Business Casual is one of those podcasts where I pick and choose the episodes. Last week featured two great ones.

My favorite was an outstanding podcast interview with the CEO of Chegg. Sure, parts are a little self-serving (as they all are), but I haven't come across a better summary of the challenges and inevitable changes coming to universities over the next three months to three years.

https://www.businesscasual.fm/zoom-university-is-in-session-decoding-higher-eds-online-future/?utm_source=morning_brew

Nintendo had its best quarter in over a decade. As did many other gaming companies. Okay, maybe this isn't surprising given the pandemic. But it is a little disappointing that millions of unemployed people are going to have nothing to show for the year 2020 other than minor improvement in games that may not even exist five or ten years from now.

So Congress is looking to extend the unemployment benefits for those people whose employment have been adversely affected by COVID-19 through no fault of their own. And I applaud that to a certain degree. The lingering question that I have is this. How many of these people are taking an extended vacation — whether outdoors or on Netflix — while much of the rest of the population that is employed has been re-skilling just to figure out how to work from home or whatever hybrid model that their companies are employing?

In other words, it still comes back to this question – how many unemployed people are taking advantage of this downtime to re-skill (or up-skill)? And should we be monitoring this and perhaps making this a condition for continued unemployment benefits? This seems to be a reasonable middleground that was never fully explored with all of the welfare reform arguments over the past several decades.

With digital distribution, there’s almost no excuse. It is cheap, ubiquitous, and completely necessary to improve the capabilities of our society.

Let's help our fellow citizens financially now AND the future.

The latest unemployment numbers just came in for the United States and we have now surpassed 30 million new claims over the past six weeks. And yet the one question that I don't hear anyone asking in all these reports is "Who is using this time to up-skill or re-skill?". Sure, I hear about how much people are using Netflix and YouTube—so much so that they have had to downgrade the quality of the video because it was putting strain on the Internet infrastructure.

But what about using some of this time to become more valuable to your current employer (assuming that you will be returning to the same one) or a future employer (assuming that you're going to be entering into a much more competitive market for employment than we have seen in the past 5 to 10 years)? This is such an obvious question...and yet, nothing. Just look at what is out there, from...

• Udemy
• LinkedIn Learning
• The Great Courses
• Masterclass

...or host of other online resources that are ridiculously inexpensive compared to the more formal education options—the vast majority of which are currently closed or going online anyway,

I'll have a lot more thoughts on this later...