The Learner

How to prepare young people for the future of work and lifelong learning

“With little idea about the jobs of the future, the key responsibility of the education system is to equip young people with the skills needed to manoeuvre this ever-changing landscape.”

With the future of work and learning having been the key focus at Quest2Learn Summit 2019, Dr Anantha Duraiappah – Director of the UNESCO MGIEP – helped map the landscape of education to make sense of the opportunities that lie in lifelong learning.

Here’s a thought-provoking excerpt from his keynote speech at the Summit:

‘Leaving no one behind’ has been at the center of UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with its emphasis on equitable and inclusive education. Anchoring his keynote speech at Quest2Learn Summit 2019 around this theme, Dr Anantha Duraiappah – Director of the UNESCO MGIEP – spoke about the problems plaguing the education sector and the structural changes needed to promote equity and inclusion.

Dr Duraiappah opens with some startling facts that shed light on the level of extremism and intolerance prevalent among the youth in India and the sense of anxiety and depression common among this subset of the population today.

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How can we make women ITIs future-ready?

As a step towards bringing more women to the workforce, Quest Alliance – in partnership with JP Morgan – hosted a round table on ‘Driving Holistic Reform in the Women ITI Ecosystem in India’.

With the aim of bridging the gender gap in India’s workforce, the multi-stakeholder participation led to several important solution strategies.

Women’s participation in the workforce continues to decline across the world. The situation is particularly stark in India, some of the reasons for which are expounded here.

While the battle to fight social norms keeping women away from the workforce will be a protracted one, an urgent step towards bridging the gender gap in India’s workforce was taken in the form of a round table on ‘Driving Holistic Reform in the Women ITI Ecosystem in India’.

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What is keeping women from working in India?

Women’s labour force participation has never looked promising, but the decline in numbers in the last two decades have been alarming. One of the major reasons for this drop is the rise in the number of women in formal education, which in turn delays their entry into the job market.

But the real travesty is that the few who do enter the labour force are faced with gendered distribution of jobs, which is mostly concentrated in low productivity industries.

Women’s careers may be peaking in the world of Indian films, but the narrative in real life tells a different story. Only 27% are in the labour force – down from 35% in 2004. And this fall is even sharper when seen from the lens of women in the age group of 15-24 years. Almost half are not in education, employment or training, compared to just 8% of young men.

This is critical in the larger context of declining female labour force participation rates (FLPRs).

According to a report by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), while 2.4 million women fell off the employment map, jobs for men increased by 0.9 million in the same time period. This meant that while women were quitting jobs, more men were joining the workforce.

Why is this happening? Why are women withdrawing from the world of work?

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Preparing Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s World of Work

‘A future of skilling strategy should look beyond the technical skills required for specific job profiles, and instead, seek to cultivate a set of core skills that can help chart meaningful and sustainable careers.’

This – and more – was articulated and shared in an article originally published by FVTRS on their souvenir for National Skill Conference 2019.

What we’ve seen at the workplace in the last decade is a confluence of technological advancements — one that has negated some jobs, albeit creating new ones. This accelerated pace of innovation has provoked some into thinking deeply about the possibilities that lie ahead — an important development given that most jobs of tomorrow will demand entirely new skill sets.

This begs the question: how can one upskill oneself for an uncertain future?

Having established the fact that the future of work is largely ambiguous — compounded by an ever-changing technological landscape that will continue to redefine future opportunities — identifying skills that will help offset some of the challenges that such a transition brings with it will be a good place to start.

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Storytelling — a changemakers pathway for success?

In what I could only describe as a week of transformation, eleven members from the Capacity Building team of Quest Alliance came together for a workshop. There were moments of reflection, moments of creativity bursts, moments of sharing.

But what truly created a human bond that week was through the stories we shared — Our stories.

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How to prepare girl students to join the 21-st century workforce?

A young girl, a dreamer, scribbled her favorite quote in her diary “One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.” This was inspired by her favorite film, The Bucket List. The movie is about two people doing all the things they ever wished to do before ‘kicking the bucket’, which translates into doing everything they ever wanted to before they died. An eye-opener of sorts.

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