Building Skills-Friendly Cities To Prepare For The Future Of Work

Skills shortages are easily brushed off as Covid collateral, but in fact, they are much more troubling signs of an education system that is not preparing people for the future of work. These issues stem from a union of education and employment that has been designed to fill specific criteria for the workforce, but the job market that young people are training for today will require a much greater emphasis on human skills to complement the repetitive tasks handled by AI and automation.

But bringing up young people with the human skills they need for a changing world of work is a mammoth task that must combine the powers of government, businesses, and dedicated organizations to reshape our education systems and integrate them with the communities they serve. I spoke with Justin van Fleet, Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Education), about the need for a holistic and skills-centered approach to education, and how change needs to start as early as possible.

Working for the future workforce

Traditionally, when industries were relatively stable and predictable, building the future workforce was simply a matter of training and retraining people in the necessary skills to fill job demand. But this method will not satisfy demand any longer, because predicting the technical skills and even job sectors that will be needed in future is becoming increasingly difficult. “Because of the way the world is evolving due to technology, most jobs will not exist [in the same way] when a young person who's five years old now graduates college,” says Justin van Fleet, Executive Director of GBC-Education, “we need to prepare young people with those skills that really are transferable… it’s about making sure that young people leave school with that curiosity and ability to keep learning, which will be a premium in years to come.” In order to solve skills crises now and in the future, education needs to change to focus more on human skills like “adaptability, flexibility, problem-solving, entrepreneurship, and more recently resilience,” says van Fleet, so that the workforce can adapt and apply themselves no matter which technical skills are required in future.

To try and catalyze this radical change GBC-Education is working with partners in education, businesses, and local communities to “bring the best ideas to the table [to address the skills crisis], and incentivize and facilitate those conversations,” says van Fleet. Big Ideas, Bright Cities is one of GBC-Education’s latest US-based grant initiatives in partnership with Dell Technologies and Deloitte. The initiative focuses on the “one in ten people aged 18-25 [who] are not in work or education [by] bringing together the business community, the education system and young people themselves” to try and create new initiatives for cities to promote and encourage skills-based education. “With this initiative, we're asking for people’s best solutions to this challenge. Come up with your most innovative idea, something you’d like to take to scale, or something completely outside the box, and let’s bring all these ideas forward and get them off the ground,” van Fleet encourages. This collaboration between local organizations, big businesses and local communities aspires to “form a standard practice [by] cross-pollinating the best ideas across cities” to tackle current and future skill crises, says van Fleet, and links the idea of skills-based education with an employment ecosystem within and outside of local communities.

Minimum standards

Because cities are “hyper-local enough that you can create policies… but at the same time influence the lives of millions of young people,” says van Fleet, it is important that participating organizations keep in mind ten minimum standards that focus on real integration with the community, which in turn will allow initiatives to grow organically as well. Starting from the grassroots of community involvement and with a strong focus on supporting young people through education and into employment, the initiative aims to create a “collaborative ecosystem for young people… encompassing education and training, public policies and public sector efforts, employers, connections and matchmaking [and] funding and investment from public, private, and other actors,” as stated on the Big Ideas, Big Cities web page.

Because of this focus on creating a network of supportive actors throughout education and employment, the initiative is heavily geared towards engaging and encouraging skills-based learning in young people in under-served communities. Thereafter, using a bottom-up approach, the aim is to build pipelines from skills-based education (including adapted curricula) into employment and encourage a supportive ecosystem within local communities. “What we're hoping comes out of this is that education systems, city governments, businesses and youth-serving organizations can really look at this as a holistic issue and tap into those shared resources,” says van Fleet, asserting that “teachers should be supported more… they should be very much at the heart of [these partnerships] so they can know what resources are available in their communities to build these skills.” Thinking of education and employment as an ecosystem not only allows human skills that are important for the future of work to be nurtured and carried into stable employment, but reframes how we think about the education system and its place or role in society. Van Fleet explains:

“In a typical classroom around the world, there is usually one teacher and one teacher’s aid. Compare that with healthcare where you have a doctor, a nurse, and a lab technician - there is a much greater ecosystem of professionals around the patient. We can build out the educational workforce in this way to not only expand the workforce but also provide more resources for teachers to draw on within their communities… These partnerships give [teachers] more time to be teaching and allow young people to learn those important skills without worrying about health, food security, or childcare while in education.”

Grassroots growth

The community-centric approach of the Big Ideas, Bright Cities initiative goes beyond simply installing apprenticeships and employment pipelines (although they feature as part of the ecosystem) to creating a much more inclusive, wide-ranging, and supportive education model. This method of reaching deep into communities, engaging young people and local employers and bringing them together with large youth-serving donor organizations and multinational businesses allows GBC-Education to not only direct resources to the current skills crisis but also help build a stronger foundation for the future workforce.

The focus on human skills rather than technical abilities is one that requires this more involved approach, and will help not only young people but every part of the ecosystem - teachers, local employers, and public policy-makers - to be more supported and more capable of adapting to a radically different future of work.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestowersclark/2021/12/07/building-skills-friendly-cities-to-prepare-for-the-future-of-work/?sh=3f3a342c1565