Which school for tomorrow?

Our era can be described as hyper-innovative coupled with a great deal of casualness. Not all are equally adept at seizing opportunities. This is true of school and university structures; even as the repository of the future of future generations, they move last. Yet profound changes need to be implemented sooner rather than later to solve environmental, societal and employment problems.

Among these problems is the growing mismatch between the professional relevance of job seekers and the job offers available on the market, as well as demands for new profiles to meet innovations.

"Skill shortage reaches unprecedented magnitude: +68%

Zurich, November 28, 2022 - After an easing of tension due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the last two years (2020 and 2021), the skill shortage in Switzerland is dramatically increasing again.

The Skilled Labor Shortage Index is currently at an all-time high, making staffing a major challenge for companies. Healthcare professionals, IT professionals and engineers are particularly hard to fill right now. That's according to the labor shortage index from Adecco Group Switzerland and the University of Zurich's Swiss Labor Market Monitor.

---

COVID-19 pandemic: a bad for a good for the Swiss labor market...

Staffing shortage most pronounced among healthcare professionals
Healthcare professionals top the labor shortage ranking. This occupational category was already experiencing a severe labor shortage before the pandemic. The shortage has only worsened since then. Corinne Scheiber, Director of Adecco Medical, notes: "One of the reasons for the worsening shortage of healthcare professionals is that Switzerland is not training enough specialized healthcare personnel to meet the real demand in these professions. To fill this gap, a substantial portion of the healthcare workforce is recruited from abroad..."

This is followed by software and computer application developers and analysts. Like healthcare professionals, this occupational category has been experiencing a significant labor shortage for several years now, which has again worsened significantly this year to a record high. James Peck, vice president of LHH Recruitment Solutions Switzerland, notes, "Software developers with experience in object-oriented programming languages like Java or C# and front-end software developers familiar with Angular or React frameworks are desperately needed right now."

Aside from construction managers, foremen and production managers, who rank 4th, industry occupations are also being hit hard by the labor shortage. Engineering and related professionals are in third place and polymechanics, production mechanics, machine mechanics and machinists are in fifth place. The labor shortage in these occupational categories has increased sharply from year to year...

"In technical occupations such as watchmaking, we are facing a significant labor shortage, which affects not only highly qualified people, but also low-skilled labor. Adecco Switzerland has therefore created the Watch Academy in Geneva to invest in new talent. The Watch Academy's mission is to train people with a talent for manual labor in the watchmaking industry to join this unique sector."

Source: Press Release Adecco Group: 28.11.2022

What we are seeing today is just the tip of the iceberg. The disconnect is much larger than what is visible as employers stop marketing jobs that don't find takers or no longer do.

There are two fundamental problems to distinguish:

• the first is the attractiveness of old jobs that turn off future employees and
  
• the second is the lack of adequate training and thus trained people who can respond to new offers.  

Yesterday, we only had one part to satisfy. The social change of this decade is that the employee has become a stakeholder in accepting and rejecting an offer. Jobs have to be sexy, co-workers have to be nice... and on the other hand, we don't know what jobs to train the youth for tomorrow. The world has accelerated. The traditional interlocutors and information relay structures are unable to dialogue with the new companies.

What can schools and universities do about these two problems? They can only create their relays themselves and work on the fundamental issues instead of waiting for some intermediaries.

How to go about it?

This time I am not going to answer you as an editor at Thot Cursus but as the head of the Research Laboratories of Regeneration Matrix Group. Complex problems are our specialty.

1. Society is changing so let's get into a posture of change. A posture of change requires being attentive, alert and open to trying new things.
   
   
2. This is a shift in society. We are not alone. Group with others who are experiencing the same situations. Find alter-egos who understand you and most importantly do not compete with you and with whom you are comfortable.
   
   
3. Do small scale testing with these other people. Creating a new course costs money, but by banding together you can reduce costs and support each other in these educational adventures.
   
   
4. The more you test, the more confident you will become.Start with a small project and grow it if it's successful. If it's not a success, keep it in mind and continue with something else.
   
   
5. To choose your topic, you must first make a good diagnosis of a situation. There are simple diagnoses, complicated diagnoses, and those that are complex often because they are not transparent or are subject to denial by governments or the public.
   
   
6. Start with simple topics and later move toward complexity. Simple topics appear in the news: "There is such a lack of trained cybersecurity engineers." The topic is in short supply. It is identified.
   


7. Continue with complicated topics. What is a complicated topic? A complicated topic is one that requires expert opinion. Let's take the example of the climate problem and the rising sea level. The sea is rising, there are areas that will no longer be liveable with the current standards. What will be the consequences and therefore the jobs induced? What will be the extent of the problem? How many people do we need to train?
   
   
8. When the mastery of the complicated subjects is acquired, try the complex problems. There, it might get stuck. For complexity goes hand in hand with uncertainty. And, not everyone has encoded the pedagogy of complexity yet. We may have to go through an intermediate phase and train complexity specialists before solving complex problems. But no one is bound to do the impossible. One can always implement the mastered solutions. 

If you already manage to juggle with points 6 and 7, you will be champions in front of those who, tetanized, always propose only the same sempiternal trainings to their students even if they are obsolete.

For the implementation of trainings, the key is to keep that spark of creativity and motivation to offer the best for the students.