Lifelong learning from birth to death and a career spanning 50-60 years in various professional fields is the new reality for the average office worker of the 21st century
Svetlana Mironyuk, Head of Marketing and Business Development at PwC, Professor of Practice at Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, is sure that such a scenario awaits us in the very near future, and we need to be ready for it now.
75 million people around the world will lose their jobs by 2022 due to the development of technology and innovation, predicts the World Economic Forum (WEF). And in our country, according to the estimates of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), over the next ten years, with the active modernization of industries, up to 6 million people can be reduced, while for 25 million, the requirements and composition of work may radically change, which indicates the actual the disappearance of these places.
“Stable” occupations (until at least 2022) are scientists, robotics engineers, CEOs and CEOs, risk managers, university professors, oil and gas engineers, cybersecurity specialists, and database specialists.
The idea of lifelong education appeared 100 years ago – it is only now becoming a new reality
The very concept of continuing education appeared in the work of Eduard Lindemann “The Significance of Education for Adults”, published in the USA in 1926. But it is embodied only now, in the life of our generation. The essence of lifelong learning is well conveyed by a quote from an American futurologist:
“The illiterate in the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
— Alvin Toffler
Like many other ideas in the history of mankind, the idea of lifelong learning has gone through stages of birth, rejection and hype around it.
Professional life used to be arranged according to a one-track scenario: “one life – one education – one profession – one job.” A person studied, followed the chosen path for a long time and gradually, reached professional and career heights, and then retired, in Russian realities often – to the dacha, to the garden.
Now, in this multi-year scenario, new forks have appeared, filling life with new challenges and difficult tasks.
Today, continuous education is a conscious daily routine of a modern person and part of the workflow of companies.
Life on average has gotten much longer, and careers have gotten longer along with it.
Every 10 years, life expectancy increases by 1-2 years. Statistical projections say that, for example, Japanese people born in 2007 should live until 2107.
A generation has already been born with an average life expectancy of 100 years, and the British gerontologist and engineer Aubrey de Gray claims that the first person who has to live a whole thousand years has already been born. This means that the period of active economic activity will exceed the usual 35-40 years for previous generations. It is likely that current 40-year-olds will work until their 70s, and current 20-year-olds will work until their 80s. The usual successive stages of life – study, work, retirement – disappear. Who can adequately plan a career 60 years in advance?
A career of 50–60 years can hardly be built on the same starting educational background and follow the same professional track. Forks, possible changes in the professional scenario, of course, are tied to different stages of career and age maturity, to personal circumstances. But turns at these forks are impossible without a new formation.
What to read on this topic:
- What professions may disappear in the near future?
- 100 professions of the future
- How to retrain and change profession after 30: English experience
- Five myths about learning that prevent us from developing
- Profession – hunter: a career test from a professor at Skolkovo
- Don’t Follow Your Dreams: How to Love Your Job and Find Yourself
So far, continuing education is still perceived as a superstructure – additional training in cases where the main one is not enough. But in the new economy, education is fundamentally understood as unfinished, and it is precisely this that becomes the main driver of a career and a prerequisite for the possibility of multiple professional scenarios throughout life. This determines the main change of today – the request for the individualization of educational trajectories. The set of competencies required specifically for you is no longer chosen by an educational institution, but by each for himself.
The role of the teacher is also changing – he is no longer just a translator of knowledge, but a researcher, consultant, mentor, project manager. Today, among the popular and in-demand teachers are people from various fields of activity – science, business, public administration, and the media. This profession is also becoming highly competitive.
How to learn to study all your life?
Adults learn differently than children. They do not learn through a mono-process, when there is a dominant authority in the class – a teacher – and an audience listening to him, and the flow of knowledge follows only one direction – from teacher to student. Yes, and children are now learning to understand the world in a different way, through creativity and curiosity.
Video interview with the author of the course on how to learn to learn:
Adults learn best through so-called project-problem approaches. In the learning process, problems are considered and discussed based on new knowledge and previous experience, which in no case should be discarded, it is a good basis for further development.
