What Should I Learn To Be Prepared For Teh Future 2018

Past: Tom Vander Ark & Emily Liebtag

Our time to come depends on our young people'southward power to confront novelty and complexity, and to work together to create a meliorate globe for themselves and the side by side generation they leave behind. They will face challenges in jobs we have yet to envision and work alongside more intelligent machines than Orwell could have imagined.

Educators face the daunting task of properly preparing our young people for the automation age. Many fear the increasingly unknown future and potential for more than chore competition and displacement.

But as Bill Gates said, "The world is getting better, and progress is coming faster than always." There'south never been a amend time for youth (and educators) to make a deviation. It's never been easier to build an app, launch a entrada, start a business, or contribute to a global cause.

Following are a few of lessons from a 2 yr study of the future of work and from visiting a couple thousand schools.

How will the automation economy impact the employment mural?

We're living through aplatform revolution where we are work, larn and alive on platforms. Traditional institutions (e.g., taxi cabs, newspapers) are straining or fully disrupted. The expectation of customization has spread across the economic system.

Jobs are being augmented by smart tools (think AI in HR, ERP in process management, scheduling software). Repetitive jobs are existence replaced by automation.

What's new is the speed of augmentation and automation. In the last few years, a new generation of processing fries fabricated computation cheap and fast enabling rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Proliferation of broadband and connected devices (the Internet of Things) led to an explosion of information. The combination of AI and large data is powering robots and other enabling technologies that can learn on their own.

At that place is likely to be large scale chore displacement as secondary school students striking the job market place—just information technology will be dissimilar by sector and geography (what nosotros do right now, region by region, matters).

Information technology is fifty-fifty harder to predict chore formation. The way in which the ride share and room share sectors created value from gratis fourth dimension and underutilized avails (with some collateral displacement) are illustrative of the alchemy of the automation economy.

The quaternary industrial revolution (4IR) will also enable custom local manufacturing. Distributed networks of smart micro plants volition supervene upon some of the mega plants that governors throw tax breaks at today. Boston call centers staffed past a marketing director and programmer (and a k chatbots) will displace hundreds of workers in Bangalore.

There are growing opportunities to intendance for people young and old. Every bit societies, we'll take to decide how we value those jobs.

Where to start?

To improve readiness,states, districts, networks, and schools should start community conversations about how the globe has changed and what graduates demand to know and exist able to do for civic and career contributions. These conversations tin can exist summarized in an updated graduate profile and graduation requirements.

In these conversations, it can be helpful to feature updated graduate profile from other communities. Battelle for Kids has great examples of graduate profiles around the state and a guide for how to start the conversation in your community. TheMyWays frameworks from NGLC is one of the best student learning frameworks with great supporting materials.

School visits are a bully conversation starter and may be the best form of professional person learning. They expand everyone'southward sense of what'south possible. Check out our list of 100 secondary schools and 85 elementary schools worth visiting.

What's different?

Our friends atKnowledgeWorks summarize the new landscape as market-driven and user-centered, data and metrics focused, modularized and recombined, and interwoven with learning. And, despite the shift to digital, relating to each other is more important than ever.

The electric current job landscape and all the trends we've looked at propose that for the next decade that v skills should exist a priority:

Self-management: The ability to manage one's time, awareness, attitudes, and learning is more important than ever. A growth mindset (self, learning, awareness, interactions meta-sensation of perceptions, etc.) is far more than important and disquisitional to success in the hereafter of a young private.
Projection-management: We alive in a project-based globe. Nigh half of high school graduates will enter the freelance economy and experience project-based careers. Many others that take jobs will manage their work in projects. All immature people should learn how to deliver value by managing multi-step activities—and often doing it in teams.
Teamwork: The complication of every profession has transcended the skillful craftsmen (see Being Mortal, Atul Gwande). The power to collaborate and deliver in teams is disquisitional in near every sector. As jobs are augmented, working with smart machines is a new attribute of teamwork. Self-management and managing social interactions are the foundation of social and emotional learning every bit advocated byCASEL.
Entrepreneurship: An appreciation of the importance of effort, what Carol Dweck calls growth mindset, is the foundation of enterprise. Employers (and customers) would recognized this as hustle. Knowing how to get work (marketing) and deliver value (project direction) are of import for all whether self-employed or working for others.
Design thinking: Adaptive challenges (problems we've never seen) will be more than prevalent and prominent. Design and computational thinking (attack skills for complication) are essential. The ability to walk into new situations and know what to practice, where to start and how to approach the challenge. This requires iteration, development of solutions and analyzing possible outcomes. Great schoolhouse examples include One Stone in Boise, d.Tech Loftier on the Oracle campus, and High Tech High, and Design39 in San Diego.

