Skilled for life

SPONSORED BY Future­Learn

Dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion has swept through near­ly every sec­tor caus­ing seis­mic change not just to busi­ness process­es and cus­tomer expec­ta­tions, but also the skills required by employ­ers to adapt suc­cess­ful­ly. The speed at which tech­nol­o­gy has advanced, how­ev­er, has cre­at­ed a short­age of suit­ably skilled tal­ent, which Accen­ture pre­dicts could cost the UK econ­o­my as much as £141 bil­lion of GDP growth by 2028.

That fig­ure was cal­cu­lat­ed before the coro­n­avirus cri­sis, but the pan­dem­ic has only accel­er­at­ed the need to trans­form and there­fore exac­er­bat­ed the dig­i­tal skills gap. Peo­ple who hadn’t already embraced online shop­ping or bank­ing apps have had lit­tle choice and even the likes of GP con­sul­ta­tions have had to adopt online alter­na­tives. Busi­ness­es, mean­while, have been forced to piv­ot to dig­i­tal mod­els to sur­vive.

“We’ve seen this huge accel­er­a­tion towards dig­i­tal appli­ca­tions, and the skills sup­port­ing their use and deliv­ery, both in terms of work and dai­ly life,” says Justin Cooke, chief con­tent and part­ner­ships offi­cer at Future­Learn, a pio­neer of social learn­ing and a dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion plat­form that con­nects peo­ple with the world’s best free online cours­es.

“Add the wider impacts of COVID-19, includ­ing the rise of unem­ploy­ment, and the sig­nif­i­cant dig­i­tal skills short­age that already exist­ed is sure to widen even more.

“That’s the sup­ply side. On the demand side, every organ­i­sa­tion in the world has been through the effects of COVID and knows that adapt­ing to the new nor­mal requires new skills and a basic sense of how to con­tin­ue busi­ness as usu­al in a dis­trib­uted, remote-work­ing envi­ron­ment. Many com­pa­nies have had to adjust to being ful­ly online, rapid­ly devel­op­ing skills they nev­er had before­hand to make that hap­pen, pure­ly out of need.”

A huge wave of upskilling and reskilling, par­tic­u­lar­ly in high-demand areas like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, data sci­ence and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, is required to address the skills gap before the wounds to the UK’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and over­all econ­o­my cut too deep.

Accord­ing to the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, more than 1 bil­lion jobs, over a third of all jobs glob­al­ly, are like­ly to be trans­formed in some way by tech­nol­o­gy in the next decade. This means dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion is not only dri­ving the cre­ation of new jobs, but new skills for exist­ing jobs.

To achieve the nec­es­sary upskilling and reskilling, gov­ern­ment, indus­try and acad­e­mia must active­ly work togeth­er to embrace edtech solu­tions and trans­form learn­ing expe­ri­ences across the coun­try, with a strong empha­sis on life­long learn­ing.

The tra­di­tion­al notion of an “edu­ca­tion” – nurs­ery, pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary, pos­si­bly fol­lowed by high­er edu­ca­tion or an appren­tice­ship, then stop­ping – is increas­ing­ly archa­ic in a dig­i­tal age where the pace of inno­va­tion and change con­tin­ues to accel­er­ate.

“Learn­ing is just a com­plete mis­nomer now,” says Cooke. “There is an urgent need to reskill or upskill hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple around the world, whether that’s due to eco­nom­ic change or indus­tri­al automa­tion, or sim­ply to get them out of pover­ty, and that need will con­tin­ue as tech­nol­o­gy evolves even faster.

Edu­ca­tion is ripe for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and right now edtech is hav­ing its Spo­ti­fy moment

“Going into COVID we saw the demand for adult edu­ca­tion was ris­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly, with 14 mil­lion new stu­dents expect­ed every year from now until 2030, which would require an addi­tion­al 13 new uni­ver­si­ties every week. That’s just not going to hap­pen. Ulti­mate­ly, the future is dig­i­tal.

“We real­ly see this need for learn­ing to be acces­si­ble, which means it must be flex­i­ble. It needs to fit into our lives, deliv­ered through what­ev­er device we want to use, when­ev­er we want it, bite sized to fit around our life or work style. And it needs to be real­ly focused on career and pro­gres­sion. That skills ele­ment should be front and cen­tre.”

Employ­ees and job­seek­ers alike require an essen­tial dig­i­tal toolk­it to adapt and devel­op their skills suc­cess­ful­ly. Future­Learn, which was found­ed by the Open Uni­ver­si­ty in 2012, has been work­ing with gov­ern­ment and indus­try to build a dig­i­tal skills stack to ful­fil this need. Its cours­es, sup­port­ed by the Insti­tute of Cod­ing, were includ­ed in a skills toolk­it of online resources launched by the Depart­ment for Edu­ca­tion in response to the pan­dem­ic.

Work­ing with Accen­ture, the organ­i­sa­tion has also helped pre­pare more than 400,000 young peo­ple for the job mar­ket with dig­i­tal train­ing rang­ing from under­stand­ing what arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence means in the work­place, to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and web ana­lyt­ics.

Future­Learn is par­tic­u­lar­ly keen to chal­lenge the assump­tion that all young peo­ple are nat­u­ral­ly ingrained with the dig­i­tal skills that busi­ness­es want and need. Some­body who uses social media exten­sive­ly doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know how to apply those skills in the work­place. Since the start of the lock­down in March, Future­Learn has seen traf­fic to its plat­form increase three­fold, with the major­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als who are inter­act­ing with its online resources, many of which are free, already in employ­ment.

“Edu­ca­tion is ripe for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and right now edtech is hav­ing its Spo­ti­fy moment,” says Cooke. “Edu­ca­tion has reached a tip­ping point, a moment of great dis­ag­gre­ga­tion. Sup­port­ed by part­ner­ships with gov­ern­ment and indus­try, dig­i­tal plat­forms can assist stu­dents and employ­ees in learn­ing new skills, and help employ­ers urgent­ly tack­le their dig­i­tal skills short­ages.

“Future­Learn is lead­ing the charge, break­ing down tra­di­tion­al mod­els of edu­ca­tion into much more flex­i­ble and tar­get­ed offers and prod­ucts to learn­ers, which can be deliv­ered not just at a nation­al but a glob­al scale.

“As the leader in social learn­ing, we’ve built this incred­i­ble ped­a­gogy that fits the way peo­ple want to learn. The way they con­sume media, the same prin­ci­ples apply to learn­ing and we com­bine that with real­ly high-qual­i­ty con­tent. We have more than 25 per cent of the world’s top uni­ver­si­ties as part­ners and some of the biggest brands in the world work­ing with us to cre­ate this real­ly engag­ing edu­ca­tion.

“We are one of the fastest-grow­ing, most excit­ing edtech star­tups in Europe, and we’re work­ing with gov­ern­ments around the world, as well as busi­ness­es, uni­ver­si­ties and even job seek­ers, to ensure tech is inte­grat­ed in the way they approach teach­ing and upskilling.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it futurelearn.com