Future Minded

By Zaimah Khan

How do you prepare kids for jobs that don't yet exist? Kids learning in a system created for a bygone world? Especially when they're learning in a system designed for a different world.

Future Minded: Preparing Today's Youth for Tomorrow's Workplace delves deep into how students are being educated in a system created m

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781641378949

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New Degree Press

Copyright © 2020 Zaimah Khan

All rights reserved.

Future Minded

Preparing Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s Workplace

ISBN

978-1-64137-993-9 Paperback

978-1-64137-893-2 Kindle Ebook

978-1-64137-894-9 Ebook

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

Malcolm X

For Rehan and Aidin.

Every day with you is a new adventure, and without you two I wouldn’t have embarked on this quest.

To Sonny, thank you for your love and support in all my endeavors.

To my parents, siblings, and my chosen family, it is your love, prayers, and wisdom that have made me into the woman I am.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Future of Work

Part I: Developing the Self

Chapter 2: Emotional Intelligence

Chapter 3: Resilience

Chapter 4: Adaptability

Chapter 5: Critical Thinking

Chapter 6: Problem-Solving

Part II: Developing People Skills

Chapter 7: Empathy

Chapter 8: Communication

Chapter 9: Teamwork

Chapter 10: Conflict Resolution

Chapter 11: Digital Skills for the Future of Work

Conclusion: What’s Next?

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Introduction

When my older son was about ten years old, he said that he wanted to be a YouTuber when he grew up. We had already cycled through the usual job options that most little boys want. He wanted to be a policeman, a fireman, a teacher, a cashier at Target, a soccer player, and numerous other positions. My son, like many other young children, is part of the generation that enjoys watching others play video games, so he wanted to start his own channel, play his video games, and get enough subscribers so he could be a YouTube celebrity.

What kind of jobs will my kids have? was a question that had been percolating in my head ever since my kids were born in the oughts. Then in 2012, I had a mind–blown kind of year because of three momentous events. First, my oldest started Kindergarten. Second, I started another master’s degree program. Third, I heard Sir Ken Robinson’s speech on shifting education paradigms, which made me reevaluate everything I knew about teaching. Given that I was a teacher at a community college and that my son was starting Kindergarten, hearing Sir Ken Robinson describe the history of why schools are organized the way they are, and they are still run the way they used to be over a century ago made me rethink my question from what kind of jobs will my kids have? to how do you prepare kids for jobs that don’t exist yet? when they’re learning in a system designed for a different world.

Nearly four years later when my son, declared he wanted to be a YouTuber, my immediate gut reaction was Hell no! but when I stopped to think about how much the world has changed and what the future could hold for my sons and kids of their generation...YouTuber is a reasonable occupation. It is becoming more and more evident that the old career template that we had been directed to follow is not what’s going to take us into the future. In the past, a four-year college degree was a guarantee of employability. It meant a way to support a family. It was enough and, for the most part, it also meant the end of formal learning in preparation for a job. Those of us who are in our mid-careers witnessed our parents follow this model and can probably recall moments from our youth when we were told that a four-year college degree was the pathway to success. We have harbored those same expectations for our children. However, things in 2020 are very different than they were in 1990.

In 2016, Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum wrote¹:

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before.

We are entering an age of artificial intelligence and robots in the workplace. The way that we work has changed. Things like what does an office look like, or where you work from, and how you work have changed from the nine to five mindset. Career paths are no longer about rising through the ranks in a specific company or a single industry but more about a life path as work-life balance gives way to work-life integration, and people are seeking jobs that provide them personal and professional fulfillment. We have longer life spans and because there’s no longer the concept of staying at a company long enough to earn a pension, so more people are having to or looking at staying in the workforce longer.

The outdated industrial-age mindset where people received an education early in life to be ready for a lifetime of work no longer reflects the individualized and unexpected trajectories of modern careers.

²

World Economic Forum

After several declarations of my son’s desire to be a YouTuber, my husband and I were forced to confront our prejudices about the old path of school, to college, and to work. We had an earnest conversation about how our template of life and learning might not be our kids’ exact path. Especially since he and I, and those of us in mid-career have already had to re-skill and up-skill and look at our careers with a new lens, and even switch career paths or industries. In fact, my cousin’s best friend graduated from Georgetown with an accounting and finance degree. She worked in accounting, went into consulting, and now is the COO of a company that analyzes and updates HVAC systems. She speaks about LEED certification and WELL certification with such passion and animation that when I ask her if she could have imagined that this was what would excite her when she graduated from college, the answer was a resounding no.

Those of us in the workforce are already making changes toward these non-linear career paths. Given how quickly things are evolving, I can’t help question what will be my children’s experience?

•What will be the jobs when they graduate college?

•What will be the jobs five to ten years after that?

•Will they be prepared?

