We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” Franklin Roosevelt
Anything we achieve in our careers and life, we owe to those who invested in us - those who believe in us, our mentors, the hard-working teachers, and our colleagues. I do not take this reality for granted. I am passionate about doing my part of investing in the next generation. We share the responsibility to help the next generation succeed. By focusing on what we can do today to prepare our youth — the Digital Natives — for the future, it will help them, and us, prosper tomorrow.
Throughout my career, I had the opportunity to learn from and study students, educators, customers, and employees. All these opportunities contributed to building my unique talent stack. My bundle includes my skills, knowledge, accomplishments, wisdom, and behavioral traits.
Evolving our education system will prepare our youth for tomorrow better. I am sharing my views on ways that we can help develop the next generation. I hope it sparks further conversation and ideas.
Institutions embed the best-thinking of the past
Many institutions integrate the best thinking of past generations. They think these practices will serve students well going forward. For example, engineering education in countries representing 65% of the world GDP (Washington Accord member Countries) have equivalent accreditation systems. At the heart of this international agreement is a set of graduate outcomes. ABET developed these outcomes in the mid-1990s are remain unchanged. Also, the input requires within many of these systems remain unchanged. Are we keeping up? Are we serving the next generation of engineers well?
Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation.” — Ray Kurzweil
We are only 18 years into the 21st century. Progress has been stunning with the global adoption of the Internet, smartphones, ever-more agile robots, AI that learns. For example, in 2004, saw the first sequencing of the human genome. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, machines can sequence a genome for less than $1,000.
Think about all the things you can do besides making calls on your smartphone: take photos, shoot video, listen to music, give you GPS-based directions, manage your travel, control your home, and more. Moreover, think about how much each of these technologies originally cost as separate devices. If you add up the costs, your phone is worth over a million dollars. The services once available only to the wealthy are now pretty much free.
Ninety percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone, at 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day! The data growth rate will likely accelerate even more with new devices, sensors, and technologies emerging every day.
With an eye toward keeping you ahead of the shifts that are transforming the industry and reshaping customer demands. These are a few examples of progress driving forward. The future is approaching much faster than we realize. It is critical for us to think about where we are headed and how we will get there.
Providing an enabling educational foundation to support life-long learning requires a major fundamental shift that must be guided and supported by research.” — Brian Frank and Greg Evans
Frank and Evans make a compelling case for investment in education research in their article — Flying blind: The future of work in Canada depends on better research.
My provocation follows four themes:
- understanding the students of the future
- preparing those students for the jobs of the future
- preparing our education system to teach and build the skills needed in the future
- advancing life-long learning to develop the next generation’s talent stack
Students of the future are Digital Natives:
Children under the age of ten were born after the invention of the iPhone. They are a generation unlike any before them. We need to adapt our educational approaches to serving them better. Their brains are wired differently, with information always at their fingertips or a voice-command away. As a result, they have developed the unique ability to do many things at once – something neuroscientists call continuous partial attention. Observe kids watching TV, looking at a YouTube video on their laptop, and scrolling through social media on their phone, at the same time.
“They cannot possibly be effective in doing that,” is our first instinct. No one can that be that good of a multi-tasker. However, science suggests otherwise. In fact, Digital Natives switch back & forth between devices an average of 27 times an hour. Their brains are wired to do so effectively – thus the term “continuous partial attention.” What a gift! With this gift comes to a different reality – they possess an average attention span of 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds just four years ago.
However, the idea that there is a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has been debunked. How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much on what the individual brings to that situation. We have a wealth of information in our heads about what happens in given conditions, what we can expect. Moreover, those expectations and our experience mold what we see and how we process information at any given time.
As educators or business leaders, we need to understand these facts and begin to think about how we tailor our approach to education and work environments to maximize the potential of the next generation. The methods that worked in past generations will not work in the future. Digital natives need a re-think and approach that is designed for them and the way their minds work.
STEAM Prepares Digital Natives for the jobs of the future
We live in a global economy, connected by the cloud with computers in the palms of our hands, powered by big data and machine learning. These trends are having a profound impact on the types of industries and jobs we need to be building for today, or we risk being left behind. I explore this in Forget Princess – I want to be an astrophysicist and How to discover your path to remarkable career success.
