International research comparisons
Pearson’s Global Learner Survey (2019) provides some great international findings and comparisons that can help us shape our responses in helping our young people secure a better future.
(1) In hindsight, many people would like to take an alternate path to learning.
This is a consistent message from other studies which have shown us that young people are incapable of making life choices at an early age especially when there are ineffective career counseling programs influencing and guiding their preferences and decisions.
(2) Almost half of those in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Europe don’t think that higher education prepared them for their career.
When educated graduates cannot find relevant jobs in their field of study upon graduation after incurring huge amounts of study debts, there is something fundamentally wrong with the current education systems.
These post-industrial-era just-in-case knowledge-based education systems are not equipping our young people with relevant in-demand on-the-job skills that are desperately needed by employers on a just-in-time basis for them to stay competitive and earn the required profits for their shareholders.
(3) Many people are not working in fields that they majored in during higher education.
The value of education is called into question when young people are studying college or university majors that are totally unrelated to their career paths. This mismatch is problematic when we factor in the total cost (and opportunity cost) for young people and their families in gaining their paper-qualifications.
(4) 68% of people globally agree that a degree or certificate from a vocational college or trade school is more likely to result in a good job with career prospects than a university degree.
Effective and appropriate career guidance at high schools is vital for minimising any mismatch between study majors, career paths, and income potential.
Alternate educational paths (apart from college or universities) must be actively explored and intentionally matched with individual career paths, interest, and personalities. There is no one-size-fits all approach.
(5) 78% of people think they need to develop their soft skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity. This is where people think that human skills will become even more important in the future. Universities and colleges can and must help workers do more to build human skills of the incoming workforce.
As automation becomes more prominent in workplaces and transforming work, employers are seeking more human or soft skills instead. This is where humans have a competitive edge over machines!
Interestingly, our education systems are not designed to up-skill students in these in-demand skills!
(6) 63% globally believe that colleges and universities aren’t teaching the right skills.
It is not surprising that many people are questioning the value of costly education obtained from colleges and universities. There will come a point when the negative return-on-investment on a costly degree or higher education will tip the scales against colleges and universities.
(7) Coding is the new second language – people believe coding, along with a knowledge of English, will help them better compete in the new economy.
As automation and machines become more prominent in our daily lives, humans will need more programming and coding skills to create and maintain them. This is a similar situation years ago when more people had to acquire computer skills just to survive in a computerised world.
(8) In the US, 67% of people see higher education as getting more out of reach for the average person.
Elsewhere too, the cost of higher education is rising faster than inflation rates and average household incomes. The gap between the haves and haves not will slowly grow, causing social imbalances for governments to solve as an unintended consequence of higher education policy inaction.
(9) Globally, 70% of people agree that colleges and universities care more about their reputation than educating students.
There will be a tipping point when young people will avoid entry into costly colleges and universities. The value of education should relate to equipping our young people with future employable skills and be job-ready for the future of work.
(10) People have sought out self-learning to up-skill – Among those who said they needed to up-skill for their jobs in the last two years, 43% said that they found information online and self-taught. As such, between 70% and 90% of people liked the idea of reinventing themselves at work every few years by acquiring new skills.
Technology has enabled easy access to just-in-time knowledge and education by anyone located anywhere in the world. People can no longer give excuses for not being able to up-skill and up-grade themselves with the vast amounts of online courses offered by prestigious universities.
Preparing young people for the future of work
Technology is changing the world of work. Change continues to accelerate, and young people need more help than ever in envisioning their future.
As a result, many jobs will evolve more quickly than in the past. Course choices which keep a range of options open or simply match a student’s interests may be the best course of action rather than training specifically for a task which may soon be automated or disappear.
The concept of a single career path is in the process of becoming obsolete. Students of all types will increasingly need support to understand the changing nature of job opportunities in the future.
Career advice is lagging behind
The concept of careers advice itself will have to change, as the notion of a career for life is increasingly outdated, or at least can no longer be guaranteed.
Careers advice should help high school students understand that linear career paths are becoming the exception rather than the rule, and to consider their skills and capacities to transfer between jobs in the future.
A deeper appreciation of a student’s capabilities, interests, and portable skills should open a range of possible jobs which they may explore through their working lives.
Careers advice needs to furnish young people with the ability to change careers as well as choose them and be supported by more technology and data to keep abreast of the vast, and fast-developing, range of choice available.
The gulf between student needs and educational structures
There is a deep gulf between the educational needs of young people and the traditional supply structures set up to meet those needs.
