public service and in human interest like Teach for America, are experiencing huge growth. Despite suspicion that this is just a product of intensified email recruiting, evidence elsewhere coroborates this trend: students are graduating, and looking for work that they feel in their heart. Apparently, over the past twenty years, high-paying jobs suffer lower employment rates, whereas low-paying employment in public service have increased. This includes a rise in employment in the Arts. As a former resident of Los Angeles, one realizes how the Art economy definitely has opportunities, albeit poor-paying ones. I myself was a production assistant on a music video before cementing my commitment to technology and the Internet.

I personally remember the downturn of the early 1990s: I graduated from college in 1995, when opportunity was beginning to rise, and the underpinnings of the tech boom were starting to show some signs. But in the winter of 1992, 3, and 4, our generation felt quite obscure. I remember writing in my journal how our opportunities were going to be truncated, and to choose a path that came from the heart. I was quite wrong, and the number of opportunities in Internet exploded within three years. Small firms competed to participate in offering useful products that contributed to the blossom of telecommunications.

That was then, and this is now. Already, students should read the writing on the wall, and get interested in the greening of the economy. This time, the indicators that green technologies will proliferate, and they should get busy studying how to participate. Photovoltaic cells, natural gas, clean tech legislation, and business models built on green-collar work will dominate the future horizon. Anyone within the reach of this blog should take note: the economy is an ecosystem, and anything related to practical applications and environment will have a stake in the new booms. Even though recent legislation is somewhat discouraging, necessity is the mother of invention, and despite the claims that offshore drilling will help lower gas prices, those gas price declines aren’t expected until 2030. So the likelihood that alternative power will proliferate is guaranteed. (Did you know that the majority of state legislatures that push for tax subsidies for alternative energy projects are Republican, whereas their federal counterparts tend to push more for traditional oil and gas exploration subsidies.)

The key for young people, when orienting themselves to succeed in the broader economy of the future, is to look at what we need right now, and are not getting.

• lack of information security
• lack of software engineering
• lack of lawyers (surprising, but true)
• lack of science, tech, math
• lack of non-profit management talent
• lack of accounting
• lack of accounting for non-profit management (joke)
• lack of environmental design
• lack of asian language speakers (Arabic, too)
• lack of knowledge in latin-american countries
• lack of knowledge about India
• lack of knowledge about Kazhakstan, Armenia
• lack of knowledge about Russia
• lack of knowledge about French economics

There’s something for everybody in this list (Excluding arts majors, who never lack for ideas, but probably need to do lots of documentaries, which are hot right now). For young people looking for directions, there’s plenty of need for them to absorb disciplines that keep their host country on top of their global position!

I admire Ian Ybarra’s book, Recruit or Die. It sees things the way they really are at college campuses.

I believe that Next Acropolis will solve the problems Ian Ybarra presents. We will give all the quality firms who are not Microsoft, G/S, and McKinsey the ability to search for students wherever the desirable talent lies. And it will likely be wherever the professors are that have the expertise… and teaching jobs distribute the elite across the entire collegiate system. You don’t have to go to MIT to find kids educated by MIT graduates…

An article on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website gives a strong example of operating inside of a ‘culture of evidence.’ In it, a graduate advisor describes listening to graduate students, who often come to her office to tell tales of horror in the dissertation process. She begins her advising session by asking the graduate student to show her their recent research, which is expected of them. This is usually the cause of many of their problems.

I experieced this as a graduate student myself; a good friend would meet me in lab, and I would ask her how she was doing. She would reply, stressed, and feeling lost, and we would talk about what she had so far, and where she could go with it. Often, having more than one person working on the problem helped a lot, but I couldn’t help her at all if she hadn’t done a ton of work to begin with.

The counselor in the Chronicle article operates inside a culture of evidence, and it is this culture that defines the state of universities with regional accreditation status. In order to get acceditation, they must present evidence that shows their students gain the skills they need, and go on to gain the jobs they came there to get.

The US Department of Education depends on this culture of evidence, interestingly, because the government must accredit the accrediting agency. (In my case, it is the Higher Learning Commission, whose accreditation my college seeks). The accreditor asks for a culture of evidence from the applicant university, then accredits them on multiple factors, such as placement within the student’s major, and the evidence that the school produces research by students.

