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How Do Universities Prepare Graduates For Jobs That Don't Yet Exist? (theguardian.com)
Technological changes such as automation and artificial intelligence are expected to transform the employment landscape. The question is: will our education system keep up? From a report: The answer matters because an estimated 65% of children entering primary schools today will work in jobs and functions that don't currently exist, according to a recent Universities UK report. The research, which explores the "rapid pace of change and increasing complexity of work", also warns that the UK isn't even creating the workers that will be needed for the jobs that can be anticipated. By 2030, it will have a talent deficit of between 600,000 and 1.2 million workers in the financial and business sector, and technology, media and telecommunications sector.
University leaders would be "foolish" not to pay attention, says Lancaster University vice-chancellor Mark E Smith. "We look at the trends in the job market and the skills employers are looking for, and we listen to what employers are saying. We don't want to be talking about yesterday's problem." This is one of the reasons the university is a partner in the National Institute of Coding. The programme, led by the University of Bath, is bringing 25 universities together with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and global companies including IBM, Cisco, BT and Microsoft to create "the next generation of digital specialists".
Jordan Morrow, chair of the Data Literacy Project advisory board and global head of data literacy at US-based analytics firm Qlik, thinks that in a climate of uncertainty, universities should focus on developing the thing they have specialised in for centuries: critical thinking. "We need people who can give insight, not just observations," he says. Likewise, he says, the "softer" skills of communication and storytelling are vital. "The reality is that data scientists are trained to do very complex and complicated things with data, but their training is not necessarily in people skills or leadership. It becomes an issue when you have, say, a very intelligent data scientist who has put together an analysis, but doesn't know how to communicate it."
University leaders would be "foolish" not to pay attention, says Lancaster University vice-chancellor Mark E Smith. "We look at the trends in the job market and the skills employers are looking for, and we listen to what employers are saying. We don't want to be talking about yesterday's problem." This is one of the reasons the university is a partner in the National Institute of Coding. The programme, led by the University of Bath, is bringing 25 universities together with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and global companies including IBM, Cisco, BT and Microsoft to create "the next generation of digital specialists".
Jordan Morrow, chair of the Data Literacy Project advisory board and global head of data literacy at US-based analytics firm Qlik, thinks that in a climate of uncertainty, universities should focus on developing the thing they have specialised in for centuries: critical thinking. "We need people who can give insight, not just observations," he says. Likewise, he says, the "softer" skills of communication and storytelling are vital. "The reality is that data scientists are trained to do very complex and complicated things with data, but their training is not necessarily in people skills or leadership. It becomes an issue when you have, say, a very intelligent data scientist who has put together an analysis, but doesn't know how to communicate it."
so medical, military, civil service, hotel and restaurants, hookers and blow... won't exists in the future... nice to know.
You don't *train* for a job ( if you're running a college correctly) - you teach the students **how** to learn new things. And BTW the need to teach students how to communicate clearly has been present for a couple hundred years. it's hardly a NewThing in education.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
At all levels below university
Instead of asking how we can offload companies training expenses on the school system, they should be wondering how to educate. The basics of reading, writing, mathematics, basic science/chemistry, and history is timeless. If you get those down while encouraging group and independent learning, you've done your job as an educator.
University and Up
They've got bigger problems on their plate right now. How about they sort that out first, and then worry about 20 years from now? It's like having a broken car and worrying about gas prices. A disabled vehicle consumes no gas.
The point of a university is (should be?) to teach people how to learn. (In addition, of course, to how to hold your liquor, put on a condom, and provide life-long devotion to its sports teams.) Critical thinking is/should be the core of all institutes of higher education.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
It is something that is part nature (born with)...and part environment, how did you grow up and learn how to interact with people.
I have found that having really good people skills, especially if you can readily persuade people to do what you want, etc...can often be MORE valuable that pure tech knowledge and proficiency.
If you have people skills, and decent tech skills, you can go quite far, often further than those that are only tech, even if brilliant at it.
Sadly today, with the youth having grown up with faces stuck in phones and tablets rather than developing real people skills in meatspace, they are going to be at a disadvantage to those few that actually DID develop people skills.
I guess it is never too late to start to learn, but it sure is easier if you start out young, and learn how people interact, and how you can read them and interact with friends, and even manipulate others when needed.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The best way to face technical situations is to retain your curiosity. It is not about memorizing textbooks, it is about staying curious.
And these don't prepare for any job in existence (yet).
