Beyond laptops: the real education revolution
Sheryle Moon | October 15, 2009
It is a time of great upheaval in the economy and consequently, the role our education system plays in preparing young Australians for the changing world of work is under renewed scrutiny.
The Global Financial Crisis has demonstrated just how quickly prevailing economic conditions can upset trends in employment, skills and education. The stronger local economy has even lead to returning overseas workers (“brain gain”), but to say that the skills shortage is over is premature and wrong.
The challenges Australian businesses will face in the coming years regarding skills will be more about having the “right” kind of skills, than the right “amount” of labour. Population growth in Australia may be the highest it has been since the 1960’s, fuelled mostly by immigration, but the sorts of skills we need to remain competitive on a global scale will be more sophisticated than those we have been producing to date.
In short the community, business, government and education need to come together to develop the “right” kind of skills in young Australians, existing workers and immigrants too.
There is a need to ensure the Australian community understands the broad issues underpinning globalisation, the knowledge economy, and the constant evolution and updating of skills in the labour force required to remain competitive in the current environment. Education and training providers hold a key role in equipping their students for these challenges.
If anything, it could be argued that recent talk in education systems around the world about “getting back to basics”, with a no more obvious example than the No Child Left Behind policy adopted by the Bush administration, is in fact returning to the “wrong” basics.
Ask an employer what skills they wished their people had more of and they will usually respond with things like:
· Creativity
· Collaboration
· Communication
· The ability to manage uncertainty
· Emotional intelligence
These skills seem far more anchored in “right-brain” capabilities than the left brain “basics” we continue to obsess about in education. Sir Ken Robinsons, the highly respected commentator on creativity and education, suggests that we have forgotten that literacy, mathematics and science as the core focus of education is in fact a recent phenomena. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century our focussed shifted to these highly analytical, process based, fundamentals of education which at the time were PERFECT for the dawn of the industrial age.
In other words, schools were producing exactly the kind of thinkers their economies needed.
Is it possible that Australia, and much of the world for that matter, is producing graduates with skills based on a world that no longer exists.
There has been much research into the kinds of skills employers need graduates to possess, which can be broadly categorised into career assets and career management skills. Overall, graduates need communication, collaboration and creativity skills to be effective in a modern business environment, but programs to integrate these learnings in a structured and comprehensive way in Australia are for the most part still in development.
What are employability skills?
There is a broad range of definitions and formulations of the specific bundle of skills that comprise “employability skills”. However they can loosely be defined as those required not only to gain employment but also to progress within an enterprise so as to achieve one’s potential and contribute successfully to organisation strategic directions.
After a comprehensive review, there are two streams of employability skills independent to job-specific technical skills that represent a general consensus of employability skills.
The first stream is Personal Attributes:
· Loyalty, Commitment, Honesty, Integrity and Reliability
· Enthusiasm, Motivation, Adaptability, Ability to deal with pressure
· Personal Presentation, Commonsense, Sense of Humour, Balanced attitude to work/home life
And the second is a framework of Competencies:
· Communication, Team work, Problem-solving
· Self-management, Initiative and Enterprise, Planning and Organising
· Ongoing learning, technology aptitude
The Department of Education, Science and Training National Industry Skills Report of 2006 maintains there is a sizable irreducible level of uncertainty about future patterns of skill requirements, and the longer the period of projection, the greater the uncertainty.
While this is certainly difficult to predict the specific technical skills required for future individual jobs, the underlying personal attributes and competencies discussed in this paper are independent of specific vocational or technical skills, and will serve as a blueprint for desirable employability skills well into the future.
Sheryle Moon is a director of the behavioural change specialist group Centre for Skills Development. Sheryle also sits on a number of Australian Government advisory boards and was recently inducted into the Australian National University’s Hall of Fame for her contribution to Australian business prosperity in the ICT industry. She is also the former CEO of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and a Telstra Business Woman of the Year.
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