The top job skills for the future: are your students ready?
Asking your students what they want to be when they grow up might turn out to be a question with an answer that doesn’t exist – yet. According to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t even been created yet. At the same time, many of today’s jobs will become automated by technology and even artificial intelligence.
So how can we best prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s world?
In order to prepare students for this new world, it is essential to change the way we educate them. Educators are searching for ways to adapt and develop new ways of teaching and learning that reflect this changing world. In the past, education was about retention and “replay” of information. Success in learning in the 21st century, however, requires a new skill of agile learning, which is about how to immediately identify and apply new concepts at a much more rapid pace than ever before. Instead of simply giving students the information they might need to succeed, teachers should mentor them to be able to find and acquire new information from a variety of sources, distill that into actionable concepts, and to apply those in smart and creative ways. Learning is now all about discovery and integration, not memorization of facts.
In a future that is heading to be increasingly digital, and where knowledge will possibly be just a mouse-click away, which job skills will be valued?
According to the “Future of Jobs Report”, World Economic Forum, those are the top 10 skills for the future:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality, and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring, and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
The addition of technology into the classroom – with students taking a more active role in the learning process which is enabled by technology – offers the opportunity to develop those skills so that, in the future, students are prepared to enter the workforce and be whatever they want to be! Are your students ready?
