The devastating co-existence of unemployed university graduates and employers who say they cannot find the people with the skills they need shows the disconnect between real life industry needs and the products and qualifications our education system churns out yearly resulting in greater unemployment numbers.
It is a ubiquitous fact that skills transform lives, generate prosperity and promote social inclusion. What people know, and what they do with their knowledge, has a major impact on their chances at success. Without the right skills, people are left on the margins of society.
To succeed in converting education into better jobs and lives, we need to better understand the skills that drive outcomes, ensure that the right skill mix is being acquired and input rightly to help transform our economy.
- The steepest decline in skill demand is no longer in the area of manual skills in the industrialised world but in routine cognitive skills
- Memorizing something and expecting that it is going to help us later in life is an archaic mindset. The 21st-century world demands a different way of learning.
- The world’s knowledge can be accessed on the Internet which has made memorizing things totally unnecessary.
- Routine skills are being digitized or outsourced.
- When jobs are changing rapidly, accumulating knowledge matters less.
This ipso facto means success becomes increasingly about:
- Ways of thinking: creativity, critical thought, problem solving and judgment.
- Ways of working: collaboration and teamwork.
- About the socio-cultural tools that enable us to interact with the world.
The fact is that schools need to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created. They need to teach these students to use technologies that have not yet been invented or venture towards creating one and to solve problems that may arise in the future.
The government needs to wake up from its slumber and realise that educating our youths and equipping them for life in the twenty-first century is not a task that should be toyed with.
Policy-makers should do the needful to make sure that our education system is totally overhauled and a new forward-thinking curriculum is put in place to equip our young ones with the right skill sets to compete and excel in today’s world.
Our youths need the necessary skills to collaborate, compete connect and create a better life for themselves and our society. And now is the time to forge ahead.