Publish at November 15 2023 Updated November 15 2023
It takes 6 years for a university to create a new degree course. For years now, we've been confronted with dazzling breakthroughs in innovation, and quickly we need people trained for operational jobs. And ever faster.
"While the media regularly raise awareness of the impact of these technological innovations and automation on professions, some people sometimes have this alarmist figure in mind: 85% of the professions of 2030 would not yet exist. A figure published in 2017 and the result of a study carried out by Dell and the Institute for the Future, who shared the results of a prospective study, whose main conclusion has been widely commented on".
Source: Le futur de nos métiers et leurs transformations - Caroline Deblander -2023
https://fr.linkedin.com/pulse/le-futur-de-nos-m%C3%A9tiers-et-leurs-transformations-caroline-deblander
What can we do if today, at the dawn of 2024, we don't know what the students of 2030 will be trained for? The problem is not new, it just hasn't yet found a solution. And that solution needs to be found quickly, because already today, some students are leaving university with diplomas for jobs that are going to disappear in the short term.
The first is for schools and universities to assess and bet on the future, and for students to focus no longer on a vocational diploma, but rather on transferable skills to be developed throughout their lives with additional training.
They're unlikely to be told what's on the horizon, as many advisors find it hard to think outside the box. They are used to or forced into a routine when they should be curious, creative and pro-active. And they will only be replaced very slowly.
On the one hand, we have geeks, creative academics and entrepreneurs who are changing the world, and on the other, we have day-to-day managers who are stuck in their certainties, lagging behind the changes and mutations taking place. To sum up, the world of innovation is changing very, very fast, while the world of education remains slow and set in its ways.
We need to move away from hierarchical systems towards shared systems. What can we do about it?
"Vision: adopt an explicit, shared vision that can be translated into concrete objectives.
Goals : co-construct goals, no longer starting from the exercise of the teaching mission in the traditional sense of the term, but by defining goals with all the players in a perspective of obligation of means.
Anticipation : embedding the transformation in a long timeframe, which implies both letting go and managing temporal tensions to ensure that the first trials can be replicated.
Collective and sense of belonging : make the collective, a social space for the development of a sense of belonging, a strength of the project by encouraging an inter- and cross-category approach to the objects and initiatives of pedagogical transformation crystallized by a common project.
Potentiation and empowerment: bring together the various conditions needed to unlock routine practices and encourage movement by providing a secure framework offering a range of possibilities within the proximal development zone of players and organizations.
Accompaniment and reflexivity: support the various players directly or indirectly involved in pedagogical transformation with appropriate accompaniment that articulates needs and possibilities. The aim is to establish a reflective posture that enables players to distance themselves from the course of action in order to make the dynamics intelligible and identify the "elements" to be considered for spin-off and scaling-up in a process of updating the planned practices.
Valuing: recognizing and valuing the different types of commitment made by players in this process ante (before the project/initiative), in itinere (during the project/initiative) and post (at the end of the project/initiative)".
Source : Innovation in higher education: from models to practices, what principles should be retained? - Didier Paquelin - 2020
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/enjeux/2020-v7-n2-enjeux05655/1073359ar
Several heads already do and know more than one. If this extra head is a very traditional one, operational problems may arise, to the detriment of the desired result. Often, the line manager is also the Human Resources recruiter, and this situation can lead to traditional teaching ecosystems being asked by decision-makers to solve unsolvable problems because they themselves are at the heart of the problem.
Innovation is a collective intelligence process that must be preserved. As Olivier Zara says, "the leader must speak last in a brainstorming session, otherwise everyone will align themselves with his or her answers, and this will cut off the creative momentum".
It's not necessarily easy for every teacher to renew himself or herself. There's a wear-and-tear phenomenon, as in the support professions in the healthcare sector. Some nurses are mentally worn out by their profession, which is not an easy one. The same is true of some teachers.
