I am a trend-watcher. As CEO of a higher education institution, I must ensure that my college remains a viable, thriving force. Here are some trends that I have culled from recent reading:

* Reskilling will explode. According to the American Society for Training and Development, 75 percent of the current workforce will need to be retrained by the year 2000.

* Competition will be more aggressive. Our colleges are not "the only game in town." Students have a multitude of choices and they want to go where they have the best chance of enhancing their employment opportunities.

* The mismatch of what education provides and what our economy needs will become more glaring. For example, traditional education deals with facts. Yet employers want employees who are problem-solvers. Another example is how our colleges emphasize individual effort. Yet every employer you talk to is looking for good team players.

* Work and learning are becoming the same thing. Don Tapscott, in his excellent book, The Digital Economy, brings out this important insight. Maybe that's why so many employers are becoming "educators. " McDonald's Hamburger U. provides credit-level education to more than 10,000 employees each year. There's also Motorola U., Hewlett-Packard U., Sun Microsystems U., to name a few. Employee education is growing 10,000 percent faster than academia.

Bottom line? Community colleges must get more in synch with the Information Age. We must do more than change our institutions. We must transform them.

Ask yourself: How many of your faculty are still teaching lecture style? This style is fine to prepare students to work on a factory assembly line at the turn of the century. But how effective is it at preparing students to make it in today's workforce where collaboration, problem-solving, creativity and collective decision-making are required?

Technology is redefining the role of our faculty. Rather than fact-givers, they must become navigators, guiding their students into a whole new world of discovery. The spotlight must now shine on learning, rather than teaching.

What we are seeing at my college, Parkland, is that students and faculty are becoming collaborators in learning. They work on projects together, explore resources, share ideas and, in many ways, feed off each other's excitement.

Technology also is changing the way we lead our institutions. Now it is easier not only to share information, but to share consciousness. I saw this happen earlier this year when we were developing our college's strategic plan.

Parkland has a planning committee composed of representatives from throughout the college, but in an institution of nearly 1,000 employees, obviously only a fraction were involved in the early stages of strategic planning.

Then we put the draft of the strategic plan on e-mail for the entire college to review. This may sound like a small I thing, but I recognize it now as a revolutionary change for our college.

E-mail allowed everyone to be involved with strategic planning. Everyone had a voice. More important, the strategic plan, the road map for our college, is now part of everyone's consciousness.

One more point about e-mail. While I always have a full schedule of appointments and meetings, I know that a) sometimes it is difficult to get on my calendar and b) there are some people who feel intimidated meeting face-to-face with the college president.

But with e-mail, I communicate with anyone who wants to share an idea, tell me their problems, ask me to lunch or whatever, and it takes much less time than a traditional office appointment. E-mail may very well be the most democratizing, inclusive force in technology.

As technology helps us to transform our institutions, we will move away from hierarchical management models that, in effect, send the message, "Stay in your little box and just do what you're confined to do." This just doesn't make sense in the quantum world where what matters is interrelatedness.

In the Information Age, workers have the knowledge to manage themselves. Bureaucracy will become a thing of the past as the line between worker and manager blurs.

Our institutional transformation must allow workers to socialize, share ideas and collaborate. Technology makes this easy and efficient. We need to rely less on standardization and policy manuals, and leave room for improvisation.

So much is possible in the Information Age. The best thing we can do as leaders in our organizations is not hold people back. At times it may feel as though we are working in chaos. That's part of change and transformation.

We all have people in our institutions who want to hold onto the past. Do what you can to nurture these people and make them less fearful of change. But we cannot let them prevent us from moving toward the future.

As community colleges, our ability to serve and remain viable will be based on whether we can move from an industrial model that no longer is relevant to one that embraces a new vision for the Information Age.