The future of work - Initial questions about input

What will the world of work look like tomorrow? Or the day after? Or the day after that? Life has become increasingly fast and faster. The bit that has recently caught my attention is that all the mechanisms and structures that initially provide input into our lives at an early age remain the same. We go to school, we go to university or start an apprenticeship, we start a job... How do we get the next generation of young people ready for the challenges of work that are being created today?

Schools primarily teach you knowledge - of which there is more than ever before and more is being created every day. Yet our time at school remains the same. Do we need to change our perception on what is relevant knowledge? Should kids learn coding at school, rather than history? We barely write with pen and paper anymore - should we teach kids to touch-type instead? Kids can recite Shakespeare, yet struggle to understand their taxes or pensions. Exams test the capability you have to retain information and to regurgitate it at a particular point in time - at work, we google when we don't know. Has the school system we operate become outdated?

When we look at higher education, we see similar trends. We set students tasks and ask them to complete them by a certain date and for six weeks, nothing about this brief changes. Let me ask you - when was the last time you started a project at work that did not change for 6 weeks? When these young adults enter the world of work, all of a sudden, their previous experience lacks relevance. You spend most of your time typing, google when you don't know and the project you start looks entirely different by week 2. We now have organisations market life skills rather than their actual roles - recognising that the input the new generation receives seems somewhat mismatched to the challenges they encounter at work.

So is the input today's generation gets mismatched? Should skills take precedent over knowledge? Or should we become better at defining what particular knowledge is relevant? How will we know? Do we inadvertently and without meaning to create false expectations about what the world of work is like? I by no means have answers to these questions, but I find them thought provoking. Maybe the world of work has moved too quickly and has forgotten to catch up the education system on what it needs in the next generation of talent. If we look at the topic of the future of work, how will we make sure that the input we provide in the future and for the generations of the future is and remains relevant and topical?