The following is an excerpt from Flash Foresight by Daniel Burrus.
(To read an interview with Daniel Burrus, click here.)
Not only do we need a vision for education, we also need to extend that beyond the schoolyard and into the workplace.
In the past, job security meant you worked for thirty years for the same company. Today you can’t even count on being able to work in the same industry for thirty years. In the face of job upheavals and dislocations, American workers are asking, “How do we get job security back?” But it’s not coming back, no more so than the vacuum tubes in our radios. The new value is not in job security, but in job adaptability. To thrive in the future world, employees need to have the ability to adapt to new and different jobs.
Our present school curricula are oriented by a rearview-mirror approach. When we baby boomers were in high school, our guidance counselors would show us a list of potential careers and say, “Have your pick.” Today that approach is no longer possible, because the hottest jobs of 2020 haven’t been invented or even conceived of yet. We need to be preparing our kids differently: we need to be preparing them for a rapidly changing world—and the same is true of our workforce.
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That may be true. Fortunately, we aren’t dogs.
In the past, you could graduate from school, learn a trade or a skill, and milk it for the rest of your life. The era we live in today could not represent a greater contrast. It used to be that if you had an advanced degree, you were guaranteed gainful employment for life. Today having a PhD simply means that you used to know a lot. Today it no longer works to get our education up front in one big chunk: we need to expect our education to continue throughout our lives. Singapore’s national educational policy talks about “lifelong learning” and declares that “the capacity to continually learn, both for professional development and for personal enrichment, will determine our collective tolerance for change.” We would be smart to use Singapore’s vision as a starting point and go beyond it. The human mind is infinitely upgradable by its owner.
In the past, what we needed to survive, thrive, and excel was a well-trained workforce. Not any more. Today a well-trained workforce produces only pain and protectionism. What we need is a workforce capable of being reeducated again and again.
Our unions are still functioning within the parameters of the old economy’s scarcity model: their goal is to protect and defend the job, using the old definitions of retirement and security. But “employment for life” is no longer relevant: today we need to develop employability for life. A twenty-first-century labor union’s job is not to make sure you are employed—it’s to make sure you are employable.
The twenty-first-century union needs to focus not on training, but on education. The difference is that you train someone to do a specific task or skill, while you educate them to understand why they’re doing that task and what the principles are behind it. Training prepares you to accomplish something in the present. Education, if it’s well designed, prepares you to adapt to change and accomplish things both now and in the future.
Not long ago, a CEO of a large company told me he was reluctant to spend the money to upgrade his people’s skills. “What if I do,” he said, “and then they leave?”
“I see your point,” I responded. “But what if you don’t—and they stay?”
Learn to Fail Faster
Part of living successfully in the new future is embracing a new relationship with one of our most valuable and underappreciated resources: our failures.
