Written by Chris Geary, BSD Education
There is considerable discussion about the impact technology will have on the future of the workforce and consequently education’s role in preparing people to join it, or enable their ongoing participation.
The reality of what we are seeing is the evolving relationship between humans in the workplace and machines giving rise to new jobs. Often, however, these new jobs are related to previous experience. This process began a number of years ago and is gaining pace, but many of the economies in the world are not looking to push humans out of the workforce. Instead they are looking to add in machines while keeping humans employed to give a nett productivity gain.
As the world of work evolves, so must the education systems that prepare its participants, but what does all of this mean for schools and broader educational institutions?
The world of technology is colossal, evolving quickly and therefore becoming exponentially more complex than an individual can grasp on an ongoing basis by themselves. Therefore educational systems are going to need to give students the opportunity to develop key hard skills in areas of technology, accompanied by the soft skills to partner with others that complete the remaining pieces of the puzzle.
A blend of key soft and hard skills are therefore the digital skills that we are talking about as critical for the future.
Given the speed that technology has developed, particularly in recent years, it has not been possible for education systems to dedicate sufficient time to plan the learning journey or progression for digital skills, resulting in so many programs implemented on a piecemeal basis.
The change being driven by technology is already here, and therefore compels educational systems to robustly and immediately implement digital skills learning that will prepare people at all career stages to be successful because of change, not incase of it.
In the full text of this article, I will discuss more about the current state of evolution of the workforce, and the data that illustrates what it needs. We will explore more about what defines digital skills, how educational institutions can implement their learning and how.
At the end of the day, the greatest impact of technology in both the world of work and education will be to make us focus on and value what it is that makes us most human after all.
