Thursday, May 2, 2019

Teach Yourself

How do you prepare for jobs that don’t exist yet? That’s a question students, workers, and educators will face in the coming years.

Guide Magazine

It’s difficult to teach job-related skills when it’s unclear what those jobs will be. It’s not just the times that are changing. Think about explaining to someone just 15 years ago what a social media manager, ride-share service employee, or drone operator does for a living.

Technology—combined with globalization and a host of other factors—has created an array of new jobs and radically changed others. A recent British study suggests that at least one-third of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in jobs we haven’t even dreamed of yet.

So how do we prepare workers and students for a future we can’t foresee? What should we be doing now to give them the skills they’ll need to have a successful career?

“In the old days, when you came to college you were trained in a functional area for a job that you would stay in most of your career,” says Philip Powell, associate dean of academic programs at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. “[Today] it’s imperative that schools teach students how to teach themselves.”

Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, dean of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, says it’s more important to focus on experiential learning than on job-specific skills. “We cannot teach skills we don’t know exist yet,” she says. “We need a different strategy and make sure they’re becoming lifelong learners.”

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Innovation and Knowledge found that experiential learning reinforces theoretical concepts and leads to superior performance. McGill has launched some programs that focus on industry-specific experiential learning, while also incorporating relevant coursework. The school’s new Bensadoun School of Retail Management focusses on the future of retail. It has an experiential lab where students will be able to work with cutting-edge retail technology and real-world simulations.

Ansley Erickson, associate professor of education at Columbia University in New York, sees an opportunity for this future-focussed thinking to also solve bigger issues, including inequality in the workplace. Innovation sometimes contributes to inequality.

“What kind of schooling prepares, for example, to participate in discussions about what constitutes a decent living wage?” Erickson asks. “What constitutes fair employment practices? How do education and employment operate in an unequal society? I think those questions are just as crucial as questions about what kind of technical training schools can offer.”

Source: fastcompany.com

Teach Yourself

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