It is this culture of evidence that is so useful to educators and advisors, as well. I find that I constantly work on student writing, and insist that their writing is an example of how well they think. I imagine that when employers begin to access student literature, they will look for evidence of a keen mind, and they will find it. I use my uncle as an exmple, who in the 1960’s wrote a paper as an Australian undergraduate. He analyzed how the Australian economy would absorb a professional golfer’s league, like the US PGA. In his experience, multiple sports agencies submitted competing bids for him to come work for them, based on this paper. Though this paper was the last thing he produced as an undergrad, it propelled him toward a bright future, based on things he cared about.

The research paper is precious because it allows the student to hunker down for weeks with a concept that bedevils them, and figure a way to solve a problem. Stacks of books are consumed, as well as many other papers, as well as experimental data, program code, and their own original algorithm analysis and design.

The paper, once invisible, now can be indexed and brought to light as a source of insight into an individual’s personal capacity for thought, and leadership. The paper clearly begins a student’s journey on the path to adulthood, where their personal volition is the major factor that defines where they will go. We can also intervene, and mentor a student based on the things he or she writes about, and identify young adults in our industry who are keen to contribute.

And what I mean by industry, is sub-industry. I do indeed participate within the computer sciences industry, but specifically within the domain of social computing, and specifically, within online communities of practice, dealing with academics. That’s pretty niche, as I like to say, and in order to identify the next mid level executive, I can search for papers with those niche terms. Then I can begin to contact those students, offer internships, and begin to court my next round of executives, who can learn this company from soup to nuts.

As this conscientious researcher wrote, it all begins with this ‘culture of evidence’.

During the development of next acropolis I continue to remind myself that our system will be very niche. Right now we are focused entirely on the movement of talented university students from the academic world to the public world, and getting them absorbed into the economy based on their talents. That’s it.

Well, there’s quite a bit to that niche. First of all, you’ve got to make a way for students to optimize their education. Relationships with peers in their discipline, outside their discipline, relationships with professors, and the perfection of those all-import papers. And you’ve got to help them with the organizational work associated with passing courses. I recently attended a meeting with my development staff, and they showed me the calendar students will get. The calendar will be so good, that the students can plan their whole day around Next Acropolis, and use it to stage their success during their degree. Making a successful 4 years or more of degree work is a priority within that bigger goal.

The next area is enabling professors to reach out, in a Web 2.0 world, and envelop students into their course as a daily part of their lifestyle. This component of The Next Acropolis is built for the kind of teachers I had in college and grad school — people whose courses really crept into your lives, and changed you as a person. As a college educator myself, this is precisely what makes teaching so interesting. A big goal for Next is to provide professors with a wide set of tools to help pull students into their missions, as teachers. A big part of college teaching is building a culture that supports student success, and the cultivation of a group of students who will fulfill that degree. So making a social network that supports students on a day-to-day basis is also a part of Next.

But the job isn’t quite done, even after you’ve made a cozy environment for students and professors. The folks who make the system work are the recruiters outside academia. These are the people who assemble companies, one individual at a time, by locating the right person for the job, designed to make the company move forward. Ultimately, it’s the recruiter’s goal to make that organization competitive.

What we do at the Next Acropolis is to focus on making the information needed by recruiters highly available. Because the faster the recruiters achieve insight into a candidate, the faster they can place them, and move that organization into ‘go mode.’ I myself contend with this very issue as I operate as a CEO, hiring engineers, designers, attorneys and accounting pros. And I encounter the student side of the predicament when I teach courses in software engineering. Students typically create strong research that is invisible to employers. When employers ask for more than a transcript to certify their preparation for hire, it becomes critical to supply more evidence. For graduate students, having the ability to present their research to employers changes the game entirely, as they prepare painstakingly for inclusion in their chosen industries.

In the space between school and industry, much of the information employers really want is missing. Meanwhile, the efficiency of the organization rests on its talent, as located by management. We are about bridging that gap. This is our niche.

