Adapting to the ever-changing business environment
Inevitably, organisations will follow the money trail. They will gravitate towards areas of business that will make them profits.
In doing so, they will ‘instantly’ require different or totally new sets of just-in-time business skills and competencies like customer-focus, value creation, data analytics, etc. just when the skills are needed to perform the work.
When this occurs, workers may be caught off-guard for not having the right skills demanded by employers.
As skills acquisition do take time, skills demanded by employers today may significantly differ when tomorrow comes especially due to the ever-changing business landscape.
Here’s the thing.
When workers can quickly or proactively respond to the ever-changing job skills’ mix due to automation and ever-increasing competitive business competition, they are essentially future-proofing themselves to be job-ready and future-ready thereby securing their jobs and incomes.
For many, time will be of the essence given the exponential growth by which technology is advancing in industries and professions that they are working in. For example, computer processing power doubles every 18 months and 10 times greater every five years.
Hence, it’s only a question of when not if.
Outdated education models enhance skills imbalance
Our education models of study first (for years), work afterward (when technology has moved on!), and information-based or just-in-case learning are outdated and have been limiting for many people.
These models are based on industrial age thinking where the aim was to produce as many homogeneous factory-type workers in the shortest possible time to fill a significant number of vacancies in factories that were popping-up after the two world wars to meet the ever-increasing post-war consumer demand and exponential population growth.
Under this educational approach, up to 50 students are packed into classrooms and are taught the same things. That is, to be efficient in doing the same tasks, over and over again, and doing it well.
Unfortunately, in a just-in-time customised approach of modern day, technologically-based working environment, these outdated education models cannot produce enough appropriately skilled workers to meet the short-term, just-in-time, ever-changing requirements of employers.
As tasks are no longer homogenous and repetitive, workers are expected to problem solve and decide on the best course of action using critical thinking, innovative, and analytical skills.
Research by The Foundation for Young Australians revealed that 25-year olds are better educated and more invested in their education than ever before.
Unfortunately, half of the better-educated job applicants can’t even get a full-time job. What’s interesting is that nearly 60% has tertiary qualifications, up from about 30% in the late 1980s. That’s twice the number of qualified applicants.
To make matters worse, in order to graduate, education systems do require a software engineer to have three to four years of full-time continuous university education.
What’s happening is that employers are requesting for more qualified applicants but are not getting them through the education system.
Job seekers will be at the losing end.
The result is an unfortunate situation where we have more over-educated, unemployed graduates who desperately need work to pay their increasing study debts!
Whether they are able to meet the specific just-in-time skills requirements of employers is another matter because the priorities of universities and job seekers are different.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation reported that many of those looking for jobs do not have the skills required by businesses. This has resulted in higher unemployment rates even as businesses desperately seek new talent and people with the right skills to give them value at specific points in time.
Research by the National Institute of Labour Studies found that between 2008 and 2014, the proportion of new university graduates in full-time employment has dropped from 56.4% to 41.7%.