A Different Way to Learn

Conventional wisdom has it that what we study in school equips us with the right knowledge and skills for the workforce.

A degree used to be viewed as a badge of honour that sets us apart from the rest. For many people, it was an indispensable item to have before even embarking on a job hunt.

But most people would probably agree that a university degree is becoming increasingly irrelevant in today’s world. While technology has been constantly driving change in the workforce, the global education model has largely remained unchanged, and this disparity in their pace of evolution has in turn created a divide between what we are taught and what employers need.

According to management consultancy Opimas, university courses that are presently popular among students, such as those related to finance and economics, could soon be difficult to sell in the near future when these sectors are disrupted by artificial intelligence.

For instance, robots are already slowly taking over the finance sector. Research by Aite Group found that investments in automated portfolios grew by 210 percent from 2014 to 2015. Meanwhile, large numbers of financial analysts are also being replaced by software that can perform the same task with greater efficiency.

Earlier this year, The Australian published a news article about a survey which found that a large percentage of the country’s graduates said their degrees were “close to useless for their jobs”. Meanwhile, more than 50 percent of the 4,000 employers polled said that management and commerce degrees are not important.

Furthermore, the survey also found that the quality of graduates from eight Aussie universities did not meet the requirements of more than 20 percent of the businesses polled. Innes Willox, the head of Australian Industry Group, was quoted as saying in the article that the survey results shone light on the fact that higher education today has failed to keep up with the needs of employers.

Adam Wiedmer, a director at recruitment outsourcing solutions provider Seven Step RPO, shares the same sentiment about the situation in the United States where there is a shortage of talent in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

“There is a mismatch between skills being taught in the US and the labour pressure in the market. Psychology, history, and performing arts account for 22 percent of degrees earned in the U.S., but the corresponding professions don’t appear in any top rankings for labour demand. Of the top majors granted in the US, only 5 percent fall within the high-demand areas of engineering and technology,” said Wiedmer in an article by Training Magazine, a professional development publication.

But some of the most sought-after skills that employers are after these days aren’t related to the STEM fields.

A survey by the Center for Creative Leadership showed that while soft skills such as self-awareness, self-motivation, communication, learning agility and adaptability are among the most desired in job candidates, many from today’s young generation lack these qualities.

“While undergraduate business administration and MBA programs provide students with a variety of technical skills, leadership and other soft skills are virtually absent in many programs,” said Ellen Van Velsor, a senior fellow at the centre’s research and innovation department.

“Whether these are the qualities companies actually are hiring for is an important question, but these are certainly not all qualities that are the core focus of typical high school or college curricula.”

Case in point: Van Velsor noted that though young workers today have an impressive grasp of technology, many are overly dependent on tech and poor at face-to-face communication.

Blair Sheppard, the head of the strategy and leadership development unit at PwC, has said that it is not so much what we learn, but how we learn.

“So what should we tell our children? That to stay ahead, you need to focus on your ability to continuously adapt, engage with others in that process, and most importantly retain your core sense of identity and values,” he said.

“For students, it’s not just about acquiring knowledge, but about how to learn. For the rest of us, we should remember that intellectual complacency is not our friend and that learning – not just new things but new ways of thinking – is a life-long endeavour.”

The way we are learning has already been changing. For example, many universities around the world today offer online courses that allow students to learn from anywhere, at any time. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) forecast that about 120 million students will learn through mediums such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) by 2020.

The fact that many major corporations in the world have ditched their college degree requirements can be seen as another blow to the higher education system.

Tech giant Google was among the first to do so. Laszlo Bock, the former senior vice president of people operations at the company, told the New York Times in 2013 that grades have proven to be a largely inaccurate means of determining a person’s suitability for the role.

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently,” said Laszlo.

“Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment.”

Andreas Schleicher, the special advisor on education policy to the secretary-general at OECD, said that integration is the key to staying relevant in a digital age.

“The future needs to be integrated, that means emphasising integration of subjects, integration of students and integration of learning contexts; and it needs to be connected: that means connected with real-world contexts, and also permeable to the rich resources in the community,” wrote Schleicher in a Google blog post.

One of the ways we can keep up with the changes in society and skill demands of employers is by allowing students to learn as they work. This pedagogy can be referred to as experiential learning or blended learning or Worked Integrated Learning (WIL).

In a survey conducted by Canadian market research firm Abacus Data, the overwhelming majority of the 1,000 undergraduate students polled indicated that WIL programs are an important source of meaningful learning opportunities.

Universities also stand to benefit from providing such learning experiences – the survey found that students with greater access to practice-based settings were more likely to feel satisfied with their education experience.

Canadian universities aren’t the only ones getting in on the action. A host of institutions in Australia, including the University of Canberra, the University of Melbourne, Murdoch University, Deakin University and RMIT University, currently offer experiential learning through temporary job placements.

Over at QLC, we open doors for university students to gain valuable skills at some 800 startups from around the world.

One characteristic of these jobs is that they are completely remote, removing geographical boundaries and increasing the project choices students have access to.

This mode of working is in itself a valuable learning experience because of two factors - it prepares students for a remote working future (half of the world’s workforce is predicted to be remote by 2020), and it teaches them how to pick the most effective medium of communication for different workplace scenarios.

Why startups per se? Because they are companies of the future. Because they encapsulate the very traits that sum up the future of work – technology-centric, remote working and innovation-driven.

Our education partners include the University of Sydney, UNSW Sydney, Cass Business School and the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. We are currently also working with the Dubai government to roll out QLC university courses in the near future.

To ensure that students get a quality learning experience (as opposed to internships where all they do is menial tasks like buying coffee and photocopying documents) we co-develop a holistic curriculum that teaches both valuable practical and soft skills. In addition, we only partner with startups, social enterprises and other innovative companies that are able to give students a meaningful role to play.

No one knows for sure if universities or degrees will eventually become extinct one day. After all, though curriculums are quickly losing their relevance in today’s fast-changing society, going to university is still widely considered a rite of passage that is essential to one’s personal development.

What we do know for certain is that universities will have to change the way they teach so that students can be equipped with the right skills at a pace that is in tandem with market changes.

This post originally appeared on the?QLC Blog