The questions asked included:
“How should we best prepare the next generation of students for a world that is unknown and for jobs that may not yet exist?”
“You mentioned that tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Apple are developing their own academic institutions to train their future workforce. How do we as public educators compete?”
“How do I inspire my students and motivate them to realise the danger and take action to learn these skills now? I have students whose grandad was a plumber, dad was a plumber; and they assume they will just become a plumber, too. How do I get them to aspire to be more?”
“How long do we have before we are replaced by machines?”
What are the skills needed to become entrepreneurial? How could they create a premium value proposition by providing a level of service and quality that sets them apart from the competition?
The plumber question made me chuckle because, in my book Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularityi, I specifically use plumbing as an example of one of the jobs that are very difficult to automate away! While machines can make almost everything a plumber uses, we are decades away from robotic plumbers. Plumbers are also in high demand, especially in the UK, as young people were encouraged to go to university rather than to technical colleges (most of which were closed down), creating a glut of social media administrators and marketers but such a shortage of skilled tradespeople that the UK needed to import skilled labour from abroad. I advised the teacher that perhaps, rather than persuading his students not to become a plumber, he should instead encourage them to examine how they could become the best plumber possible, explore what makes an excellent plumber versus an average one, and inspire them to create a successful plumbing business and grow it so that it was not solely reliant on his own labour. What are the skills needed to become entrepreneurial? How could they create a premium value proposition by providing a level of service and quality that sets them apart from the competition? How could you inspire them to grow a successful plumbing business, rather than just be a plumber.
Other questions raised the issue that there was an apparent gap between the subjects they were teaching in their schools and the skills businesses needed moving forwards - a case of industrial-age education in a digital world. One of the