The same way they always have? Giving students a broad education, steeping them in the great thinkers of their (and to some degree, other) cultures?
At least, that used to be the idea, I thought.
I was googling along this articles thought process. And found the following.
2015 out of Australia - http://theconversation.com/uni...
2011 from the Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/te...
I have read the comments here, and actually have no quarrels with either argument. But this topic has been around for a long time, and probably will always be a topic.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
This isn't even news. It's recycling some old claims made by Andreas Scheicher, et al. at the OECD's education department. The 65% figure or anything similar to it has yet to be supported by any evidence whatsoever -- I know several experts in education who have tried & failed to even find a citation of the figure. Re:
"...there is a need for skills such as judgement, decision-making, and analysis and evaluation of systems."
This doesn't make sense unless we teach people sufficient knowledge to support these skills, i.e. What do you want them to judge, make-decisions, analyse, & evaluate? What kinds of foundational knowledge do we need in order to be able to make use of these skills? Currently, our primary, secondary, & post-secondary educational institutions are doing a great job of providing students with a broad range of useful foundational knowledge as well as analytical & critical thinking skills.
Not mentioned in the article but implicit is the need for "21st century skills." They're often not actually listed or defined when these claims are made but when they are, they look an awful lot like 3rd century BCE skills. (See: http://www.ascd.org/publicatio...)
Another fallacy is that we need to teach school children to write code, e.g. code.org. So far, research shows that learning to code requires that students already have problem solving & logical reasoning skills that are sufficiently well-developed for them to transfer to the abstract concepts involved in writing code. Additionally, there's no evidence of any benefits to other areas of study or thinking that learning to code can provide. In other words, coding requires knowledge & skills learned from elsewhere & doesn't provide any benefits to elsewhere, i.e. it's a specialist cul-de-sac and end result of learning that's a waste of time in primary & secondary education. There are more useful & important things to be learned.
Re: so called "soft skills" like being able to communicate your ideas to others clearly & to participate in & manage teams, it turns out that the best communicators, participators, & managers are those who have a great deal of expertise & experience in their specific professional domain, & those skills don't necessarily transfer from one domain to another, e.g. a great sports coach doesn't necessarily make a great software team leader.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
They're conflating "talent" and "skilled labor". You don't train talent and you don't teach talent, you find talent.
I'm of two opinions about communication.
The practical side of me says communications is important. The ideal side of me says if the audience can't understand it, either you don't understand it or the audience is not smart enough in whatever domain that it matters. That said, I have issue with many in my profession using technical jargon because they use it incorrectly. They use it more like an ambiguous buzzword than a technical word with specific meaning. But again, this really just means the person talking doesn't understand.
In my experience, communication is more like a soft skill of using simple enough words that the receiver thinks they understand just enough. Just a "feel good" kind of skill. It's like describing a cube to someone who doesn't understand 3D shapes. In the end, you just tell them it a bunch of connected lines and they feel better about themselves because they know what a line is.
For the most part, that's a complete canard.
60% of the adult American population belongs to the arithmetic Special Olympics:
* couldn't solve a quadratic equation
* couldn't integrate x
* couldn't differentiate x
* couldn't explain why anyone would ever add two logarithms
* couldn't factor 1050 into primes without several mulligans
* couldn't check a calculation by casting out nines
* couldn't explain the significance of the law of large numbers
* think that the "Bell" curve was invented by Alexander Graham Bell
* think that "Bay's" rule concerns the golden ratio of cuts to cut-offs
* think that tariffs aren't paid for by the end consumer
* and don't even get them started on randomness or correlation.
And it's the cossetted research scientist who can't communicate?
The innumeracy gap is real, and it's spectacular.
But sure, you can add a few extra courses to their already intense course load to help them best explain the paintings of M. C. Escher to a congenitally blind man.
Data scientist: "You see, it's about perspective ... "
Now the blind person believes that he or she has perspective, only in no way does it resemble the "perspective" under discussion.
Because if you do, you create artificial need for something that doesn't exist. Then lo-and-behold, someone comes along with grants and actually makes this "job" into a reality to appease all the idiots who indebted themselves for a useless degree.
Universities should teach you how to learn; so that YOU can go out and create these "jobs that don't exist yet" because you're smart enough to realize there's a need for X by doing Y.
I tend to rant.
Reasoning skills and learning skills are certainly important. We could be teaching a lot of that long before people go to a university, but some people haven't learned it, so okay teach that. Through deliberate teaching, my four-year-old is better at critical thinking and asking "does this claim pass the sniff test?" than many adults I know.
