The open road and the open mind
Daniel Bluzer-Fry, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Sally McNamara, Helen Babb Delia, Soolin Barclay and Courtney Guilliatt, on the #secretlifeofskills, an under-the-surface exploration of skills.
What you will read here is not research in any sense.
Instead, The Secret Life of Skills is, at its essence, journalism — or maybe photojournalism, or maybe participative journalism, or maybe storytelling — crossed with some ethnographically-inspired looking-for, finding-out and sensemaking, blended with material culture studies crossed with a pinch of design fiction. In this piece, there’s also a dash of semi-autobiographical fiction around a recent excursion into The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Let’s see what it makes you think about.
When Colette was recounting her experiences moving from high school through to formal tertiary education and into a portfolio career blending social work, teaching and therapy, much of her 15-year journey had been punctuated with time spent abroad.
Between finishing high school and deciding what to pursue next, Colette said about her thinking as an 18-year-old:
“I remember filling out my applications for uni, and I was like, I’m not going straight to uni. I want to go travel, I’ll save up, and then I’ll go to uni. I applied for things like youth work or whatever, but I knew I wasn’t going straight to uni. I just wanted to travel. Travel has always been a passion. Work has never been a passion.”
— Colette, 34, Melbourne
Today, Colette is yet to own her own property, and while she loves her home and the garden she has built, the rising rents in Melbourne’s inner north are a source of frustration. But she remains steadfast in making travel plans and spending time abroad, whether it's on a volunteer program, trips with friends or alone. Sometimes these trips have been a reaction to burnout or fatigue; sometimes, they have been organised around a study sabbatical.
Is it just a vicious cycle? I asked myself after our first conversation. If Colette focused on building a bit more stability around the cadence of her life — one job rather than three, a mortgage — would things be different? Would she feel more fulfilled, happier and better at being a social worker and teacher? Or is there something in these experiences that make her more capable and energised, and better at doing her work?
“If I was to ever write a thesis, it would be about how the way the roads in a country work reflect their culture,” said Andre with a chuckle.
We’d been talking for around 20 minutes at a cute little brewery in the Old Quarter in Hanoi. It was a chance meeting — we were both relaxing on stools next to each other and got chatting. I noticed his South African accent. He was in his early 50s.
Our first conversation lasted close to three hours, as he had worked in the service industry and his work had taken him all over the world. But more on the conversation later.
What Andre said early on had struck a chord as for the two preceding weeks, I had thought about this exact phenomenon in Vietnam — and about my distant memories from living in South East Asia over a decade ago.
The conventions on the road are so very different in comparison to a developed Western economy. To Andre’s amusement, I noted my observation that traffic in Hanoi and many other cities across South East Asia flows like a giant, fluid school of fish.
There’s an alertness amongst those on their scooters and bikes, with everyone — from the trucks and cars through to the pedestrians — that nobody wants anybody to be hurt or to inflict damage upon anyone else.
“There’s a sort of implied trust,” I said before saying, “the horn is not used out of anger, or in some form of aggressive way … it’s used to communicate non-verbally and help people place themselves in the broader context”.
He laughed, nodding his head, and sais that he had just got his scooter and that he was still adjusting, having recently observed himself agitated on the road, knowing full well that this was unjustified.
Different contexts will teach you things or at a minimum, provide some stimulus for reflection.
I often wonder if we learn and reflect on a deeper level when we are pushed into more vulnerable or extreme circumstances.
Just recently, FORWARD’s Sally McNamara wrote a piece on how life’s most stressful experiences may unlock durable skill development, and I often wonder if our growth and maturation are accelerated and amplified through being in unfamiliar contexts, especially if unaccompanied.
Perhaps this part of what travel and its connection to growth is about. Maybe we reinforce our durable skills around resilience and adapting to change that we can then transfer into daily life. Or maybe it isn’t even really about what we take out of the experience in real time, but rather about being that little bit more exposed with a break from the familiar, coupled with having the time and solitude to reflect on what we have seen and experienced.
The cynic in me questions if this is a universal truth. We all travel differently — not just abroad, but through our daily lives — and many of us are pulled out of moments of solitude and reflection through omnipresent technologies.
Sherry Turkle has written extensively about what she calls ‘the virtuous circle’, and how being tethered to modern technology impacts our ability to find the solitude to process, reflect and grow, along with how this is impacting the stock that we typically input for this reflection in conversation.
“I went to Asia a month … basically backpacking around Malaysia. That’s where I got my first like independent travel. My mom was like ‘You’re crazy. You’re 21' . That really kind of brought home my culture and respect for all cultures, and I learned a lot about religion, culture and identity. You know, what one person thinks is normal is completely the opposite somewhere else in the world. And you have to learn that your way of thinking isn’t always the right way. Everyone’s gonna think differently and I learned that overseas.”
— Sam, 27, Melbourne
As a natural extrovert, Sam talks about learning how others think and how he gets different perspectives through conversation.
There’s no disputing that we’re able to have meaningful conversations with others in our day-to-day lives, but perhaps it is when we have less time pressure and less connectivity we become more open to embracing new kinds of conversations.
Shortly after arriving in Hoi An, I found myself in conversation with Thach.
