“But more than half of all the people I know in their 30’s, their 40’s, their 50’s, half of all the parents are not doing what they formally studied to do.”
This week Jude Foulston and Graeme Codrington discuss the future of skills at work. Challenging parents and teachers to a paradigm shift in their young learner’s educational journey apart from the traditional, narrow path to a university academic career and toward practical, usable and a range of skills relevant to every organization five years into the future.
The insightful discussion touches on artificial intelligence and algorithms potentially replacing most human menial tasks at a lower accumulated cost and quicker speed emphasizing the need for learners to develop future work skills in a combination of the following areas:
And many more internal human centered skills not easily replicated by a large computer.
IMF and Mckinsey articles in links below:
Thank you for listening and we look forward to your engagement. Please like and subscribe to join our community. If you enjoy the podcast, please would you consider leaving a review and sharing with your network.
CONNECT WITH Graeme:
Website: www.graemecodrington.com
Email: graeme@tomorrowtodayglobal.com
Join the Future Smart Parent Community
“But more than half of all the people I know in their 30’s, their 40’s, their 50’s, half of all the parents are not doing what they formally studied to do.”
This week Jude Foulston and Graeme Codrington discuss the future of skills at work. Challenging parents and teachers to a paradigm shift in their young learner’s educational journey apart from the traditional, narrow path to a university academic career and toward practical, usable and a range of skills relevant to every organization five years into the future.
The insightful discussion touches on artificial intelligence and algorithms potentially replacing most human menial tasks at a lower accumulated cost and quicker speed emphasizing the need for learners to develop future work skills in a combination of the following areas:
And many more internal human centered skills not easily replicated by a large computer.
IMF and Mckinsey articles in links below:
Thank you for listening and we look forward to your engagement. Please like and subscribe to join our community. If you enjoy the podcast, please would you consider leaving a review and sharing with your network.
CONNECT WITH Graeme:
Website: www.graemecodrington.com
Email: graeme@tomorrowtodayglobal.com
Join the Future Smart Parent Community
JF: As we get to the end of another long year. I recently asked Graeme Codington to join me for this episode to help parents and kids rethink how this year has gone, and a reminder not to focus on all that has been lost but to rather acknowledge what we've gained, the new skills we've learnt and how these will benefit us all in the years to come. We chat a lot about future skills and what jobs of the future will look like. It's a conversation that again reminded me that education is not just all about the academic results.
Graeme provides some wonderful suggestions of how we can help our kids through the remainder of the year and provides us with some practical ideas on what we can do to acknowledge just how far we've all come.
Welcome back to the Future Smart Parent podcast. Graeme, it's awesome to have you back. I thought it would be good to chat to you as we're heading towards the end of the year. Christmas decorations are out in the shops. I know that you're so keen to start playing your Christmas carols, but you have to wait a few more weeks, but at the same time as we gearing towards the end of the year, I know that a lot of parents and kids also start to feel quite a bit of anxiety.
Now as we head towards the end of the year, we have the Matrics writing the final exams and not just Matrics - we have from grades grades four and up, all stressing a little bit now with the exams. On top of that, we've had two years of Covid schooling where we've had the additional stress. So I just wanted to chat to you and to find out just your message for parents at this time of the year in 2021.
GC: It's been tough, and I suppose that we need to start by saying to parents that relax, if your children are happy, if your children are healthy, you have probably done enough to get them through. Nobody's going to look back in future years and say, oh, what happened to you in 2020? What happened to you in 2021? Everybody is going to remember that the whole world was going through a massive traumatic period. So the first thing I'd say is relax and focus on health and wellbeing and happiness with your kids.
The second thing that I would say, I'd probably say, even if we weren't in the middle of a crisis or wherever, I don't know if it's the middle of the end, who knows? But even if we weren't in a crisis, I would say to people that let's be careful of how we talk to our kids about what happened. In other words, what happened this past year and what their results are and what's about to happen. Maybe let me frame this in a slightly different way. We tend to ask kids and maybe younger kids especially - we say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And whatever the answer is that comes from them, that then begins to frame all the choices that they make. Okay, so you want to be a doctor when you grow up? Well, you have to do science and bio and math and you've got to get really good marks and you've got to focus so much on your academics and you can't be in the school play and you can't play as much sport.