Also, there is a TON of knowledge that doesn't change much. Another big stack of knowledge is about "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The maths are huge field where the things that are helpful to know don't change much, and what IS new in maths builds upon the old; algebra, calculus, and set theory haven't gone away. You might say "set theory? Who uses set theory in their job?" Ever heard of databases? SQL is a *direct* translation of set theory into convenient wording. It's not even *based* in set theory, it *is* set theory. Lots of different people use set theory for their job, and most don't even realize it, so they don't do their job as well as they could. They do better by being able to look at a problem and say "oh, this is just basic sets, I know sets".
Just the other day I was trying to show a co-worker how to do a job in a very simple way. He was getting all confused, making it super complicated and wrong. I drew some basic 8th grade sets on my whiteboard and he was completely lost. Okay, let's put aside the sets and view it as simple Boolean logic (and/or etc). Nope, he didn't know anything about a&b=true. This is maybe middle school math. It hasn't changed in the last hundred years.
How about some basic mechanics of how things work, leverage and things like that, weight? Ever needed to work with any of that? That's Newtonian physics. Hasn't changed for hundreds of years.
90% of the arguments we have on Slashdot wouldn't happen if we all remembered some basic history. We argue about what might happen if ... whatever policy. That policy you're advocating trying has already been done a dozen times, in a dozen different places. We already know the results, if we know a bit of history. History doesn't change all that much in couple decades.
I work in computer engineering. That's a fast-moving field, right? Gotta be on the cutting edge, only stuff that came out in the last five years matters, right? Not so much. The old guy frequently amazes the newer guys who started with Ruby on Rails, because old dude has been doing the same things for years in other languages. He understands it conceptually, knows the principles it is based on, and understands what's going on under the covers. That's all knowledge stuff.
When JSON first came out, some people said "forget all that old stuff, we're doing everything in JSON now - and promptly created a bunch of critical security vulnerabilities. Some of us who had some knowledge about objects and what goes on under the covers saw the problems right away. We had knowledge of underlying principles and technologies. That can all be taught.
As everybody knows, pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions. With such a degree, you will be immediatly hired for doing non-existing jobs. Unfortunately, your salary will be imaginary as well...
Nursing schools have been a thing, and a degree/test in it required to be a nurse, for at least 30 years. Because you don't want the hospitals hiring someone with no training and letting them learn on the job- you want them to have at least injected a few oranges before doing it on a human. And you want them to know the signs of a heart attack, not get taught them by missing it the first time and being told after the patient codes.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Queue liberal arts majors who are going to jump into to say how their degrees prepare students for these future jobs.
Universities are not trade schools. They don't teach job skills, and they don't spoon-feed graduates how-to manuals on certain "jobs".
They give you a broad-based education within a particular field. They teach you how to teach yourself what you have to do for a job.
The question fundamentally misses the point of what an education is.
The first job I took after leaving university was in a field that didn't exist when I started the course, 3 years earlier.
And because of that, nobody was able to assess my ability to do it. However, it turns out that because of my broad range of skills and understanding of things that hadn't been on the curriculum as part of my undergrad studies - but which interested me anyway - I was able to beat many other candidates with better academic results. But who had far narrower fields of knowledge.
And it turned out I was pretty good at the job, too! It formed the basis for my career.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
..both as a former student and now as a business owner, colleges are pretty shitty at preparing students for actual work NOW. Maybe they should focus on that before trying to prepare students for jobs that don't exist yet?
-Styopa
The best that employers can do to screen for soft skills is to search for them on a resume, but they don't generally do a good job of it anyways - and they often aren't high priorities for the employers either. As long as the applicants have the hard skills, the employers will often help out with the soft skills.
And this is coming from someone who is working a job that did not exist even 20 years ago.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You're thinking about vocational schools. Universities are explicitly not job training.
The original purpose of a university is to provide a rounded education which in theory will allow the student to provide a higher potential value to society than a focused education in a single discipline. It was the intended destination for the children of the elite, folks who would be seated at the economic, legal, or political controls of the country in the future, their 'jobs' already provided as a legacy of their parents.
What, you thought that the commoners would be sending their kids to college? With no child labor laws, did you think they'd even go to primary school when they could be earning money or doing work on the farm?
While the perception of college (and the value of education) has changed, the structure really hasn't changed all that much. You can claim that it's for job training, but nothing important in it's structure has changed, so I would find that relatively hard to argue. It still looks like a duck, still quacks like a duck...