To thrive and survive in this world, we need to inspire in our children a love for STEAM – science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. Today kids should understand how to build apps and write code, even if their passions take them in different directions later in life. Not all who learned to write in cursive became journalists or poets. However, we had the foundational skills needed to contribute in a society where writing skills were critical.
On a recent post about STEAM, one of my engineering colleagues responded:
Please, I beg you, DO NOT use the meaningless acronym STEAM- what, social sciences, humanities, economics or languages aren't important, only "arts"? The A doesn't belong. Forget about the rubbish about science/tech being a creative pursuit and hence the A- sure, it is a creative pursuit, but so is everything else at that kind of stretch.”
Many of my engineering colleagues share this view. They argue that the general addition of an “arts” component distracts from the focus on the hard sciences. Others say that there needs to be a separation between the arts and sciences to prevent anything taking away from the emphasis on STEM education.
The STEAM movement is not about spending 20 percent less time on science, technology, engineering, and math to make room for art. It’s about sparking students’ imagination and helping students innovate through hands-on STEM projects. Moreover, it is about applying creative thinking and design skills to these STEM projects so that students can imagine a variety of ways to use STEM skills into adulthood. For decades you continue to hear that engineers have excellent technical skills but lack the soft skills.
The acronym should be refined and even broader - THE/SAM - Technology, Health & Engineering (the functions) over Science, Arts & Math (the foundation).
There is a growing demand for “digital builders” to create the world of tomorrow. Many technology companies need to hire skilled tool and die makers to build products. Estimates suggest we could take all of the tool and die makers in the USA and fit them into a single basketball gymnasium. In China, this would take several football fields. As leaders, we must re-embrace and respect the industries that build things with our hands. At the same time, these industries need to know that it will not be producing the same things we did in the past. Instead, we must focus on the future trends and on making those products and services.
Preparing our education system
The National Academy of Engineering’s publication The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education provides a useful framework. It examines the evidence behind the assertion that educational programs that integrate learning experiences in the humanities and arts with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) lead to improved educational and career outcomes for undergraduate and graduate students. It explores evidence about the value of integrating more STEMM curricula and labs into the academic programs of students majoring in the humanities and arts and evidence on the importance of integrating curricula and experiences in the arts and humanities into college and university STEMM education programs.
In Canada and the United States, a broad study in an array of different disciplines —arts, humanities, science, mathematics, engineering— as well as in-depth research within a specialized area of interest, have been defining characteristics of higher education. However, over time, comprehensive study in a major discipline dominates the curricula at most institutions. This evolution of the curriculum has been driven, in part, by increasing specialization in the academic disciplines. There is little doubt that disciplinary specialization has helped produce many of the achievement of the past century. Researchers in all academic disciplines have been able to delve into their areas of expertise, grappling with ever more specialized and fundamental problems.
Has higher education moved too far from its integrative tradition towards an approach rooted in disciplinary “silos”? These “silos” are an artificial separation of academic disciplines. The NAE study reflects a growing concern that the path to higher education that favors disciplinary specialization is poorly calibrated to the challenges and opportunities of our time.
With the pace of disruptive change in the world today, one of the most critical skills we can teach is problem-solving, which also develops entrepreneurial skills. In my insight Wisdom — How to understand and leverage your talent stack, I explore learner-centered teaching. I argue that inquisitiveness and thinking outside the box need to be treated with the same level of importance the school system gives to language, physics or math.
From my experience, success is an exercise in constant contingency planning. Most of the start-ups that succeed in the Silicon Valley strike gold on an idea different than the one they started with. These are problem-solving skills – wrapped in methods such as design thinking or agile development – that we can and must teach in schools. Moreover, we need to show them in all education environments. In fact, we have categorized a new type of leaders — an Agile Leader. We include developing this type of leader on our ladder of leadership.
