Upskilling in the 21st Century Online education also has the benefit of delivering high-quality lectures by the brightest minds of our world, imagine being able to learn from the best educators, online from the comfort of your home or workplace
By Prateek Singh •
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Two things will shape upskilling in the 21st century.
Millennials taking over the workplace.
Faster adoption of new technology.
A young population and faster adoption of new technology mean employees need to upskill quickly. Jobs which are the highest paying today didn't even exist 7-10 years ago. The speed at which industry is changing means employees who do not upskill quickly will see stagnation in their careers. This is the biggest threat to the new generation.
Millennials Taking Over the Workplace.
A millennial is anyone between the ages of 23 and 38 (in 2019). India has the most number of millennials in the world, at a staggering 400 million. This generation generally believes in a holacratic organisation structure, perhaps a rebellion of our imperial past. Holacratic organisations have self-organising teams rather than vested in a managerial hierarchy. Every team member's opinion counts and shapes the work. Since each worker has a say in the organisation, the products companies produce will innovate more than the generation before us. By 2022 the largest consumers and hired workforce will be from the millennial category. We will be making decisions in the workplace and consuming those products too.
The speed of innovation will steepen and that means employees will need to upskill to keep up.
Faster Adoption of New Technology.
Jobs and products will change quicker than before. Can you believe that the Appstore was started only 10 years ago, Android was introduced around the same time too. The drone market will be worth ~$25 Billion in 2021 and it didn't even exist for retail use 5 years ago (2013 Amazon announcement). Magic leap's light field technology requires engineers who don't exist today. The people who excel in that job will be rewarded handsomely. A traditional education institution cannot keep up with the pace of technological advancement. Only an online university can push out content quickly and reach millions of students.
Upskilling in 2020.
How do you upskill 400 million people where job markets change every 10 years? The internet. Online education will take over traditional learning in classrooms in the decade ahead. The largest schools in the world will be online and not a state-owned university.
In the next decade, certifications will be replaced by skill reports and projects students have worked on. Degrees will become obsolete.
To achieve this we need fresh content posted often on topics you can't learn in a traditional education setting, built for the masses. Imagine video content on farming, drone technology, 3d modelling for AR taught in Hindi. The learning content will go way beyond just corporate India's need for Microsoft Excel, management skills or leadership lessons. Online education also has the benefit of delivering high-quality lectures by the brightest minds of our world. Imagine being able to learn from the best educators, online from the comfort of your home or workplace.
Test-taking will also evolve, most exams take place online now. We can measure how the response time of a question, the accuracy, based on the students level the system can make the assessment more difficult or easier. Based on a users performance we can recommend content to help him shorten that learning curve.
People are working towards a better online education system. We don't know what the future of jobs will be, but in the next 10 years, education in the workplace will change completely.