I was tired and hungry after a delayed series of flights from Melbourne to Ho Chi Min, then Da Nang, and had then proceeded to work my way the 30-odd minutes down the road to my lodgings.
I quickly came to realise that the 27-year-old was a new starter in the establishment I’d visited. He was on day 4. Hospitable and capable of conversing in English (his English significantly better than my Vietnamese), Thach had recently moved back from Ha Long, where he’d worked in hospitality on cruises to be closer to his wife, their child and his family. We had a chat, and then I headed off into the night.
I’d arrived in Hội An during Tet (the Lunar New Year), and on my final night — the final day of the three most significant days of celebration — I went back to the said establishment and bumped into Thach again. After some more conversation in which I detailed my itinerary, Thach invited me to visit his home in the morning, which despite time pressures, I felt was too good an opportunity to pass up.
The following morning, during an uncharacteristic downpour of rain, Thach picked me up on the back of his scooter and took me to his family’s home, which overlooked the coast of Cửa Đại. It was here that, as he began to make me my Café Sua (the delicious condensed milk coffee favoured by many Vietnamese), we got into a deeper conversation.
Thach had been living with his parents along with his partner and their 18 month-old. He told me about their Covid experience, how he’d had to move back into the family home with them after all of the tourism work dried up, and how he and his wife filled their days. He also talked about why he was seeking another job outside of his job at the brewery and his goal of owning his own home and told the story of his parents, who used to work in the beachside café resorts that his parent’s house overlooked, which today remained largely abandoned after a storm devastated it, pushing his father into early retirement.
I gave him my take on the struggles of finding fulfilling work and the benefits of having multiple streams of income in a portfolio career, and also talked about some of the challenges we had in Melbourne as the most locked-down city in the world at the end of 2021. We went out for a late morning bowl of Pho before saying farewell.
This was one of the more relaxed connections I made during my trip. At the other end of the scale was something a dash more extreme.
I’ve made a habit over the years of aiming to land in large cities coming into weekends, primarily because I like to try and find underground youth arts culture and explore.
In Hanoi, one of those undergrounds was a techno club. I’ve typically found that it is in these fringe spaces that you often meet locals and other travellers that offer another valuable lens on people, place and culture. And in the case of an LGBT-friendly mansion on the outskirts of town that utterly heaves until 5 am in the morning, this more than ticked that box.
I had several fascinating conversations with people like Scott (an openly gay, early 30s Berliner of Vietnamese migrant descent who had returned to Hanoi for Tet that was remotely working in information architecture), Yen (a local who was in her early 40s, single and had just come out of a relationship with an Italian foreigner and had been left bitterly disappointed by the experience), or Jonothan (an Israeli who had recently finished his compulsory military service and told me he had been diagnosed with PTSD).
There’s something in the accumulation of these conversations. And at FORWARD, one thing that is becoming more apparent is that learning and growth rarely need to come from a didactic base.
One of the key elements of the conversations we have with our Secret Life of Skills collaborators is about getting their response to a variety of concepts.
From designing a Universal Basic Income system that is connected to lifelong learning through to unpacking how a state-based work insurance scheme could be designed to help people with forced career transitions, we then analyse their responses and and produce a design fiction as a way of bringing these concepts to life.
Initially, when presented with the concept of a UBI scheme connected to lifelong learning, Ian had some reservations.
He reflected concerns about how this kind of a concept may see the negative side of human nature kick in, which would see it become horribly competitive. But after further discussion, he saw a different layer of value in developing such a scheme — with the value being far less oriented to the didactic aspect of sharing a skill.
“If you can reframe it so that it isn’t so much about whether this person’s good or bad or indifferent [at what the teach], but [about gaining] different views of the world … I mean, if you end up just talking in your own echo chamber on this and that, it is problematic.”
— Ian, 60, Melbourne
Sam too, was a big advocate of having less of an emphasis on the educational content that one could be taught, versus the value created through the more informal conversations and exposure to people from different backgrounds:
“If every month you had to have a new teacher, and every month your teacher was from a different place … for instance, if you had a Japanese teacher, he had a South Korean teacher, you would have such a better understanding and such a better grasp on what life really is.”
— Sam, 27, Melbourne
It appears that we may already be able to derive much of the benefit that comes through travel through the way we approach daily life. The way we expand our networks and conversate with those who are unfamiliar may help us not only develop new skills but to broaden our understanding of life.
Perhaps most interestingly, in the case of a UBI Scheme, in a time where the threat of automation is real and our societies continue to face greater polarization, beyond learning skills, perhaps it is not simply understanding difference and new perspectives through conversation that matters.
With the world and road ahead full of unknowns, it is understanding commonality that is of the most value.
The Secret Life is Skills isn’t research — or at least in any conventional sense of the word — beyond it being a form of inquiry. The Secret Life of Skills is, at its essence, journalism — or maybe photojournalism, or maybe participative journalism, or maybe storytelling — crossed with some ethnographically-inspired looking-for, finding-out and sensemaking, blended with material culture studies crossed with a pinch of design fiction. Read more at #thesecretlifeofskills and to learn more, talk to daniel.bluzer-fry@rmit.edu.au
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