Recently I have spent a lot of time joining groups on Facebook, and ‘friending’ individuals online who are in the recruiting industry. I have also spent time discussing The Next Acropolis as a product with new high school graduates, who surprisingly have become very interested in the company’s concept:

Next Acropolis builds three systems:

1. a system for professors to create social networks around their courses

2. a system for students to manage their academic lives, including delivering papers to professors, and staying connected to courses

3. a system for recruiters, in corporate environments, to contact and locate students with the educational credentials they need.

The Next Acropolis system excels for recruiters who must locate student talent based on real knowledge. Papers and research projects give employers the best possible indicator what you know, and what you care most about. Frankly, the student who is the most invested in a particular subject, makes the best possible employee. Conversely, the employer who seeks someone who matches your profile, in terms of interests and values, is the ideal place to work. (This is the goal of career development professionals, who seek to place students based on their academic interests, but lack the visibility into student’s personal profile).

This very difficult combination of seeking employers based on your interests is resolved through a system that provides employers with the ability to locate you, based on your interests. I believe that this focus on exposing your strengths is an answer to many recruiters’ desire: which is a searchable social network, like facebook, that contains information they need on you. (Employers are relying less on transcripts, and much more on projects with professors, internships, and tangible evidence of talent to make hiring decisions).

The National Association of Colleges and Employers recently posted some summary stats on recruiter behavior, costs and trends for this year’s graduating class. Some key details:

1. over the last 10 years, the number of recruits interviewed has dropped 50%, from 8 to 3.9 interviews per job hire.

2. it still costs around $6,000 to recruit and land a full time hire, out of school

3. internships are increasingly seen as keys to locating and recruiting key staff, out of school. The number of internships is increasing, and the likelihood of hiring the intern after school has grown to %70

Some key elements inside the Next structure are designed to decrease the time and effort required to locate student talent. The ePortfolio system is designed to allow students to be located based on their research projects, which will expose a layer of student talent that was virtually invisible, and allows industry representatives to target students very precisely. A good example would be in the case of students in the life sciences; many of them display excellent coursework and research projects, and startups can locate exemplary interns and entry-level associates based on the work they did as an undergrad or graduate student. The truth of the matter is that start-ups and innovative companies may not make it onto the radar of students, nor can they penetrate the vast array of campuses in search of high-grade science talent. The same goes for new lines of business inside of larger firms, that expand, and become competencies in areas they are not known for. In this example, the large firm can reach into the pot of students who are committed to an academic area, like risk analysis or futures trading, and make aggressive pitches to students with little effort — just a google search on nextacropolis.com, and click to become their peer. This is absolutely built to transform the way in which students transition from school to their working lives.

The emergence of talent is the head of the looming power of India and China. (And the inequality, or non-employability of offshore talent that relegates them to more menial tasks). In the global sphere, talent is the differentiator for industrial producers; this is perhaps redundant. Talent also underlies the strategic advantages of start-ups, which create nimble environments for high-grade innovation. It stands to reason that talent also provides the lever for companies — so long as they attract human capital, they can translate it into market capital. Nothing in this statement defies tradition now, nor in previous eras. Simply put, people make the difference. Professor Jay Swaminathan helps me to make this point, and then take it up a notch; not only is competitive advantage created when talent is leveraged properly, but it is taken away, when it is enlisted to fight competitors. To this corporation, talent must be revealed in order to be tapped, and we must be dedicated to doing this on a world class level.

The Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland states that if businesses require more science, technology, engineering and science (STEM) graduates, they’ve got to stimulate more students to come into their disciplines. It makes sense that if industries as diverse as finance and pharmaceuticals need these critically important graduates, that mentors within each industry must stimulate the production of these graduates. One area that Next Acropolis excels is in its ability to empower mentorship between industry pros and students. Not only do corporations need to encourage students to pursue career paths in STEM majors, but they have got to court them to join up with them once they’ve come of age. This is a fragile type of relationship, best done online, where a company mentor can reach out and cultivate a strong crop of new recruits… This is what Next was built to do.

The growing tech sector in Buffalo, NY is growing. And the need to fill tech positions comes with it.  Firms already struggle to compete with out-of-state corporations who have their recruiting act together, and have to make their hiring requirements elastic, to accomodate the availability of talent. This is a good problem, especially since it points to a healthy small-business climate. Recruiters of small tech firms admit to actually using myspace to find talented people… Next is built to handle this problem.