Where Practitioners Actually Read About Skills, EdTech and Technical Careers

If your work touches skills, whether you design training, hire for it, or are trying to change careers yourself, the useful reading is spread across tiers of publication that almost nobody reads together. Sector news gets read. Peer reviewed research does not. Trade press for an industry you do not work in is invisible even when it is the only place your question is being answered properly, and the best writing on the subject is often by one person with a mailing list.

This is a field guide rather than a ranking, because the tiers are good at different things and knowing which one to reach for is most of the skill.

Sector press, for knowing what is happening

Times Higher Education (timeshighereducation.com) provides global higher education coverage, and describes its output as world university rankings, news, opinion, features and book reviews. Whatever you think of rankings as an instrument, this is where the higher education sector argues with itself in public, and the argument is a reliable leading indicator of what institutions will shortly be under pressure to change.

What this tier is good for: knowing what is happening and who is worried about it. What it is bad at: telling you whether any of it works.

Peer reviewed research, for whether it works

Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration (ojdla.com) is a peer reviewed electronic journal, offered free every quarter, publishing original work by practitioners and researchers on the administration of distance learning. Recent issues take on exactly the questions that decide whether an online programme survives: designing needs assessments for distance STEM provision, why regular and substantive interaction matters to administrators as well as faculty, centralising standard operating procedures across a large online education division, and whether targeted webinars actually improve doctoral students' use of generative AI.

That list is worth reading twice, because it is administration rather than pedagogy. Most online learning failures are operational, and this is one of the very few places the operations are studied directly rather than assumed.

There is also a small thing in its editor's column that is more instructive than it looks. It notes that a conference of online education leaders meets face to face, on Jekyll Island, for its twenty sixth year, and defends the choice: the value is not only the sixty or seventy concurrent sessions but the informal conversations afterwards. People who have spent their careers building online programmes are the most careful about what online cannot do, and that is not hypocrisy, it is expertise.

Research, Society and Development (rsdjournal.org) is a multidisciplinary scientific publication focused on disseminating knowledge for social, scientific and technological development, running double blind peer review and thanking more than 340 ad hoc reviewers for a single year's work. Its current issue runs from silage fermentation in tropical grasses to information and communication technology based mini greenhouses.

That range is exactly why practitioners skip journals like this one, and exactly why it is worth not skipping. Multidisciplinary journals are hard to skim and are where cross sector findings surface first, usually years before somebody repackages them as an insight.

What this tier is good for: evidence you can put in a business case and defend. What it is bad at: timeliness, and prose.

Vertical trade press, the tier everybody skips

RFID Journal (rfidjournal.com) covers RFID, sensing and connected retail and industrial systems, and its front page is a good demonstration of what this tier does that general technology media does not. Its lead expert view argues that retail's next big problem is not innovation but integration, on the grounds that the real challenge is making existing systems work together. Alongside it sit specific deployments: smart sensors in beverage production, automated retail store operations, RFID scrub dispensing in healthcare facilities, a label manufacturer adding a second high speed converting line.

The reason to read a vertical publication about an industry you do not work in is that it prints the things that went wrong, in detail, with names attached. Generalist technology media almost never does, because its readers have no operational stake in the answer.

What this tier is good for: finding out what a specific industry actually needs its people to be able to do. What it is bad at: being findable from outside that industry.

Independent practitioners, for the things an institution cannot print

Nivi Achanta (niviachanta.com) publishes free guides on building healthier, happier and more impactful online communities, alongside community strategy and consulting work and a newsletter based climate community she has built and writes about. She describes the guides as a behind the scenes look at what has and has not worked for her in building that community.

The "and has not" is the whole point of this tier. Community design is a live and badly understood problem for anybody running cohort based education, and it is written about far more competently by people who have run one than by vendors selling the software for it, because a practitioner is allowed to publish the failures.

What this tier is good for: specificity and honesty. What it is bad at: consistency. The good ones stop publishing without warning.

How to read across the tiers

A habit worth building: take any confident claim you meet in the sector press, look for a peer reviewed paper that tests it, then check the trade press for what happened when somebody in a real industry tried it. Most confident assertions about skills and technology do not survive that sequence, which is the reason to run it.

Disclosure

Refonte Learning publishes in this space and approaches publications about editorial collaborations, including guest contributions, expert commentary and content exchanges. We are not a neutral observer of this market. We are a participant who would like to be published in some of it, and you should read the list knowing that.

We publish round-ups of this kind in other parts of the market too, and the companion piece on who publishes practical technology courses is the clearest example of the method. On the editorial questions that come up whenever anybody carries anybody else's material, we have written down our rules on third party content and who owns the content a contributor writes.

We have not ranked these publications, been paid by any of them, or accepted payment to include them.

How this list is maintained

Entries are compiled from our own reading and described using each publication's own public material, read on the date of publication. No payment is accepted for inclusion or for position.

The list is open and revised. If you publish on skills, education technology, technical careers or your own industry's workforce, and you are not here, write to [email protected] with a link to the section you would want quoted. We will describe you in your own words or not at all, and if we have put you in the wrong tier, tell us and we will move you.