What will education be like in the future? I think that education will become more focused, and condensed, and teach the specific skills that people need for job functions. The future of schools will be in measurable skills over degrees. This should allow for shorter education time frames. Students no longer having to dedicate years in school, to learn the relevant knowledge for them.
Learning New Skills Efficiently Is The Future Of Schools
What does this mean for schools? Traditionally, there are well defined curriculum and learning programs. Those things can take time to adjust for changes to business and technology. They also can force students into corners, learning things that might not be in the student’s career future.
Instead, teaching more relevant skills, those that will be used on the job, will become more important. The focus will be on more specific skills, and tech skills. Which will have more ability to be measured, and those results directly tie to job work.
Skills Over Degrees Helps Employers Select Employees
Degrees as the benchmark to help employers identify and select the employees best for them will be replaced. Skills will eventually take over as the tool to determine if employees are selected. With effective skills based training, and ways to measure the persons ability in the skills, employees will easily be able to find who they need. This will help employers to select employees more quickly. Which, ultimately, is a help to employees also.
The Future Of Schools Includes Learning On The Job
In order to tackle the ever changing demands of business and technology, employees will need to tackle new skills. They will need to learn on the job and be able to perform new skills to see success. Employers need to recognize this as a model. Business and technology evolves and changes so fast, traditional degree programs can’t always keep pace. New methods to learn new things, do it quickly, and do it for the employees on the job that need it will become so important.
This means that there will need to be more partnership between employers and education. Partnerships to figure out in demand skills and be able to teach them. The future of schools will depend on their ability to teach relevant knowledge and skills, but also to do so in a cost effective manner.
Up-skill To Advance
This also presents an opportunity to employees. Those that want to branch out and take on new types of work. Or those that just want to advance in their current organization. Effective means to learn and measure new skills will enable employees to find what they need, learn it, and market themselves as needed.
You already see this with the educational technology platforms out there. Many more condensed online learning courses exist today. To which you can take those and get a certificate of completion, to help show you learned the new skill. Or, maybe even quizzes to test on the knowledge, an even better way to measure success. The future of schools includes online learning, and that is already apparent today.
These types of relevant learning programs to employees can be a tremendous help. Employees can and should take advantage of their organizations learning content, or there are many options out there.
Additional content to check out
It always helps to keep skills relevant and to keep learning new things. Check out some of the ideas on feedback and just in time requirements. Both important ideas and critical to good Agile practices.
Also check out the interview with LinkedIn’s CEO. A great read on the same mindset in skill based requirements for employment and employee training.