And this might just be a little childhood fantasy because they just watched a Disney show yesterday, and are now feeling that they want to be a doctor, whereas maybe that isn't exactly what they want. And we framed this with our question, what do you want to be when you grow up? I think it's a dangerous question because it frames the conversation about who they are, what they do next, what choices they make at age 10, 12 or 14. And it frames those conversations in ways that I think become very limited.
I think we've got to change how we talk about what's just happened and how we talk about what's going to happen next so we can get into a little bit more detail. But that's kind of where I'd start with parents.
JF: It's tough for us as parents to do that because we keep on falling back to what we know and how it was for us, how important the grades were when we matriculated to get into University and so on. So I suppose a big mindset change for us and understanding the why why can we relax on this a little bit?
GC: So I think you're right. It is a mindset shift, and I think that the key starting point if you want to know how do I change my mindset about this, then, is to kind of jump into the future and look backwards. So what I mean by that is what options are your children going to have four jobs? So if we thinking, Well, what do you want to be when you grow up? We've got to ask what jobs are available and jobs as we know them, are changing now more than they ever have before.
And I think there's three major forces that are driving these changes. The first is obvious. I think it's the fourth industrial revolution or digital, if you prefer that as a label, this is everything from robotic automation to artificial intelligence, machine learning to cloud and mobility. All that stuff is changing almost every job on the planet, and it's creating a whole lot of new jobs, and it's going to destroy a few in the process. The second major force is the blurring of lines between different industries and functions.
So if we take somebody saying, I'd like to be a doctor when I grow up, well, what type of doctor? There's no such thing as a doctor. There are doctors, medical professionals who work in different sectors of society. You can be in the wellness industry. You can be a dietitian, you can overlap with a retail company that's selling food, and you can become a nutritionist to the scientist. But with medical training in the background, you will then be able to link in with data analytics. I know a lot of people who wanted to go into the medical side of things and have been captured by the analytics part of medicine, where we get real time information from the smart watches that people are wearing, and we start to predict whether they might get sick or not.
So, you know, there's these blurring of these lines between industries and functions. And the third big issue is that geography is also pretty much dead. And we've seen this in the last two years of lockdown is that if you don't have to be in the physical space of your work, then you can work anywhere. And we are not limited by what country we grew up in or what city we're living in. So all of these just mean that our children have way more options than they've ever had before.
And this is not just impacting the top level professionals. I sort of jumped to doctor as an example, but think of, I don't know, take any other example. A teacher, for example. Right now we've got schools all over the world who are realising the power and the potential of online teaching. What happens if you're a teacher who's really good at putting stuff out on video and of engaging with people online? Well, why couldn't you be a staff member at any school in the world? Why would you be restricted to just being in the city that you currently live in?
And why should you also be restricted to only teaching the curriculum in the city, in the country that you live in, pick a topic, put content out on that topic, get students to sign up for it. These are those massive, open online courses that are available, and you don't have to be linked to a particular organisation. If you've got great content to teach and you know how to put it online, you can develop a completely alternative approach, by the way, if you are getting your head around what I'm saying about that, I've also just described one of the fastest growing jobs.
You might not want to call it a job, but it is a way that some people are making money. I'm talking about an online social media influencer, of course. So maybe you don't want your kids to grow up to be that. But it is something that can be done. It's about people who are good at communicating, good at influencing other people. And hey, why not? There are weird jobs becoming available, and yeah, I think another example, I mean, a plumber might be a really good example here.
I had a plumber meeting to come around to our house to have a look at our gutter. We've got a double story house. Why didn't he just put a drone up in the air to get this massive long, ten metre long ladder, climb up on the roof, put his life in danger and at risk. What would have easily worked would be to put a drone up flight around Cheque out our gutters. There might be even little robotics that he could be using to push them through the pipes.
And, of course, the best plumbers, the best electricians are all very much ahead of the game. That's why you can't get them on a day to day basis because they're so busy, so busy working because we still need all of these professions, but we need them to be future focused, blurring the lines between the traditional way they used to do it and integrating technology into their work. So for me, I think we've got to be very careful to think that there's only a sort of finite list Jude of professions that our kids could go for lawyer, doctor, engineer, account and actually vet, architect, teacher, primary electrician
We've got to be thinking beyond those categories, realising that those categories have blurred and we've got to help them to prepare instead for a much more fluid future of work. And I think if we start with that mindset, we'll stop asking, what do you want to be when you grow up? And we'll start asking, but not even asking, almost telling our kids this is what you have to become. In other words, these are the skill sets you need rather than the careers you need to be focusing on.
