The Education 4.0: Critical Skills For Students to Secure Future Jobs
Education 4.0 envisions education as an inclusive, lifelong experience that focuses the responsibility for skill development on the student, with teachers and mentors serving as facilitators and enablers.
Here are the three essential skills that should play a central role in each student’s curriculum as we prepare students, parents, educators, and the business community – working with government and non-government agencies – to invest in and upgrade existing education systems to prepare students for the jobs of the ever-changing future.
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Problem-solving
Problem-solving is at or near the top of every university’s and company’s list of required talents, but what exactly does it entail? Students who are proficient problem-solvers approach problems with interest and a willingness to accept the challenge at hand.
Independently or collaboratively, students study the situation and ask questions to identify the root cause of a problem. Once the cause is confirmed, they collaborate to generate potential solutions, experiment and test those solutions on a small scale, evaluate the results of those tests, scale up the best solution, and continue monitoring it to ensure that it is effectively solving the problem.
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Students develop and rely on the building blocks of problem-solving along the way: creativity, data analysis, perseverance, and critical thinking.
In a Brookings Institution series on teaching future skills, educator Kate Mills describes “normalizing trouble” in her classroom, seeking opportunities to demonstrate how other students (not the teacher) have solved problems by naming and describing the steps they took and reiterating how the process resolved the issue.
“After a few weeks,” says Mills, “the majority of the class realizes that professors are not there to fix their issues for them, but to assist them in addressing their own problems.”
This includes providing pupils with a variety of problem-solving tools they can refer to if they become stuck. Mills says, “as a teacher, it is essential for me to foster an environment in which kids are problem-solvers.”
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Collaboration
Collaboration is really about working successfully with others, both as a team leader and as a team member. Collaborative students are swayed by strong facts and persuasive arguments, and they are willing to modify their ideas when presented with evidence that contradicts their earlier beliefs.
Effective collaborators develop relationships with individuals of diverse personality types, working styles, and cultural backgrounds, moving swiftly to reduce tension and resolve disagreements within any team. In addition, they are courteous communicators, whether they are conversing in person, on camera, via audio, when writing in any form (from micromessages to comprehensive reports) or when attentively listening.
The British educational publishing company Pearson Education teamed with the Partnership for 21st Century Learning to analyze the most significant findings in teaching students how to collaborate five years ago.
The report suggests incorporating interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, and task management into routine classroom activities.
“For instance,” the research explains, “if a job only requires groups to generate a large number of ideas but not to rank those possibilities or make any decisions, there will be no need for students to coordinate their contributions and thoughts.”
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Similarly, there is no opportunity for students to practice conflict resolution if a task requires consensus yet everyone in the group already agrees on the optimal course of action.
To build and practice collaborative abilities, the learning environment must have some friction.
To design a collaborative-learning classroom, the report suggests organizing students into a multitude of different groups for a variety of tasks and projects, rotating roles so that all students experience a variety of responsibilities and interpersonal situations, and teaching students how to conduct peer evaluations that provide honest, constructive feedback.
Unsurprisingly, the survey also reveals that students with good collaboration abilities have greater employment and career growth opportunities than those without.
Adaptability
Because ‘adaptability’ is difficult to describe, the ability to continuously adapt to changing situations and realities has been undervalued for a very long time. Adaptability abilities span from a certain level of comfort with ambiguity, rapid changes, and unfamiliar situations to the capacity to make sound decisions and generate creative solutions under duress.
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Adaptable youth smoothly transition from following to leading and back again. They appreciate opportunities to acquire new knowledge, master new skills, and put their abilities to the test.
Over the past decade, an Australian research team led by Andrew J. Martin has examined students’ responses to uncertainty, novelty, and change, noting that learning to adapt requires cognitive, behavioral, and affective (emotional) adjustments, including the development of resilience, buoyancy, and self-regulation.
An way to teaching adaptation is to develop a self-regulated process in which students self-evaluate their proficiency in a particular area, establish learning goals, strive to build experience and skills, re-evaluate proficiency, identify the necessary modifications to continue to grow, etc.
Adjusting and altering abilities and behaviors as a result of evaluation and feedback allows young people to develop a flexible mentality throughout time.
The emergence of Education 4.0 presents a unique opportunity to upgrade our educational systems to effectively prepare the world’s two billion young people for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, while also reducing educational system inequalities and capitalizing on the promise of educational technology.
By focusing individual skill development and classroom instruction on problem-solving, teamwork, and adaptability, Education 4.0 provides students with the best possible chance of succeeding in the global economy.
The Education 4.0: Critical Skills For Students to Secure Future Jobs
