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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."
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.........
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.
yes yes, computers exist and horse carriages are also out... my point is that the basic skill set that education is suppose to teach hasn't changed and if it seems like it has changed... you are being sold a bridge to no where.
The issue, at least in US undergrad colleges, seems to be that other than the professional degree path, its a bunch of darts in the darkness with no value for the college experience other than experimentation.... which i am sure has its own value but not for the debt it incurs.
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.
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?
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.