Education for the Future – How Companies can Drive the Reform in Education

A lot has been said and written in recent times about the current and future state of education and how it seems to be failing to adjust and adapt to the fast changing world of today and to prepare students for the reality they will face in their careers.

It’s my view that such statements are undeniable, the current education system was developed many decades ago and with very few changes or adaptations ever since, from a teaching methodology and from a curriculum point of view. It’s a system focused on one person sharing “truths” and students learning or memorizing them, and being tested on the capacity to put back in paper the information that was presented to them in class… This has very little to do with how the real world works today and what people will be faced in their jobs. There is no collaboration, no room for sharing experiences and to start putting in practice the so needed culture of experimentation-failure-learning-pivot-experimentation-success.

Currently the majority of education methods don’t drive collaboration, experimentation and even worse they don’t drive at all creativity… There’s a huge set of old rules to be followed in almost every step of the learning processes in traditional education.

Another issue that is relevant to mention is that the curriculums being taught are mostly the same for decades and are not adapted to the skills and jobs of the future. To be fair and honest, that would be nearly impossible as the top 10 jobs of 2030 most likely don’t even yet exist today, so one can’t go to university expecting to be studying for a specific career path for life, as opposed to 30 or 40 years ago where one could go to university, choose a degree in an specific area and work in it it’s entire live, maybe moving as much as 3 or 4 times in their entire professional life and within the same industry. Today’s reality is much different, people can go through more than 10 jobs in their career and spanning many different industries, some of them that did not even existed while they were studying.

What the education system should be focusing on are the skills that will be needed to survive in a fast changing, fast pace world and we are very far from that, which, for me, and I would assume for many of us that are parents of young children, is concerning. If you see the next pictures of the top jobs in 2022 and the top ten skills for 2025 presented at the World Economic Forum it becomes clear that choosing a current degree to prepare you for that is not an easy task. And if we think about an important skill like adaptation, that will be key in the future that realization, in my opinion, is even more visible.

Some Universities are already trying to take these steps, and changing the methods employed and how they interact with students, an amazing example I had the opportunity to visit and get to know a little of was the African Leadership University in Rwanda.

Now, the purpose of this article is not do debate on the above mentioned issues per se, but to raise an argument that if there is in fact an urgent need to reform the education system to better prepare people for the future, corporates all over the world need to start giving the first steps and lead that change.

What do I mean by this? So, let’s see… Education is a business like many others, the current curriculums and methods continue to be in place because universities can charge thousands of Euros or Dollars for a degree or a masters under the value proposition that doing that investment will lend you in a great and well paid job. But what happens if that demand disappears or is substantially reduced?

What will happen when big corporates and most companies stop considering a degree as a “need to have” for considering candidates in recruitment process? For sure this will make all universities start questioning the degrees currently being offered, the methods employed in them and if they are no longer in need, what is? What do they need to change or adjust so that the final product being offered goes back into high demand?

I have no doubt that this is the fasted route to change university education around the world. The world of business (and education is a big one at that), moves based on demand, if we keep feeding the current construct by demanding old dated degrees and old dated curriculums because “that’s how it as always been” we won’t be doing anybody any favours. But if more companies have the courage to follow suite to some big names that already are hiring without degrees (Google, Costco Wholesale, Whole foods, Hilton, Apple, Starbucks, Bank of America, IBM and others), then we will start observing that shift much more rapidly. 

Of course this does not resolve the full range of issues around education, this only touches university level, the rest of it, I believe, will be a little more complicated and probably more lengthy as it’s mostly dependent on government reforms since most education up to university level is provided by public institutions. Still reform needs to star somewhere and if we can provide youngsters a better, more robust and flexible education system at university level we are preparing all of them for the much-needed adaptability they will need throughout their career.  

It is time for all to take action and guarantee that we can prepare everyone to a future where continuous learning, adaptation, analytical skills and creativity will be a key factor for success.