When I was at school, and it is not all that long ago, the careers advisers could look at our academic and other strengths as well as our preferences and make a pretty good stab at the sort of careers for which I would be most suited – chemist, bank manager, bus driver, dustbin men etc. And indeed for most of my generation that is what happened. I was a keen little amateur chemist, with a chemistry set that would probably get me into trouble with the anti-terrorist squad these days, and I went on to be an analytical chemist before extending my scientific education into sewage science and other aspects of environmental science and regulation. It was only towards the latter part of my career that I started to take a serious interest in organisational change and personal development, the fields in which I operate nowadays.

It would not have crossed my careers adviser’s mind that I might want to be a online games designer or a developer of operating systems for mobile telephones (which did not exist when I was at school) or even an engineer fitting satellite receiving dishes to individual domestic properties to allow them to receive the several hundred television channels available these days. None of these jobs even existed when I was at school. This is the dilemma that so many of today’s schoolchildren face.
It has been suggested that the pace of change in technology and society if such that most of the children starting school today need to be prepared to do jobs that do not even exist and cannot currently be envisaged. So with what skills do we equip those schoolchildren? Yes, they will need to be literate and numerate and the ability to speak Chinese or Spanish or one of the Indian dialects is likely to prove more helpful than speaking French or German. However all of this is just the fundamental basis upon which more specialist knowledge is likely to need to rest. So what specialist knowledge? How can we know if the jobs, and even industries, which will employ today’s schoolchildren have yet to be invented?

Well it seems to me that there are two core skills that will be needed. Firstly the ability to work constructively with others – fields of knowledge are getting ever smaller, we know more and more about less and less, and effective work in the future will require comprehensive collaboration amongst different people with different knowledge bases. Secondly, and arguably the most important attribute of all, if the ability to learn. The HR pundits have been talking for some years now about lifelong learning and the more forward of my colleagues have recognised that they need to keep their skill base topped up. In my lifetime, I have had three fundamentally different careers each of which necessitated learning substantial new knowledge and skills; in the lifetimes of children at school today they might expect a fundamental career change every 10 years or so. I vividly remember introducing a computer-based customer complaints and operations management system which required many of our frontline staff to operate keyboards for the first time in their lives. Today’s generation grow up with keyboards and Xbox controllers almost as appendages to their hands. But what will they need to learn to use so that they can do the job they will be fulfilling in 20 years time?

It has become increasingly clear that the one sustainable Advantage that education can give our children, and we can give ourselves as adults, is the ability to learn quickly and effectively. This does not just happen. We can no longer ‘finish our education’ after university and today’s kids can no longer simply fill their head with facts. I was never explicitly taught how to acquire knowledge or a skill, let’s make sure that today’s pupils are being equipped for the unknown world into which they will be ejected all too soon.