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Fit for purpose
The pandemic ’ s impact on young people and what unis need to do to become ‘ 21st Century fit ’.
Jan Owen interviewed by Martin Betts
Leading commentator on the changing
perspectives of young Australians and the future of work , and former CEO of the Foundation of Young Australians , Jan Owen AM , joined Martin Betts and Karl Treacher on the HEDx podcast to reflect on the acceleration that has occurred in trends for young people and their work futures , and the implications for our universities .
The winners will be those that adapt the fastest and develop their staff capabilities and connections with partners that allow them to be ‘ 21st Century fit ’.
MB : What do you see as the major implications of what we experienced last year on young people , and how that ’ s going to play out in the years to come ? JO : I think number one , obviously learning has been severely disrupted . And we ’ re still holding our breath , waiting to see whether this is going to enable us to have our great
leap forward in education learning or whether we ’ re going to try and bounce back and sprint back to the classroom and what we know as the old world order as soon as possible .
But I think there is a lot of hope around the world that this time of having to iterate and try new things really quickly and get to a hybrid learning environment might just help us accelerate some of the trends that are already going on around learning . And I think it ’ s also cracked open for us the experience of learning for many young people .
Lots of young people have really suffered from not having their social group or in fact not having access to the digital tools required for learning in COVID times . I think the big surprise was that there ’ s 2.5 million households without the kind of connectivity that you need all the time to be able to do learning , and without the hardware and devices and so on . So I think that ’ s a really serious issue and I don ’ t think we realised how serious it was .
And then other students of course have thrived . They ’ ve actually enjoyed being a self-paced learner . They ’ ve enjoyed just checking in with teachers and running their own race a bit . So I think it ’ s exposed to us this incredible diversity of learners and learner styles and learner environments , and the opportunities to capture that as we try to reimagine what education next might be .
The other big item , and this does relate to universities or higher and further education , is unemployment . Now we already were facing unemployment and underemployment as really significant issues coming into 2020 but again , those issues have been compounded and will continue to be compounded and all the things that certainly our research at FYA said about things that might happen in 2030 . Everyone ’ s having that at the moment . And everyone ’ s saying by 2025 we ’ re going to see , because of the changing nature of work , a lot more automation .
We ’ ll see a lot more learning on the job and expectation of people to have this new skillset that we always talked about was going to be incredibly important .
The third big trend I see is this convergence in a strange way of all these really big social issues . Whether it ’ s black lives matter or climate change , young people really found their voice in COVID .
There is a mistrust in government institutions , which is really pushing young people to forge forward as the new champions and pioneers of new ways of thinking and acting , whether it ’ s what they expect in business or what they expect of government or what they expect of the social security nets .
How has the future of work has been changed by 2020 ? In my presentations for a long time I had a cover of a Time Magazine from 2009 and it had this fantastic photo of a guy wearing trousers and shoes to work and up top he had a really casual shirt on and was looking a little bit unkempt .
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