Obviously, literacy and numeracy continue to be critically important simply information technology'due south increasingly of import how they're practical (NGLC calls it artistic know how).

Want a more extensive list? Minerva, an innovative and exclusive arroyo to HigherEd, has identified nigh100 habits of success and foundational concepts.

What experiences will exist almost important?

Project-based learning is the best style to build hereafter-ready skills and dispositions. Extended challenges, some with defined conclusions and some more iterative, resulting in public products, are the all-time preparation for a complex future.

Place-based education embraces the city equally a classroom, leverages local avails and invites the community into the schoolhouse. Done well, situated learning (Minerva calls this location-based challenges) involves working at the top level of Bloom'south – synthesizing and creating in new and complex setting. NGLC illustrates the field of learning (below) and advocates for "situated learning" that combines extended tasks high on Bloom's calibration and engaging circuitous real world settings.

The key is how you combine, supplement and scaffold these project-based experiences with accelerated skill edifice so that students are prepared to contribute.

What's next?

At that place is a global shift to demonstrated competency where students evidence what they know and move on when ready. Struggling learners get more time and support rather than being passed on as the get older.

In that location is growing interest in new larn and earn career and technical pathways that accelerate immature adults into family wage employment. For instance,RAMTEC is a robotics training network in Ohio, facilities where high schoolhouse students learn aslope (and sometimes teach) adults retraining for new jobs. Career Tech Oklahoma is a adept example of well-run statewide network. TheCAPs Network, based in Kansas City, helps high schoolhouse students build career fix skills and gain relevant work experiences.

Competency-based learning and mobile technology unlock anywhere anytime learning. LRNG, a national nonprofit initiative, is working to aggrandize access to valuable out of school learning experiences for youth.

Every bit the number of schoolhouse, community, and work-based learning experiences aggrandize, many young people will be able to co-construct unique pathways. It will make the advisory function even more than important.

Funding will become more portable traveling with learners to the all-time option. Wewrote a newspaper about how school funding will get to be functioning-based, flexible, and portable to back up these new pathways.

Giving youth more phonation and selection to build agency is critical. But human being beings are decumbent to do the easy affair not the best thing. Smart advisors (and algorithms) will recommend some experiences that are hard or unpleasant to promote growth and unlock opportunity.

What technologies volition be most important?

The two technologies that will shape the time to come of learning tools (and, as a result, learning opportunities) are machine learning and blockchain.

Car learning—code that learns from big information sets—will recommend the next best thing to learn, compare outcomes from different tools and schools, schedule time, and (eventually) guide vehicles that send pupils to learning facilities.

Educatee transcripts will be on blockchain, a credible, e'er up to engagement distributed ledger. Y'all won't take to telephone call a student's prior schoolhouse to get a record of their learning. The benefits of blockchain will eventually be extended to comprehensive learner profiles

What are the civic implications of the automation economy?

Given the likelihood of increasing chore displacement, most communities will need stronger social safety nets. Countries and/or states will need some course of income protection. Access to quality relevant job retraining will grow in importance every bit well grooming and seed funding for entrepreneurial incubators.

Europe, Scandinavia, and some Asian countries appear ameliorate prepared to address these demands than the U.Due south. where cities are likely to exist laboratories of democracy.

The other challenge to borough infrastructure will exist frequent and complex ethical question raised by income inequality, autonomous transportation, and genome editing (see 10 Actually Difficult Decisions Coming Our Fashion).