Unpacking entrepreneurial skills and education for the future
RMIT FORWARD’s Glass Tree series of events
Daniel Bluzer-Fry and Pete Cohen, development partners at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Sally McNamara, Helen Babb Delia, Soolin Barclay and Courtney Guilliatt, on RMIT FORWARD’s ‘Glass Tree’ series of events, which brings together people from many and varied organisations for a series of closed-door conversations on topics that are top of mind for everyone in business today. These conversations are an opportunity to honestly share and learn, respecting Chatham House rules and are held both in our space in Carlton and virtually.
Glass Tree is an informal Chatham House Rules gathering that reflects our belief that by bringing a diverse range of people together, new themes for reflection and enquiry can be surfaced and connections forged.
In late February, we ran a Glass Tree focussed on the themes of entrepreneurial skills and future-facing education, and we explored it by having focused discussions around two key questions:
- What is the state of entrepreneurial education, and what is the lived experience of Australian entrepreneurs today?
- What are the most significant challenges and hopes for the future of fostering entrepreneurial activity in Australia?
The half-day session was designed around two breakouts, with RMIT FORWARD Fellows David Cordover, Sarah Lorimer and Dr Meredith Doig OAM moderating discussions with an eclectic group of attendees ranging from those involved in education (primary, secondary and tertiary), along with entrepreneurs, VCs, futurists and ethicists.
Some of the key points in the conversation included:
- How we understand and define entrepreneurship, along with its interplay with intrapreneurship
- Challenges around the role of parents in building a creative and entrepreneurial mindset in young Australians
- The mindsets, attitudes and durable skills that are essential for entrepreneurs
- The ethical and social dimensions of entrepreneurship
- To what degree can entrepreneurship be taught through a course versus it being something that needs to be experienced? Is the idea of learning entrepreneurship actually an oxymoron?
- The centrality of risk in entrepreneurship and implications for people from different backgrounds — especially those who lack a financial or social safety net
- Is the school system — especially with its ATAR centricity in later years and a focus on career guidance — misaligned with cultivating the attributes of an entrepreneur, such as creativity and risk-taking
- What role do the basic fundamentals of school education — reading, writing and arithmetic — play in setting someone up for success as an entrepreneur?
As with all of our Glass Tree events, we have just scratched the surface and have opened up a really rich conversation with a group of insightful people.
We are looking forward to delving deeper into these topics and collaborating with our guests around their areas of passion and expertise.
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.