As a former educator and a current organization development and human capital specialist, people development is my area of expertise. I know that currently there is a workforce skills gap in soft skills, or people skills. And as we move into an age of automation and artificial intelligence, our soft skills—our uniquely human skills—are what will help us and our kids succeed because in the Fourth Industrial Revolution what can be done by a machine will be—jobs that can be automated will become automated. We find ourselves at a point in history where:

•the world is different and will be even more so in the Fourth Industrial Revolution because of automation and artificial intelligence;

•career paths are no longer linear, rather they curve, and wind around as new opportunities and options are created;

•the skills we all need to succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution are our uniquely human skills, but employers say that those skills are missing in today’s workforce,

•and our kids continue to be taught in an educational system that hasn’t changed in over a hundred years and has greatly contributed to the skills gap.

Thereby, begging the question:

Why have we reached the Fourth Industrial Revolution in work, but our teaching model has remained largely the same as it was during the First Industrial Revolution?

Our education system needs a major overhaul because the United States education system has not changed since the end of the nineteenth century when single-room schoolhouses began opening across the country in greater numbers. The Department of Education was created in 1867 to help collect information from the various schools to create a public education system, and while the schools have evolved from the one room, one teacher teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to all ages, the curriculum and systems haven’t significantly changed. Schools are still largely a place to teach kids to be prepared to be compliant, something that was necessary to prepare them for a life of working in factories in a world that has evolved beyond factory jobs.

The education system needs to be forward thinking and look at the skills and knowledge that our youth need to succeed in an age of robots and machines. As we move into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, there are already significant shifts in the type of work and jobs that exist, yet our school curriculum has not evolved enough to fulfill the needs of the workplace. And while I would like for us to say let’s scrap the current educational models we have and start fresh, that is not and cannot be the reality, so we need to find innovative ways to work with what we have.

So, with past templates becoming obsolete what do we as parents, educators, and leaders do to prepare future generations?

Based on research from the World Economic Foundation, other leading companies, and interviews with business leaders, I found that there are certain skills that are always in demand in the workforce and will continue to be in demand for the future of work. The skills can be divided into two sets.

The first set of skills are related to developing one’s self:

1.Emotional Intelligence

2.Resilience

3.Adaptability

4.Critical Thinking

5.Complex Problem-Solving

The second set of skills are related to interacting with others:

6.Empathy

7.Negotiation

8.Teamwork

9.Conflict Resolution

These nine skills show up in different ways in business. They may not be listed on job descriptions or resumés, but in nearly every interview I conducted these were the ones that were mentioned as being needed now and for the future of work. It may be surprising that none of these relate to academics, and instead they relate to the overall traits or personality of individuals. It isn’t about academics versus character. Ultimately what many people have emphasized in research and experience, teaching people how to program robots is much easier than teaching them to care about their co-workers. Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock wrote³:

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Until now, going to school and finishing a four-year degree have been the steps to employment and are ingrained in the heads of parents, teachers, and really the whole society. But as Toffler predicted half a century ago, in the twenty-first century career paths will require the workforce to engage in lifelong learning. To be skilling, re-skilling, and up-skilling to stay competitive and employed. As proof of his words is the fact that we seem to be playing catch up in workforce skills. First it was STEM skills, then it was the addition of art, so STEAM skills only to discover that we were falling behind in the soft skills. We are two decades into the century, and instead of being ready, we’re still trying to get caught up rather than preparing future generations.

All of this is not to say that school or college is not important and that degrees will become obsolete, but we cannot rely on systems that were designed for a time period that looks very different than what we’re in and where we’re heading. Lifelong learning is the way forward, and the human skills that I have identified, provide parents, teachers, and leaders with the essential skills that will serve our children best in their non-linear career paths. Paths that will require adopting the mindset of lifelong learning because they will need to up-skill, re-skill frequently, and they must be able to do it effectively and efficiently.

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1 Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means and How to Respond.

2 Simon Fuglsang Østergaard and Adam Graafland Nordlund, The 4 Biggest Challenges to Our Higher Education Model—and What to Do About Them.

3 Alvin Toffler, Oxford Essential Quotations, ed. Susan Ratcliffe.

Chapter 1:

The Future of Work

(There is an) increasing need for life-long learning in a non-linear world.

World Economic Forum⁴

Twenty-ish years ago when I graduated from college, my college’s career services advisor told me that I could expect to have up to eight jobs and two different career paths during my work life. At that time, it seemed like a radical deviation from the notion that a person worked for one company his whole life, and retired with a pension from that company. Even though it wasn’t. Interestingly, many people in the business world still write about shattering this model, as if it’s the norm even though it stopped being the norm in the 1990s as private sector pensions started sharply declining.⁵ Today, about halfway into my workforce trajectory of forty-ish