Changes in labor markets have changed the skill demands of many jobs.
Work environments now may often be technology-rich,
problems are frequently ill-defined,
and people work in teams,
often multidisciplinary teams, to deal with them.
We're moving away from
narrow occupational title definitions toward
identifying ourselves as possessing particular skills,
and those skills may be required across a variety of occupational activities.
The job-person or person-environment fit approach that was first
well-described by Frank Parsons in the early 1900s still, to a large degree,
has sway, but the focus now is more explicitly on the skills and
characteristics that an individual brings to
the work rather than on the occupational title or label.
If we focus on the desired outcomes of
particular work roles and the environment in which these are played out,
we see very readily that the implementation of
our skills depends on our 21st century context,
its people and its technologies.
It's not sufficient to learn academic, technical,
or vocational skills that assume that
all resources and technologies are known and constant.
We're living in a dynamic and a technologically complex world where it's not
possible for any one person to manage complex tasks alone.
Historically, education has responded
to and has underpinned different types of societies.
In the developed nations,
the expansion of education has been strongly associated with the move
from agrarian to industrial to information economies.
It has been fueled and has fueled the rise of wealth through
industrialization and in the 19th century led to the education of the masses.
Policies of mass education have typically been
adopted by countries as they industrialize.
As more of the technologically advanced nations shift
their economy from industrial to information-based knowledge economies,
a number of different systems have emerged across the world.
Agrarian economies still exist but in reducing numbers.
Industrial economies are being replaced but are still essential.
Information-based economies are increasing,
and we are beginning to find combinations of
these economic foundations in many developed- developing countries.
The shift from agrarian to industrial mass production required
a specific set of skills both at the level of
the floor worker and the factory supervisor.
The shift changed the way the people lived and worked.
It changed the way that people thought and the kinds of tools they used for work.
The new skills and ways of thinking, living, and working,
once recognized, demanded new forms of education systems to provide them.
Similarly, as the products and the technology to develop them become more digitized,
another set of management and production skills will focus on
increased digital literacy and numeracy and new ways of thinking.
These increasingly will be identified as essential,
and pressure on education systems to teach these new skills will intensify.
Our lives are already being altered as a result of the shift
from industrial to information-based economy.
The ways we work are changing,
the ways we think are shifting,
and the tools we use in our employment are almost
unrecognizable in comparison to those that existed 50 years ago.
We can anticipate even more of a shift in another 20 plus years.
As global economies move to the trade in information and communication,
the demands for teaching new skills will require an educational transformation of
a similar dimension to that which
accompanied the shift from an agrarian to an industrial era.
Children who start school today will leave school or university and
enter a dramatically different society
to that which exists at the beginning of their education.
Somehow, their education needs to evolve with
them and the society they're being prepared for.
We are preparing many students for jobs that don't yet exist.
With the emergence of a technology-based Information age,
the role of information in society has changed and with it,
the structure of the workforce.
Skilled labor is still important,
but a new set of occupations has emerged.
Many occupations that depended upon the direct use of labor have disappeared.
New occupations that depend upon information skills have been created.
Just as an industrial economy depended upon occupations that produced,
distributed, and consumed products,
an Information age and a knowledge economy
demand occupations that are based on the production,
distribution, and consumption of information.
Education faces a new challenge: to provide the populace with
an information skills needed in an information society.
Education systems must adjust,
emphasizing information and technological skills rather than,
or in addition to, production-based ones.
Those without the skills to act as information producers, distributors,
and/or consumers will be disadvantaged,
even if their related commodity skills are still in demand.
Access to management and advisory roles has become dependent on information skills.
The ability to learn, collaborate,
and solve problems in a digital information environment has become crucial.
A study by Autor, Levy,
and Murnane illustrated substantial shifts in the structure of
the workforce in the United States for 1960 through to the century.
They showed how non-routine cognitive task needs were steadily increasing both at
an individual and a group level while rule-based activities were in the decline,
presumably as more computerization took over automated tasks.
Note the decline in non-routine manual task input here, however,
because we find a really interesting movement in this over the next decade,
the first decade in the 21st century.
More recent studies, such as that by Jaimovich and Siu,
have both supported and clarified this trend.
As we see, the need for non-routine tasks still increasing,
both in the cognitive and the manual domains.
Similarly, we see, at a global level,
the same trajectory in the increase in demand for non-rule-based activity.
As can be seen from
these global employment trends from the International Labor Organization,
what these studies have in common is their depiction
of increase in demand for non-routine activity.
Although that early work of Autor and colleagues
showed increasing demand for cognitive over manual,
we see with these later studies and at a global level,
its the non-rule-based activity which
overpowers the distinction between the cognitive and the manual.
While the nature of education and its role are changing,
there has also been a need to rethink the way education is measured and monitored.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
the OECD, has led the way in this regard.
It now examines educational yield in terms of the skills that the students
acquire rather than the number of years of formal education completed.
It does this through its Programme of International Student Assessment, the PISA project.
It has done it through its international adult literacy surveys and is planning to do it
through a new program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies,
and it plans an Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes as well.
In 2015, it plans to change the format of
student assessment to include collaborative problem solving.
The changes that Patrick has described also highlight how the meaning of
capital has changed in the current age of information and knowledge economies.
Power and influence in the Industrial Age rested on control of capital.
This provided a straightforward method of calculating the value of a company,
country, or a social unit using physical assets.
Now, in an Information Age,
human capital is regarded as a means of estimating value.
This is due to the perception that capital consists of assets
yielding income and other useful outputs over extended periods.
According to this view,
expenditure on education and health represent
investment in human capital because they raise earnings,
improve health, and add to a person's quality of life.
Investment in education pays dividends because it generates productivity gains.
Initially, human capital was measured in terms of years of formal education
completed because there were
no comparable metrics of the quality of educational outcomes.
Now, the OACD's international measures, like many governments,
monitor factors such as literacy and numeracy as measures of human capital.
That original measure of human capital, formal education completed,
has been replaced by an individual's level of literacy and their capacity to access,
process, evaluate and use information,
and to solve problems.
Changing education systems and curriculum to meet
the demands of an information and knowledge economy is not enough.
Workers also learn and are trained on the job regardless of
the prerequisite level of education or skills required for any specific employment.
Workers are typically not fully job-ready at the end of their formal education,
whether it be school or university.
Workers often receive additional training to be able to perform their jobs via
formal and informal training programs when they are already part of the workforce.
Learning has become a lifelong process.
In a knowledge economy,
this is an effect of the shift in the way we learn,
the way we think, the way we work.
Increased emphasis on technology in the home and
the workplace accelerates the need for these new skills.
According to the Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker who won the prize in 1993,
new technological advances are of little value
in countries that have few skilled workers who can use them.
Economic growth depends upon the synergy between new knowledge and human capital,
therefore countries that have achieved
substantial economic growth are those in which large increases
in the provision of education and
training have been accompanied by advances in knowledge.
The information-based role of education in developing
the 21st century skills in an information or knowledge economy has become indisputable.
Patrick GriffinProfessor
