It’s Always Back to School Time

Back-to-school can be an emotional time whether your child is heading out for the first day of kindergarten or leaving for college. And while my name is often tossed out as an example of how a college degree isn’t necessary for success, I’m a strong advocate for life-long learning.

Through my own experience and the work of my family foundation, I’ve seen how a college degree can open doors and change the trajectory of people’s lives. I also recognize that the right education starts much earlier than that. We are fortunate to live in a time where it has become widely accepted that education is a fundamental right. Worldwide literacy rates have made astonishing progress in the last few decades.

However, large inequalities remain, and that presents a great opportunity to put data to work. By better understanding patterns in educational achievement and the contributing factors for success and failure we can better equip schools and train teachers with targeted curricula and support. We can also amplify the opportunity through online learning programs and by making learning more accessible in hard-to-reach places.

From pre-school through graduate school, we should be equipping students with a curiosity to problem solve, and also to look for the problems that need solving in a rapidly transforming digital society.

The Right Education for Now and the Future

Science, technology, engineering and math, commonly grouped together as STEM programs, are unquestionably vital for future generations. Our first problem is a shortage of skilled workers in these fields. So we need to widen the net by ensuring all students have ongoing exposure and encouragement to enter STEM fields. The issue of diversity becomes even more important as we think about the digital transformation of our world. Biases and points-of-view will be codified into the digital world. It is only by ensuring the broadest possible participation in the process of digital transformation that we can ensure that a full breadth of perspectives will be represented.

My business has been able to successfully navigate the many changes we’ve seen over the past 35 years by doing two things – listening to our customers to understand their needs and then innovating to help them solve their problems and capitalize on their opportunities. Today, we have more tools to innovate more quickly than ever before.

Our Jobs are Changing

That kind of innovation is vital as we strive to enable humanity to harness the rapid evolution of our world in a positive way. Emerging technologies such as neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, are all tools set to revolutionize work.

The latest Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum suggests that machines and algorithms in the workplace could create 133 million new roles between now and 2022. And our own research with Institute for the Future found that 86 percent of business leaders across 42 countries plan to use emerging technologies to improve their workforce productivity.

Changes to work and learning will be enabled by the maturation and proliferation of today’s emerging technologies and it’s all powered by data. The person who can understand data, explain it to the business and make it actionable will become the most valuable employee of the future.

We Must be Continual Learners

The power of data is set to revolutionize decision-making and collaboration throughout organizations, and everyone needs to be constantly curious and forever learning. We can, and should, be preparing our future generations to partner with machines to further human progress, but we can’t wait on them.

Within Dell Technologies we actively look for ways to not only improve digital literacy in schools, but also to skill and reskill our current team members. We then encourage them to share their knowledge and skills in their communities by giving them time to volunteer, applying their technology and business expertise to help identify and solve some of society’s most difficult challenges.

Because back to school isn’t just about students, it’s also about teachers, and really about all of us. And here’s hoping we all have a great fall semester!