How to accelerate skills acquisitionin the age of intelligent technologies

We should be talking more about learning than about education. Education is about processes and topdown transmission of knowledge. Learning is a much wider concept. A lot of learning goes on in non-educational contexts, and today we have a very large and increasing number of learning opportunities.

It’s a race between education and technologies. Blockchain, AI and advanced biosciences promise new efficiencies and growth opportunities at a time when leading economies are struggling with weak productivity gains and, in some cases, slow GDP growth. But it’s easier said than done.

“It’s Learning. Just Not As We Know It” is a study published by Accenture in collaboration with the G20 Young Entrepreneurs Alliance (G20 YEA), which includes ground-breaking analysis that helps organizations assess their future workforce to prepare skilling strategies. It reveals how intelligent technologies will change the tasks that make up work and identifies the new skills that will be required to perform them. It calls for education and corporate training systems to commit to three areas of action to develop these new skills more effectively.

1. Speed up Experiential Learning. Thanks to advances in neuroscience and technology, the development of experiential learning techniques have progressed significantly in recent years. These techniques are about learning through hands-on application, rather than absorbing knowledge by listening or reading. Design Thinking in the boardroom, simulation training tools for more technical functions, on-the-job training initiatives, learning plans, new technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make learning more immersive, engaging and personalised…
2. Shift the focus from institutions to individuals. Most of us recognize the value of a broad variety of skills across the workforce. But there needs to be a greater emphasis on broadening the variety of skills within each worker. Education and training objectives should encourage each individual to develop a broader mix of skills, rather than producing only a certain number of graduates from specific courses. This mix should include a focus on complex reasoning, creativity and social-emotional intelligence.
3. Empower vulnerable learners. Education and corporate lifelong learning systems must be accessible to all in order to truly close the skills gap. Workers who are vulnerable to disruption from technological change must be identified for targeted interventions. Our analysis confirms that lower-skilled work is more susceptible to automation. Workers in these roles also require the broadest range of skill building, but tend to participate less in training, compounding their disadvantage.

The report concludes that investments in experiential and individualized learning and empowerment strategies for the most vulnerable workers are the best way to reduce the skills gap in an increasingly digital world. The promise of economic development of digital technologies is at risk due to the inadequacy of corporate training and education systems. Unless new learning strategies are radically adopted, the failure to eliminate the skills gap can generate a loss of up to $11.5 trillion in the value of growth from investment in intelligent technologies in ten years and in 14 of the G20 economies.

This connects perfectly with what Michael A Osborne has to say about the skills that must be enhanced by the development of Artificial Intelligence and also reminds me of Asimov’s short story, The Fun They Had.

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