Bridge The Skills Gap – Roughly 65% of school children today will end up working in jobs that don’t exist yet.
- By 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines.
- Education systems, and the lives of millions of young people, are in danger of being left behind by this pace of change.
- Here are three key ways educators can prepare students for the future of work.
Alarmist headlines on the skills gap are incessant: 50% of all employees need reskilling by 2025; Digital skills emergency; Employers shift focus from education to skills; Don’t get left behind in a digital future!
As a technologist, I see the glaring skills mismatch every single day. As a parent, I am cautiously hopeful that our schools will help bridge the skills gap.
Last month I spoke to a group of 13-year-olds in my son’s school on the future of skills from a tech perspective. A LinkedIn post wrote about it garnered huge interest – I was asked these three questions: Do you have bitcoins? Are you a billionaire? Will robots replace humans? The questions reflected the pop culture image of the tech industry in Silicon Valley. But they also revealed the dire need to help an intensely curious, acutely aware and aspirational generation, bridge the gap between hype, fear and reality.
It got me thinking about how we guide this brilliant brigade waiting impatiently for us to lead them to the future. Are we doing our best to prepare them for the rapidly changing landscape? Are we helping them build the right skills to succeed in a largely unknown world?
These are critical and urgent questions that must be asked. I do not have all the answers, but I do wonder if we need a broad shift in mindset. Are we focused more on our achievements in history than the challenges of the future? We need to collectively question the existing approach in skill development to prepare for an unknown future.