JF: Graeme to go back to the original question about parents panicking and kids panicking with the anxiety of the now - just hearing what you're saying, I think what I can add to that is as parents, we certainly need to, as we say, change our mindset. But it's not just about the mindset about the jobs that our kids are going to get. It's also about the journey that they take to get there. So listening to you. I was still going. “Yes, but what about them? A trick because they need good results to get into University, to become a doctor and then to be able to do the various types of doctors.” But as you were talking, I'm thinking it's more about trusting a new process. It's not just about finishing school, getting into University because of your good marks and then becoming a doctor. There are a variety of ways that our kids can do what they want to do without just the good grades. Does that make sense? Am I right or wrong?
GC: Yes, it absolutely does. I attended an end of year function at the school that my girls used to go to and I'm on the board at the school St Mary's Girl School in Joburg, and they had an ex student of theirs coming to give the graduation address. And she, I think, graduated high school sometime in the early 1990s and she didn't really know what she wanted to do. Her parents basically forced her to go to University. So she did a sort of general first and second year.
I think she actually finished up sort of General BA degree. And then she realised she wanted to become a doctor. Only then. She's obviously a clever woman, but she didn't leave school saying, I want to become a doctor. She had done so well in this undergraduate that she then applied to switch over to a Bachelor of science, and then she has specialised in emergency care and pulmonology. And right now and the reason they got her to talk is that she is head of the ICU unit at the University in Pretoria, and she was featured on a sShowmax documentary around our response to Covid.
It's called From Zero to Zero. And if you've seen that, she's the head of the ICU Ward dealing with Covid. This is a person who went through her entire teenage years not knowing she wanted to be a doctor. But what she did was she opened doors. She created opportunities for herself to make choices later. Jude, I can just throw this at the parents who are listening. Half of your friends are not doing what they studied for. At least I don't think there's anybody in my close friendship circle who I know that's incorrect.
My very best friend at school always knew he wanted to be an accountant and he still is one. But more than half of all of the people I know in their 30s, their 40s and their 50s, half of all the parents are not doing what they formerly studied to do. So why are we thinking our kids are going to be going to be better for our kids than that. It isn't even fewer of our children are going to be doing what they study for. So you're right.
We've got to change our mindset about the journey and trust a new process and a new path.
JF: Yeah. And it just keeps going back to that. We've got this picture in our mind. Well, I've got this picture in my mind that when you're 24, you need to have your degree and you then need to kick off into your career. And there's nothing stopping our kids from getting a degree at 30 or 40 or 50.
It's difficult as parents because we want our kids to do what we did, I suppose, because that's what we know.
GC: Yes. And instead of doing that, if we go back to my picture of reverse engineering our thoughts from the future, if I'm right that there are going to be a lot of jobs that we don't know anything about now that are opening up some of those jobs we can imagine because they combinations of different jobs that exist at the moment. And if I'm right that there are a lot of jobs that the machines are going to be able to do, whether that's the robots doing some of the physical work or whether it's the algorithms doing some of the thinking work for us.
If all of that's true, and I believe that it is, then what should we be doing instead with our kids instead of saying, what do you want to be when you grow up? We need to be asking them what skills do you need to develop so that you can become whoever you want to be? And so it's less a question of narrowing their thoughts down to which job are you choosing and rather opening up their thoughts to what skills will give you the most options. And as I said earlier, I don't think we need to ask them about that, because I think we know what those skill sets are.
Every year. The IMF and a number of other places McKinsey do this annually. They put out a list of the skills for the future, and we can put a link into the show notes here, or you can just do a Google search and find the latest version. But every year the same set of skills tends to emerge. It's complex, adaptive thinking, entrepreneurial mindset, problem solving, curiosity, emotional intelligence, diversity, intelligence, communication and being tech savvy. Obviously, that's always on the list. The more comfortable you are with technology and computers and software and programming and robots, the better you're going to be in this digital world.