"Burn-out, or teacher burnout, is a state of chronic stress that leads to physical and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, detachment and feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. Teachers are generally high achievers who like to work hard and are always looking for ways to improve. These traits are laudable, but can mean that educators fall prey to perfectionism and don't leave themselves enough time to rest and recuperate.
In other words, teacher burn-out is a state that persists over time, leading the teacher to develop one of three coping mechanisms:
- Exhaustion: a state in which the teacher feels he or she can offer no more;
- Cynicism: a distant attitude towards work, colleagues, students and other aspects of the job;
- Inefficiency: a feeling of becoming incompetent and ineffective at work.
It hardly needs saying that this state is detrimental to students, teachers, administration (which has to deal with the stress of disgruntled teachers and high turnover), parents and the union as a whole."
Source: Teacher Burn-out: definition, symptoms and solutions - 2021
https://www.bienenseigner.com/burn-out-des-enseignants/
A teacher is often a civil servant who has the right to teach until retirement, but who also has a duty to be a good and useful teacher for his students. If he or she is unable to keep up with the innovations needed by his or her students, burnout, for example, can make him or her less effective, more insensitive and other characteristics inherent to this situation. So we need to take win-win measures.
Making good assessments is a real skill. What should be assessed: trades or skills?
Assessing jobs is clearly risky, because everything can be called into question overnight. Innovation was created by innovators who impose their own rules. They, in turn, recruit from their own ranks, often highly qualified people who have been trained as the innovation develops. Skills are more general and transferable.
Whether it's a recruitment problem or a promising market, managers are not creative and will not take the initiative to train in complementary subjects. They are less autonomous in their learning decisions.
For example, a good manager in cybersecurity will need lifelong training, as risks evolve daily. When he or she joins the company, in most cases, the employer will ask him or her to stay in his or her field, and will curb his or her natural curiosity. Yet employees need this curiosity to improve throughout the year, if they are to take responsibility for improving their own knowledge. This is a bipolar situation.
One way forward is to set up corporate universities or partnerships to regularly update each other's skills. This requires a rethink of how the company is structured. It's a question of lifelong learning, and of remaining perpetual students. The image of the specialist who must know everything is set to change.
Participation in continuing education in Switzerland is high: in 2019, almost 27% of the permanent resident population aged between 25 and 64 said they had taken part in at least one continuing education offer (non-formal training) in the previous four weeks. Overall, participation in continuing education increased by around 9% between 2011 and 2019. With results like these, Switzerland has been ahead of all other countries for several years.
Nevertheless, participation in continuing education varies according to level of education, labour market situation and professional status. It generally declines after the age of 50".
Source : The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation
https://www.sbfi.admin.ch/sbfi/fr/home/services/publications/base-de-donnees-des-publications/s-n-2021-5/s-n-2021-5b.html
And if lifelong learning is natural in Switzerland, we should remember that Switzerland and South Korea are exceptions and models in the global ecosystem. In France, it's much more complicated. But if employees don't develop their skills, they'll find themselves on the sidelines sooner or later.
Between natural skills, learned skills and acquired skills, there is a mix of disruptive factors such as exhaustion, disgust and disability, and amplifying factors such as motivation, well-being and so on.
Ideally, an assessment of tastes, desires and cognitive biases should be carried out before entering university. This would save on the years wasted by poor choices.
The university mutation should have worked, but there are too many unknowns that limit risk-taking. However, the situation is not lost. As long as there are students, there are solutions to be found.
One of them is to supplement the traditional networks of chambers of commerce with new networks made up of members of innovation fields, because they know their needs and the technological developments they will be proposing to tomorrow's companies, but they are disconnected from the chambers of commerce and industry.
The ideal would be to have global branches, which don't yet exist, because each country wants to protect its own territory, and so shears the cohesion of the whole. In 50 years' time, consensus will eventually be reached.
Source : Pixabay - Alexas_Fotos
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