Universities and other higher education providers, as well as vocational education and training providers, must evolve towards a more flexible system across the whole ‘learning enterprise’.
Students should not be forced into rigid, siloed categories (vocational versus academic) across hard boundaries (secondary versus tertiary) of the current education system. They will find alternatives if these traditional pathways fail to meet their needs.
Indeed, the experience of countries such as Japan suggests that putting as many as 80% of students towards academic pathways would have little overall impact on growth. The key lies in better ways to match individual student needs, interests and capacities to the courses and training appropriate for them.
Parity between academic and vocational courses
There needs to be greater parity of esteem between academic and vocational pathways.
The perceived higher status of academic university qualifications have the unintended consequence of diverting students away from vocational courses which may be more interesting and suitable for them, and for which there may be more demand from industry.
The task of delivering high-quality instruction across all levels without lowering expectations for high achievers or pushing young people into the wrong pathway must be solved.
Just as some students are forced into academic courses through a lack of vocational options, children may have parents who expect an academic route regardless of aptitude or interest.
Acquiring employable skills to survive
Let’s consider the kind of skills required by workers to remain in employment, job-ready, and employable in an environment of increasing automation and exponential use of technology.
Don’t ignore the negative impact of automation
At its height back in 2000, the U.S. cash equities trading desk at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters employed 600 traders, buying and selling stock on the orders of the investment bank’s large clients. Years later, there are just two equity traders left. (MIT Technology Review, 2017)
This is a good example where technology has significantly transformed jobs and requires far fewer people to perform the same amount of work.
Focus on acquiring higher cognitive skills
Today’s jobs are increasingly likely to require you to use your head rather than your hands.
To measure the acceleration of skill shifts from automation and artificial intelligence, McKinsey Global Institute first examined historical skill shifts from 2002 to 2016 in the U.S. and modeled these skill shifts going forward to 2030.
McKinsey found which skill categories (and jobs requiring those skills) would least likely (items 1 to 3 listed below) and most likely (items 4 and 5 listed below) to be transformed by automation up to 2030:
(1) Higher cognitive skills include advanced literacy and writing, quantitative and statistical skills, critical thinking, and complex information processing. Doctors, accountants, research analysts, writers, and editors typically use these higher cognitive skills.
(2) Social and emotional skills or so-called soft skills include advanced communication and negotiation, empathy, the ability to learn continuously, managing others, and being adaptable. Business development, programming, emergency response, and counseling typically require these soft skills.
(3) Technological skills include everything from basic to advanced technological skills, data analysis, engineering, and research. These are skills that are likely to be the most highly rewarded as organisations seek more software developers, engineers, robotics, and scientific experts.
(4) Physical and manual skills encompass tasks that could be performed by relatively unskilled labor like drivers, assembly line workers, and skilled workers like nurses, electricians, and craftspeople.
(5) Basic cognitive abilities like literacy and numeracy are needed by workers such as cashiers, customer service staff, and those involved in low-level data input and processing like typists and clerks.
The figure below shows that while the demand for technological skills has been growing since 2002, it is projected to accelerate until 2030.
Similarly, the need for social and emotional skills is also projected to accelerate. By contrast, both basic cognitive skills and physical and manual skills are projected to decline over time.
The skills and sample jobs related to each skill category are shown in the diagram below.
The bottom line is that there is a shift from activities that require mainly basic cognitive skills to those that use higher cognitive skills.
Acquiring those skills will ensure that workers and job seekers are future-ready and job-ready.
As lower-level tasks are constantly being automated with advanced technologies such as robots and artificial intelligence, new job titles, work processes, and industries will frequently emerge, as shown in the diagram below.
This is going to have a significant impact on what skills you acquire and what jobs you are planning to embark on especially if you are a young person deciding what course to take and what jobs to work in.
Without a doubt, employers will be expecting workers (including graduates and school leavers) to have more cognitive, social and emotional, and technology skills in the future, and less of the basic cognitive and physical and manual skills.
For school leavers, it is imperative that they have strategies and plans to acquire these future-demand skills during their studies at school, colleges, and universities.
People don’t plan to fail, but they fail to plan for their future!
In terms of new job titles, the word ‘robotics” in job titles increased by 30x since 2014 and roles with the term ‘language’ – from language engineers to language data researchers – grew by 23x, as shown in the diagram below. (Amazon, 2019)
People working on innovating the user experience increased by 159% and we saw a jump of 91% of job titles including the term “technologist”.