University research creates the jobs of the future. How are they behind in teaching what they're laying the path for? Maybe specific universities don't conduct research or integrate that research with their undergraduate program. Mine did though, so no problem here.
If they're talking about courses that are still being taught for careers which are disappearing, then that's a totally valid concern. The way to fix that is to rate the University programs on job placement success. My university did that too, it was part of their sales pitch even.
This article seems to be about some universities not performing well on the measures that are already in place for differentiating between good and not so good universities. What's the solution then? Research before applying.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
I don't think it's that simple. It's possible tariffs could create more lower and middle-class jobs, thus giving one more spending money. It may also increase jobs but decrease the average number of trinkets one can buy. Should people prefer jobs or stuff? Math won't tell you what you should want, only the side-effects at best.
I agree tariffs probably "hurt" somebody as a side-effect, but the distribution of the down-sides is hard to pin down in a complex economy. You can't always assume spherical cow jobs.
As far as the other things on the list, I used to be able to answer most, but those skills didn't get exercised over time, and thus rusted.
Table-ized A.I.
Most expect both kinds of skills out of a University education: practical get-a-job-now skills, and general problem-solving & team skills. You can't move up the ladder if you can't get on the ladder.
Table-ized A.I.
When you're being prepared for a job/work of some kind, it's a trade school.
When you're educated, you learn to learn and to prepare your self.
I institutions of higher learning are functioning as trade schools and you can't get a job when you get finished, it should be counted as fraud and litigated.
no wonder trump was elected.
There is nothing like having a BA in BS when it come to business BS.
Sorry, I couldn't help it.
Ahh, the whole, we don't teach something useful, but teach people how to learn trope. This is a genius level catch phrase, since it justifies nearly anything and is never examined for accuracy. It makes you feel good. It sounds good, but at the end of the day, is meaningless.
As an engineering college professor, I can attest to the fact that this is used all the time, by people who teach impractical things. Yet, there is no validating evidence that what they teach matters, helps people learn, or teaches problems solving. At best, it comes down to anecdotes or , "well, if it was good enough for D'Vincci"
In other cultures, they do not claim this or teach these things not really study them. They focus on the necessary, and frankly, are beating us badly. We produce students with far less competent in math and science, and it is beginning to cost us as world economies improve and brain drain happens less often.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Actually, it is about memorizing text books. If you do not have a huge background of facts and a high level of understanding, then you are regulated to scientific baby talk and will achieve little of value. Curiosity comes easy, knowledge does not.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
The way I see it, in order for society to function correctly and not devolve into a winner-take-all nightmare is to find a way to keep everyone employed. You need the super-geniuses who will advance the state of the art, good solid engineering/technician types who can problem solve and think critically, and yes you need something for the people who can't even graduate high school to do.The top two tiers start with a solid higher education experience, and the lower tier can be filled by vocational training.
20 years back I got a degree in chemistry. Other than being able to understand scientific discussions more than the average person, I don't directly use any knowledge I picked up in my job as a systems engineer. I do use a ton of the life skills I picked up along the way, such as:
- Being able to juggle multiple deadlines
- Taking in challenging material at a pretty rapid clip and making sense of it
- Troubleshooting complex problems and being able to reason my way through them
- Learning independence -- going to a big public university where no one directly cared about me was a good experience.
- And honestly, learning how to follow stupid rules, pick my battles, etc.
That's what university education should be. If you're an average person like me, you go through a course of study and join that middle tier of workers. If you're a super-genius, you move on to professional school or academia. What it isn't is an 18-month JavaScript bootcamp designed to make you a functional code monkey on Day 1 of your first job.
Universities should prepare students for jobs that don't exist by NOT preparing them for specific job skills. Give them the skills to pick up new skills on their own. And employers aren't blameless here -- on-the-job training of new grads needs to make a comeback.
It's true though, people always make fun of gender studies majors, but now they can find jobs as diversity officers.
Medicine and law are a little different in that their professional schools are very regimented compared to undergrad university studies. You're right that they don't learn everything. But, anyone getting through medical or law school has a common baseline level of knowledge. They have to pass a licensing exam to move on to the next phase of their training (resident or junior lawyer.)
Every time I run into a "rockstar developer" or "systems ninja" with mile-wide holes in their skills I wish we in IT had a more formal profession and barrier to entry.
But, TRAINING should be provided through apprenticeship or on the job training.
