Lifelong learning

The world is changing. The exponential acceleration of technology requires all new skill sets. Currently, the technology gap is ever increasing, which means many students graduating and starting their careers don’t have the necessary skills to be proficient in business environments.

They will live longer and have more freedom than ever to choose their experiences, social networks, and values. The rollercoaster of scientific and technological (sci-tech) change runs faster every year, spinning us irreversibly toward a very extraordinary future. Our planet is wiring up into one vast, instantaneous, transparent and increasingly intelligent global network, which creates amazing new opportunities for business and society. Yet there are great challenges ahead as well. The world is now so interconnected that big problems in any given place are becoming everyone’s problem. This constant change will require today’s learners to change their future faster, learn new technology and networking skills more frequently, and consider the environment they live in from an entirely different perspective.

They will also be challenged to keep learning every day and thus should experience these educational duties as a right to learn. The Internet and technological growth have induced a paradigm shift, changing the way business is conducted. The specialized training and education requirements for current and future employees and the lack of access to diverse employee pools contribute to the problems companies experience in employing a strong and diverse employee base. According to recent studies, ICT skills are becoming an increasingly important entry ticket to all levels of the job market. In addition, the same studies indicate that most European workers see the gap between the expectations of and requirements for ICT skills of their future employers and their own actual skills increase year by year. The gap between demand & supply for ICT literate employees imposes costs on business in the form of lost productivity, hiring and recruiting costs and limits on growth.

This calls for a different approach than the actions taken so far, such as changing the place of ICT education in our curriculums, and boosting social inclusion through innovation and training. Also, taking into account the abundant flow of new information being generated every year (estimates claim a contemporary citizen gets presented more facts and figures in one week of information gathering than a citizen living in the 18th century would come across in a lifetime), we should consider adapting our teaching methods to this new reality. In the future, knowledge will not only be about remembering facts, but about the skills to filter out relevant information from this information flow. In the 21st century, literacy will mean being able to adapt to ever evolving technological means and use them to instantly access the necessary and relevant information on a certain topic. The question to be asked is whether the current traditional teaching methods and environments are suited to the task of teaching these skills.