We need to evolve our notion of what a successful education looks like. Traditional college is one form of learning. We need to re-invigorate our passion and respect for vocational schools. It is estimated that sixty percent of Germany’s workforce graduated from professional schools – and they have one of the most productive economies in the world. While in the state of Massachusetts, an entire generation of electricians is retiring, and because its notion of a successful education system is so focused on four-year colleges, there is no one to replace them.
Also, vocational schools can be tailored to the skills needed by companies in their communities. We should also embrace new versions of trade schools such as coding boot camps. These programs are sprouting up all around us and can teach individuals how to write computer code in a matter of months, beginning their journey to be a part of the next generation of jobs.
No matter how we do it, the key is finding ways to focus on the skills needed for the future and supporting a broad portfolio of education alternatives to develop those skills.
Life-long learning – Building Our Talent Stack
Plenty of respected leaders ranging from Michelangelo to Gandhi—not to mention countless devoted classroom teachers—have spoken about the importance of fostering a love of learning and the ongoing growth of individuals.
We must maximize our ability to learn in today’s increasing globalization and evolving technologies. Learning is the foundation for continuous improvement, operational excellence, and innovation.
There is a full spectrum of informal to formal learning opportunities to build your talent stack:
- Formal – you learn as a part of a planned and monitored sequence of learning such as courses
- Self-directed – you control the path and pace of learning, including online courses, like MOOCs and self-paced YouTube workshops
- Professional – you learn through professional development, job training or skill acquisition, on the job, both formally and informally
- Personal – you pursue learning unofficially or officially and is often tied to a passion or interest
- Indirectly - some lifelong learning happens without you even planning or knowing about it, such as through conversations, unexpected lessons learned, relationships or travel, the world around you may expose you to new ideas and discover that you had even planned for
- Informal - you learn through reading, watching YouTube, from a peer, or by trial and error
The ways to learn today are endless.
In 5-Hour Rule: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you're irresponsible, Michael Simmons sets out why the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate education, while others make excuses about how busy they are!
Given these many types of learning—along with changing technology, disrupted work and learning environments, the emphasis on individual learning plans, micro-credentials, and more.
One fundamental question — Who will own the lifelong learning relationship? — YOU
In my insights Opportunities for Micro-Credential Recognition on the Blockchain and How Blockchain-Based Technology Will Revolutionize HR Forever, I provide a future view of how an individual’s talent stack will be tracked and recognized and how the business will find its future talent.
Our world is shifting from a “knowledge-based” society to a "learning-based" society. The Digital Natives will not graduate with a knowledge base that will serve them throughout their career. This model became obsolete decades ago. Students must expect to learn continuously throughout their careers. This requirement shifts the priorities of education form discipline-specific expertise to the processes of learning and teaching critical competencies in and of themselves. Given the accelerating pace of technological advancement, change will be there throughout their careers.
When faced with new challenges, tomorrow’s workforce the will need to recognize what more they need to know, how to learn it, how to apply it, how to assess their progress, and how to change their strategy as needed. They will always be building their talent stack. Future career success will become less about what people know and more about how they can get new knowledge. Providing an enabling educational foundation to support this life-long learning requires a significant fundamental shift.
These are complex issues. The change will not happen overnight. However, it must start somewhere, and with someone. It is up to all of us to help write the next great chapter for our youth — the Digital Natives.
Your Challenge — What's Right For You?
Did you know that:
- 40% of College students don’t graduate
- 80% of College students change majors — on average three times
- 50%+ of College grads believe they got the wrong degree
- On average it takes six years to earn a four-year degree
Know Your Natural Talents - Identify your unique behavioral strengthens, develop your passion, choose the right college program to build your unique talent stack further, then and leverage your career capital for lifetime success.
We provide free resources and offer insights to navigate the route to career success and satisfaction:
- Powerful Career Advice for Your High School Student
- Who should choose the career of a child – parents or children?
- Parents — Tips you need to know to boost your High Schooler’s career success
- Some postsecondary students and their parents are about to make a $20,000 mistake
- How to help your child navigate a route to career success
- Students — How to Achieve Career Success and Satisfaction
- 5 Essential Career Planning Resources for High School Students