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It was basically about saying goodbye to your old boss , saying goodbye to the career ladder . Say goodbye to working from one place and having one career for the rest of your life . And it was just a beautiful encapsulation of what has played out in the last 10 years , but has definitely been accelerated .
I don ’ t need this massive commute time . I can use it more effectively mixed with the largest downloads and the largest searches ever on YouTube and Google for how I can learn . So it is quite remarkable how it ’ s not quite so easy just to run online and do your business via Zoom .
We spend a lot of time in teams and building teamwork and collaboration offline in the work environment . And all of that has been changed and people have had to pivot and iterate to try and see if they can keep working and doing the work they ’ re doing .
We always said that by 2030 you ’ d be spending 30 per cent of your time learning on the job . The relevance of the degree would decrease as new technologies came in . And so we were looking at a really different environment where employers had to commit and invest in employees . Now people are saying that ’ s a 2025 thing , not a 2030 thing , and we have this casualised insecure workplace and labour market .
Businesses are more risk averse than ever about taking on full-time staff . So there is this idea of what I describe as a career portfolio . How will you manage a portfolio where you ’ re doing some work for somebody else , some work for yourself , some work with some other people ?
What are you seeing in our education systems to respond to and help people catch up with that accelerated agenda of their own circumstances and views for the world of work ? I think we ’ re in a bind because educators , at whatever level , have had to be really fast and nimble and agile in adapting . And I think it would be wrong to say that every educator in the world is extremely adaptive and agile . It sounds like they should be , but you and I both know that that ’ s not actually the case .
You could say that out of every profession the most institutionalised one is probably educators , because often educators go to school , go to more schools , study to go and be an educator and then go back to school . And then they may also go to higher education or further education , but it ’ s a pretty linear path .
And so we ’ re asking people to really think on their feet and to collaborate and do things that are not necessarily what we ’ ve built into the system , yet those educators have already been playing with technology or understanding their absolutely critical changing role , which is more than an educator but to be a broker , a facilitator , a disseminator , a curator , a trainer , a coach .
So we ’ re asking the profession to really change in a way that ’ s accelerated , we ’ re asking of the system and the school ecosystem a lot in terms of the : have you got the tools ? Have you got the relationships with the parents and the students ? What about the social , emotional wellbeing of students and families in this crisis ? Suddenly now our educators are frontline workers .
I think we ’ ve done a lot , but I think if we ’ d been a bit more 21st century fit , we would have done more , and we would be doing more . But we ’ ve had to do the things to be prepared and ready and to keep going . And we haven ’ t got much slack .
If I had been the education minister of Australia or in any single state or territory in COVID I would have said ‘ everyone , all bets are off . The only thing you have to do in 2020 is develop , design and deliver a project on 2020 : what you ’ ve seen , heard , experienced , learnt . We will find a way to assess , measure , articulate , help you work out how to articulate what you ’ ve learned , and we ’ ll make that your assessment for 2020 and there ’ ll be touchpoints .’ So your teacher doesn ’ t have to run around and work out how to do courses online every single week .
Your teachers would genuinely become the curators , coaches , facilitators that they are brilliant at being . And at the end we ’ ll put all those projects in a time capsule for Australia for a hundred years ’ time , on the stories and the projects of young people that they produced in 2020 about without doubt the most disruptive year in all our lifetimes .
Do you think the changes we ’ re seeing mean that the competitive environment for universities will see those that are most 21st Century fit being the best prepared for the future ? The university that actually joins up design engineering , communications and social innovation , that ’ s the university that ’ s going to have a really remarkable time in the
We actually do have the tools , the capability , the resources , and the means to deal with every challenge .
future . And then reach out to business to help solve real problems and ensure that every single young person , while they ’ re going through university , is actually having a genuine touchpoint .
I think we should really change the relationships between TAFE and universities and senior secondary . I would love to see an entirely new landscape imagined that ’ s actually genuinely student-centred , not institution and employer-centred ; but really look at something different that has much more porous boundaries . The precedents are there now in Germany and Denmark and other places .
It ’ s a time , potentially , for universities that really succeed in reaching out to young people and preparing them for the future of work to differentiate and change their strategies at this point in time . Would you agree ? Yes , I think so . And again , let ’ s not pretend that there weren ’ t people there already moving in this direction . What are the distinctive capabilities of some universities or distinctive areas of expertise , which would make somebody want to go there and specifically study that , or what ’ s the global network that a university is connected with ? I think there ’ s still a higher desire for all of that , but I think the disconnect is one of genuine connectivity with the current world and environment .
I think watching science rise and get its day in the sun has been really powerful . It was in the crisis when we could genuinely see the need for the expertise of the health worker , the scientists , the educator .
It ’ s really beholden on us to understand something that ’ s very powerful , I think . We actually do have the tools , the capability , the resources , and the means to deal with every challenge that we ’ re facing . We ’ re just not prioritising and building the collaborative frameworks and models and putting the resources and political will , all those things coming together to ensure that we are genuinely stepping into the challenges now . ■
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