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."

Comments

That's not how education works.

[cellocgw]

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.

Re:That's not how education works.

[rnturn]

Exactly: College/University != Vocational School.

The problem is that companies have gotten greedy and want fresh graduates to be able to fill their open positions and "hit the ground running" so that the company doesn't have to spend money bringing them up to speed on the way the company does business. That time new graduates are spending on learning new things sure isn't going to be available at the vast, vast majority of companies nowadays---not during the work day, that's for sure. What I find rather amusing (or maddening, depending on the day) is that companies all tout how different they are in their promotional materials -- otherwise how would they be better than their competition -- yet they seem to think that there's an unlimited supply of job candidates that will be productive on Day 1 without any ramp-up time. And colleges/universities aren't doing their job if they aren't producing plenty of new employees that meet their unique specifications.

Re:That's not how education works.

[Anubis IV]

Exactly. You teach concepts and techniques for learning new concepts. For the most part, you only teach tools and current methods inasmuch as they're necessary for teaching the things that actually matter.

None of what's being talked about here is actually new. Between my internships, hobby projects, and professional career, I've likely put dozens of programming, scripting, markup, and query languages into use at various points, not to mention countless frameworks and stacks, a huge percentage of which didn't exist when I graduated. My university's program did a good job of preparing me for all of that by exposing me to plenty of different paradigms while ensuring that I understood the benefits and drawbacks to each of them. It would have been a waste of time to make learning the languages or frameworks the point of the class, since languages and frameworks come and go, but their concepts continue to live on. Of course, it also means that the onus was on me to pick up those languages and frameworks once I got out of school.

That's why a lot of students feel like they learn more in their first six months on the job than they ever did in four years at a university: that's how it's supposed to work. Their university education has given them the frames of reference and context they need to quickly absorb that new information and put it to quick use. You don't need a university education to do so, of course, and I think most of us know people who made it in STEM careers without a four-year degree. That said, we tend to be biased by hearing about the rare success stories while never really hearing about the multitude of people who didn't make it. The ones who did make it have always been the exception, not the rule, and that's only becoming more true with time. As these industries mature, the door that used to let people in without a degree has been closing more and more.

Not the Point of Universities

[moehoward]

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.

Re:They don't

[AuMatar]

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.