3 Reasons Why We Are Not Ready for the Life in the 21st Century (yet)

Published in

Upskilling for the Future

5 min readSep 11, 2017

‘Who here thinks that the schools we have today prepare students for life in the 21st century?” asked the founder of HundrED Saku Tuominen during his keynote on Dare to Learn to more than 300 education professionals, students and business representatives. No single hand was raised.

“We have interviewed 100 top education experts around the world, asking the same question,” he continued. “How many people do you think answered that the current education systems do prepare students for the future?” he paused. “No one!”

While the subjects as the future of learning, upskilling and reskilling are high on the agenda of most governments and many businesses, you will barely find anyone to agree that what is being done in that area is sufficient. We are not ready for the future.

We can blame the unprecedented speed of development, various disruptive economic or socio-demographic factors, but the reality is that the root of the problem lies deeper than in our inability to keep up with change. Here are 3 other challenges on our way.

Challenge N1: The solutions are shattered

We live in the world that is extremely global, with education and learning being super local. Take the example of the primary and secondary education (K-12). While there is a lot of experimentation and innovation going in that area, most of it seldom spread around the world. In many cases, what happens in one school, stays in that school. Lots of resources are invested in inventing and reinventing the wheel instead of enriching and building on each other’s ideas.

Let’s share learning innovation

One of the possible solutions to this challenge is presented by the Finnish non-profit organisation HundrED. They are committed to finding the best education innovations in the K-12 area and spreading them globally. The idea is that if you live in the Netherlands, you can find the best learning innovations in Finland, searching by the subject, by application or by the skill developed, for example. The purpose of the organisation is to find and to share the best innovations for the primary and secondary school to help them spread and scale up. Imagine HundrED spreading beyond just schools, to the higher education, adult and corporate learning. What a difference building on each other’s ideas could make for the speed and quality of learning.

Challenge N2: Unclear WHAT? & HOW?

We all tend to agree that “life long learning”, “upskilling” and “reskilling” are important for preparing for the future. It is often unclear, however, what those things practically mean to us.

One of the interesting insights I got from running lots of workshop on Upskilling for the Future with different professionals and companies is that most people have quite general ideas about preparing for the future.

If you ask them how do you prepare for the future? Which skills do you develop at the moment and how? They look puzzled. The answers at best vary from following some MOOCs occasionally to having an on the job training. What becomes clear from most conversations is that people are not sure WHAT they should learn and they have even fewer ideas of HOW they should do it.

Define and decode

I think the solution to unclear WHAT? & HOW? starts with the proper definition of the skills of the future on both macro and micro levels. What are the skills for the 21st century? For your work? For your life? For what you want to achieve?

The second step is decoding those skills to your context. Nobody would disagree that leadership, creativity, problem-solving are important skills, but what does it mean in your context? How can YOU become the leader of tomorrow? How can you improve your problem-solving abilities? How do YOU become more resilient or better in load management?

At 361degreesLAB, we use the Future Playground to uncover those insights: a specially designed game experiences aimed at contextual definition and interpretation of HOW and WHAT. We found that providing professionals with the list of skills to develop and telling them how they can do it is much less effective. They will not go for it, unless they own it.

Challenge N3: The lack of ownership

That brings us to the third challenge: the lack of ownership. Who should be responsible for preparing for the future and making lifelong learning possible? Individuals? Governments? Businesses? If all of them, then to which extent? I think learning for the future is the problem everyone has and nobody actually owns. That makes it easy to put responsibility for solving it on someone else. Shouldn’t government invest more? Shouldn’t your company prepare you better? Isn’t it an individual’s responsibility to work on his or her future?

Act as you own it

It seems like the best solution is for every party involved to act as they own it. Yes, it is YOUR problem, and YOU are responsible for solving it. I believe that one of the reasons Finland is the frontrunner in learning innovation is because Finnish government acts like they own the challenge. They invest a lot of resources in taking responsibility: by supporting research, by working on right legislation, by providing financial support for learning innovation. What a difference it makes.

I believe to properly prepare for the life in the 21st century individuals, businesses and governments should take the full ownership of the learning challenges. We should go beyond small interventions here and there, build of each other’s ideas and work on it like we really mean it.

So imagine preparing for the future is your problem: what are you doing to address it?

- — — — — — — -

>> Read more about:

>> Interested to learn more about Upskilling for the Future? Follow 361degreesLAB on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium or subscribe to our newsletter to receive relevant updates.