Do universities and business schools meet the needs for continuing education? Will they be able to respond to employers’ need for new staff? Who will teach professions that do not yet exist? It seems that only adaptive educational models will survive in the new conditions. Competition is growing, the educational market is opening up for newcomers who come up with new solutions.
What to read on this topic:
- Denis Konanchuk: “Applicants are increasingly choosing business schools in our country”
- Alevtina Chernikova – on the key tasks of a modern university
- The University of Things: How Universities Can Become Technological Competence Centers
- Vladimir Mau: Removing the language barrier will change the entire education system
- Who will take responsibility for training IT professionals?
- Yandex invests ₽5 billion in education: what should EdTech startups do?
- Personnel for the digital economy: who are they – children, students, adults?
Educational institutions turned out to be not quite ready for social and economic shifts, for new requirements from people, states, corporations – requests for individualized development, flexible completion and constant upgrade of the necessary competencies of a hired manager or official. Education itself as an industry is currently undergoing a painful process of digital transformation, from which it will emerge greatly changed.
If the classical education does not change, it will perish, it will be trampled by neophytes. If it finds the strength, tools, resources to change rapidly along with the changing demand of students, especially adult students, then it has a chance to survive.
In the changes that adult education is now experiencing, the most important word is flexibility. Everyone has heard about agile in software development and agile in building business processes. Educational institutions face similar challenges: they must learn to adjust their programs to the individual tracks of each person and to global changes in labor markets at the same time.
What could the education of the future look like?
American entrepreneur and visionary Peter Diamandis is sure that the approach to teaching children should change radically, taking into account the huge potential of artificial intelligence technologies, robotics and virtual reality.
At the same time, the development of certain personal qualities will help the child achieve success in adulthood.
The most important ones are:
What else needs to be taught?
Present ideas;
Find and develop new hobbies;
Develop curiosity, ask questions, conduct experiments;
Do not lose perseverance in case of failures and difficulties;
Understand new tools and technologies and how they can be used;
Develop empathy (the ability to empathize);
Do not forget about ethics and morality;
Think creatively and improvise;
“Kodit”;
Understand the principles of entrepreneurship and sales;
Learn new languages.
Where traditional institutions fail, online education can help: all sorts of online educational videos and courses, as well as entire online schools and universities, offer a wide variety of materials with the opportunity to learn at your own pace from anywhere in the world. Distance programs are also offered by some classical institutions. But learning only online is probably not the best solution either: the future is more likely to be a combination of online and offline classes.
- How to Study at Harvard for Free: Ivy League Universities Online Courses
- Robert Neivert: “Universities without online courses will become useless”
- Note to the gamer: what computer games can teach us
- Channel of Influence: How YouTube can be used to educate
Who is the main consumer of new educational approaches today?
According to the experience of Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, the most active request for new competencies today comes, firstly, from large corporations, and secondly, from the employees themselves who want to develop and realize themselves further and on a larger scale within their current career, or come up with new career paths. Many proactively come for new competencies, get approaches, vision, knowledge and tools to meet the new digital time.
The result of new education today is not the amount of learned and memorized material, but the development of cognitive abilities: the ability to analyze, work with information, think critically, solve problems, implement creative and innovative ideas.
- What is critical thinking?
- Charging for the soul: how to develop emotional intelligence
- Ekaterina Matveeva – about foreign languages and cultural intelligence
Modern education is not a question of a diploma on the wall in the office: “crusts” no longer add demand either in corporations or in the industry. Skills, the ability to continuously develop oneself, and a new, wider circle of communication – it is these components that together serve as a multiplier for the return on personal investment in one’s own education. Investing in self-development is a necessity, not an exclusive that some can afford and others can’t.
Modern education is also an inclusion in new professional circles, the development of new contacts, new social capital – different from the one that a person possessed when he boiled for a long time in the same professional or industry niche. The wider and more diverse the social capital and the circle of contacts, the more new opportunities for development open up for a person. Continuous education, communication in various professional groups makes it possible for a person at any career or age stage to expand his horizons, come up with and implement a new track, and often find himself.