Education is not the same thing.
But do not worry, they have never done that and it is actually not their job. Universities give you a base-understanding of a specific field (well, unless you study gender-"studies" or something in that direction), but they do not and should not provide job training. If you had a really good university program, you will probably end up using something like 30% of the content during your career. On the plus-side, that will be often stuff you just cannot pick up on the side and cannot really learn on the job. And it will generally be the foundation for you to learn more and decide in which direction you actually want to take your professional life.
There are some roadblocks upcoming though. People that liked their university studies and were pretty good at a significant part of the subjects and it was in the STEM field do not need to worry: There will be an a constant and possibly increasing need for your services. However the large majority that was more average, did not really enjoy the subjects, struggled with many or most or was not in STEM will probably be hit by an accelerated wave of jobs vanishing. I don't wish that on anybody, I think anybody that tries should be able to find a way to live decently, but businesses are hell-bent on eliminating people for more short-term revenue improvements and society has not yet found a way to deal with that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Teach people analysis and algebra and stats, not Javascript and PHP?
Ezekiel 23:20
By trying to be the institution with the most accurate crystal ball. Even if it is accurate, it's only going to be accurate for a very short time.
The best way to prepare people for jobs whose nature you can't predict is to educate them on generally useful things. Critical thinking. Research skills. Mathematics. Writing. Financial and economic literacy. How to work with other people. These are all skills that make someone adaptable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The question assumes that the old higher education model of accumulating well-established knowledge into degree steps is the only way of preparing people for the job market. The problem with that is that the old model works for the old jobs, in restricted-entry professions. If you want to practice law, get educated the traditional way.
To address the new jobs, universities need to make use of their current research to squirt small modules of current learning into people already in the job market, whether or not the student's earlier jobs (if any) required a basic degree to start with. These small modules will end up corresponding with a plethora of on-job certifications that would replace traditional advanced degrees.
Nothing worse than a college preparing you for jobs that are on their way out or will leave you hopelessly pigeon-holed.
U dont need it, There's so much easy to access Information around... you just need the love of learning... you know that coding bug.
[($)]
All of this, aside from maybe the teamwork and organization bit are covered in a traditional liberal arts education.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
In the old days, Universities used to train people for jobs that didn't exist yet by giving them a broad education that was focused on the learning process, not on specific job training. Then technical institutes and community colleges decided they would call themselves universities and give out degrees too, and the whole tertiary education system became dumbed down to their level. So now, when we need old fashioned university graduates that can adapt to whatever is thrown at them, all we have is millennials who can't wipe their own ass without being sent on a training course.
I am a retired 71 (soon to be 72) year old engineer. NOTHING I worked on the last two decades of my career existed when I graduated. That is the difference between an education, which teaches you how to think and how to learn things that, "have never been done before" and training, which teaches you how to do things that are already known and how to just do those. The difference can be thought of as follows:
Which would be more appropriate for your teenage daughter? A class on sex education or a class in training on sexual techniques.
Just think about it for a moment. Who is currently qualified to teach a subject that doesn't even exist yet ? Where did they get their education ? They just collect their salary and by the time the students realize that the teacher didn't have a clue, the university will have their money and the teacher will have tenure.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Not disagreeing with anyone here, but when my first wife got her RN in the late 60s, it was a two year course (or maybe a bit longer with the OJT). I don't believe you can get an RN now in 4 years. I suspect that's due to at least two things: nurses have to work more independently from MDs these days; and there's a lot more to learn about patient care now. Also, I'm sure that methods will continue to change, and being a life-long learner of those methods will be critical.
FWIW, I doubt that AI and robotics will replace nurses, or even most of a nurse's role, in the next 30 years. But I could be wrong.
The giving tenure part is getting smaller. I believe (but don't have statistics to back it up) that lecturerships are much more common now than they were 30 years ago.
Also, a lot of professors' work is in research, more so than teaching. (And my title is Research Scientist, which I believe is also more common in universities than it used to be.)
plastics.
There are bachellors and associates of nursing. Associates still take 2 years. Bachellors take 4. I believe there are some types of nursing that has more overlap with doctors (including prescribing power) that requires a bachellors, but the standard floor nurse is an associates.
And no, AI isn't going to replace nurses. I doubt it will even replace doctors, but someone has to do the practical stuff like drawing blood, putting on sensors, inserting IVs, etc.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
As in most things, the good doctor recognized this and wrote a story about it (or at least pretty close):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...