So what we need to be doing is we need to be ourselves as parents and then in conversation and in partnership with our children, we need to be taking those lists and thinking. Let's pick one entrepreneurial mindset, right. We do a lot of work with professionals, lawyers, doctors, engineers. And one of the things that most of those professions are missing is this entrepreneurial mindset. Their picture was I become a lawyer. I work my way up through the ranks. When I'm a senior lawyer and I'm a partner at a law firm, I'm going to sit in the corner office and clients are going to walk through my door and pay me money to do my job.
And almost every single lawyer, engineer, accountant, actor, architect that I know is saying, Why did nobody teach me how to run a business? Why did nobody teach me how to sell? Why did nobody teach me about marketing and communications? Why did nobody teach me the power of social media in order to raise my own brand and my own profile? So when I say entrepreneurial mindset, I'm talking about everything that an entrepreneur has to do to get their business noticed. And there is no career in the future that I can imagine that will not be improved by you bringing a set of entrepreneurial skills to that career, not a single one from my doctor to my teacher, from my plumber to whoever it is you can think of
If you bring that entrepreneurial skill set, you're going to be better at your job than if you don't. So how do we then, as parents, we take that big bubble of skills called entrepreneurial mindset. And how do we teach our children these skills? How do we encourage our children to seek out these skills? And how do we help them to fall in love with the skills all at the same time? Now, this is going to be different for different parents, different ages of children, different personality profiles.
But if you've got a ten year old at home and it's coming up to the holidays, why don't you get them to do a survey of the neighbourhood to find out if there are any needs in the neighbourhood, things that people would pay a ten year old to do. And then they get out and they do them. It might be that they could create little gifts for Christmas, go to the shop, buy some jars, spray painting with lovely Christmas colours, fill them with chocolates and sell them for a 20% margin over their costs.
What a wonderful fun thing to do at the start of the holidays. You, as a parent, help them make sure they've got a little bit of an easy marketplace to sell these things. And they're learning all sorts of things. They're learning about costs. They're learning about margins. They're learning about sales techniques. They're learning well, they're learning to be an entrepreneur. Shall I give you that list again, Jude, it's complex, adaptive thinking. Entrepreneurial mindset, problem solving, curiosity, emotional intelligence, diversity, intelligence, communication and being tech savvy. Now that's my list.
Go and look for McKinsey future of work skills. Go and look for the IMF. They come up with a good one every year. Pick from the list. You're not going to go wrong. If you do something, anything to just try and develop these skills in your kids that's I think our role as parents and teachers. If we do that, we do that tomorrow and we do that next week and we do that next month and we do that next year. We will have done a lot to prepare our kids for the future of work.
JF: And I think to go back to the parents for now. I think we've also got to look back at the last two years and just acknowledge the skills that our kids have learnt that they wouldn't have learnt if it wasn't a double pandemic. They have learnt resilience. They have learned the tech skills.
With the amount of tech time that they've had, it's a good thing they've learned so much tech skills. They've learned empathy. They've learned so many skills. So yes, maybe the schoolwork isn't what you as a parent. They learned skills that are a lot more valuable for the future.
GC: Jude, I couldn't agree with you more, and I think that beautifully wraps up our conversation by answering your first question. What do parents need to do now as we head to the end of a second disrupted year with Covert? Sure, come alongside your kids if they're disappointed with their academic results and they're disappointed with how the school year played out, commiserate with them, but then help them to see what they have learnt, help them to see what they have become. Praise them for their resilience, praise them for their tenacity, give them marks for their empathy and their emotional intelligence.
Point out the tech skills that they've learnt. In other words, give them an updated report card at the end of the year that doesn't focus on the marks and the subjects but focuses on their character and who they are as people. And then you're not rescuing this year. This year doesn't have to be rescued. This year is what it's been and your children have been shaped and formed by it. Just like you have. We don't have to write it off as if it was something. If we could do it again, we do it differently.
Yes, but that's true of every day and every year of your life. So look back and work out what you have learnt, what went right and who you've become because of it. You won't regret doing that. And your kids will be set up for success in whatever they do next.
Totally. And as parents, just acknowledge how far we've all come as well. It's been a tough couple of years of parenting and I think we don't give ourselves enough credit as well. So yeah, I think that pretty much wraps up this episode. So thank you, Graeme. I hope that we've given some parents lots of food for thought and some stuff to move forward with in the future.
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