Preparing for the future of work
Parents often ask me “what is the one skill my child needs to learn” to be prepared for the future of work? without hesitation I tend to reel off the World Economic Forum list — problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating, emotional intelligence, judgement, decision making, service orientation — until their eyes glaze over (I never get to cognitive flexibility) then, tend to pause and refactor with “to be honest the most important things they will need are how to be adaptive and resilient and how-to-learn so they will become lifelong students”.
OK adaptive, resilient and lifelong students / lifelong learning does sound like a cop out so indulge me for a minute.
In my working life (real “jobs” since 1988ish) we have gone from a fax machine that’s basically a typewriter making whirring dial up noises spitting out thermal paper (which faded in the sunshine) to instant messaging; party-line phone-lines to everyone with a mobile computer (occasionally used for speaking or messages) on their wrists or in their pocket (I love my iWatch); from centralised mainframes where we used a monocrome screen to Personal Computers (PC’s) to beautiful tablets connected to cloud based services (ok maybe thats just someone else’s mainframe); from TV with fixed programme viewing times and adverts, yuck, to on-demand on-my-terms Netflix! you get the gist, things have changed a whole lot in 30 years!
Now imagine how much could change again in the coming 30 years. Commentators are estimating autonomous vehicles to become commonplace by 2030 — and we won’t own our own cars either!; drones already mainstream will soon be delivering pizza and parcels too; Artificial Intelligence technology is already detecting whether a mole is likely to be cancerous among medical advances helping us live longer lives; I am hoping we will all be 3D printing our houses within 20 years; and Elon Musk thinks 1,000,000 people could live on Mars by the 2060's!
To be frank we can’t predict right now what will be disrupted, automated, robotised, invented, decommissioned or will become impossible to sustain due to changing resource availability — technological advances are happening so rapidly many of our imaginations can’t keep up.
Adaptive, resilient and life long learning — hopefully you are following my thread here — the nature of work is changing and changing rapidly.
Vocational based training is no longer enough to lock in a lifelong “career”, will we even have “careers” as a notion? Every industry as we know them can expect reinvention, adaption, disruption and evolution or will disappear completely! The construct of having 1 job at a time might yet disappear too — as the freelance model and gig-economy (blog soon promise) emerge.
Learning how-to-learn does sound strange but the mental conditioning of learning can be lost as we age. We get a bit stuck in our ways as we age too so often struggle to unlearn, closing out minds to new possibilities. To highlight this point I did enjoy this article and quote:
The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is often cited as an example of how children’s divergent thinking diminishes over time. 98% of children in kindergarten are “creative geniuses” — they can think of endless opportunities of how to use a paper clip.
This ability is reduced drastically as children go through the formal schooling system and by age 25, only 3% remain creative geniuses.
Most of us only come up with one or a handful of uses for a paperclip.
It will take a concerted effort by governments, education systems, educators, business and citizens to refactor quickly enough so we can introduce Lifelong learning, adaptability and resilience into our systems in time to help those, whose jobs are about to be displaced by automation, retrain. Before I make this post too long I will also promise to write soon on why Digital Equity, the Digital Divide and a base level of Digital Literacy are all important for our future economic prosperity. Next week a report on Digital Skills by a forum I chair will also be released which provides insight into how fast this space is moving.
Upshot is we need to reconsider “jobs” and “careers” today not in 2020 or 2025 — when drivers will start to feel the impact of autonomous vehicles — we need to start planning for their retraining now and prepare every generation for this change. This is a challenge for all of us.
Final thought from that same article from the World Economic Forum “… you could combine six standard LEGO bricks in more than 915 million ways?” mind blowing challenge, not something I have tried yet but…...
“We live in a great country so helping every New Zealander reach their potential in life is something we can all aspire to achieve”. You can find Victoria on LinkedIN or Twitter.