Lifelong Learning: The new education paradigm

Since the industrial revolution, culture has maintained a rigid divide between the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and the application of those skills. The former of course is represented by formal education which generally ends after adolescence and the latter being the workplace individuals enter once education ends.

However, not only does this formula neglect the unique nature of individual minds and job roles, it doesn’t anticipate major changes in technology and how that might affect the application of knowledge.

A good example of this is the insistence on knowledge retention that my generation was subjected to. We were required to memorize dates and mathematical formulae and before many had even left school, smartphones had become commonplace and capable of performing these retentive tasks with far greater accuracy and reliability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has yielded further examples wherein the old model of pupils in a classroom is both inefficient and unnecessary. However, this has not provoked a fundamental cross-examination of how we learn but the transition to a digital economy will.

Lifelong learning is a concept that has existed since at least the early sixties but, as a philosophical idea, it is far older. Originally developed in a social program designed to encourage learning in individuals that had already retired. Since then this dynamic approach to education has persisted at New York’s Lifelong Learning Institute and provided evidence to challenge our current attitudes towards learning.

In the context of knowledge, it is fair to say that ‘skill’ applies to the meeting point between acquisition and application - where the rubber meets the road so to speak.

As technology continues to take over previously human roles, we will need a form of education suited to continual relearning that focuses on the skills needed currently and projected to be needed in the future.

UNESCO recently published a comprehensive report on the benefits of and need for a culture of lifelong learning:

“Lifelong learning fosters people’s capacity to deal with change and to build the future they want. This is profoundly important given the disruption and uncertainty resulting from the familiar threats and opportunities of demographic change, the climate crisis, the rapid advance of technology and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic...

...Lifelong learning also improves employability and entrepreneurship through skills development and creativity, enhances public health and well-being, and builds more cohesive and resilient communities.”

Professionals are already embracing the shift to lifelong learning since they recognise, especially in the wake of last year's pandemic, that being able to adapt to new working conditions and responsibility will be crucial to maintaining future job security.

Last summer, interest in reskilling, upskilling, and adult learning programs surged with services like OpenLearn gaining nearly a million new subscribers and FutureLearn seeing massive traffic increases in March and April 2020.

Given increasing levels of internet connectivity due to the work-from-home boom and matching access to digital & IT learning frameworks, it is obvious that ongoing, skills-focused learning is the model for future further education.

A 2019 PwC report titled Talent Trends 2019: Upskilling for a Digital World has shown that CEOs are responding to this emergence in learning with 46% of those surveyed stating that reskilling and upskilling are the most important steps to bridging a possible skills gap in the future.

Embracing the new learning paradigm is only the first step, however, leadership teams must now contend with the logistics of creating a lifelong learning culture, and to do so, the delegation will be key.