INTERVIEW
The concept of a 100-year life, or a 150-year life, suddenly makes our systems look deeply inadequate
Is preparing for the future about taking courses or having an agile mindset? Having an agile mindset is key to success in the future. Sometimes, it’s going to mean that we need to broaden our human skills. There are a lot of prognostications out there that we will have to bring our human skills to bear, and we will have to leverage this competitive advantage that we have, as humans, over the artificial intelligence (AI), computers, or robots whose work we are coordinating and complementing. It’s not just that we can be generalists, it’s sometimes going to mean understanding enough about AI to make the right sorts of intervention,s or understanding data science sufficiently to be able to acquire that next job. It’s both the human skills such as communication, collaboration, teamwork, systems thinking, agility, and resilience plus having enough tech skills to be dangerous. How has Covid-19 impacted the need for long-life learning? It’s funny, because almost up until the final draft of my book, Covid had not occurred. What was interesting was this laser focus in the book on people who were not thriving in the labour market. I think, when we tend to focus on the future of work, it’s helpful to move away from the statistics; I was really focused on the 41 million people in the US who were already being left behind by the present of work, people who maybe only had a high-school degree and who were not earning a living wage through their work.
ccording to the Institute for the Future, as many as 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t yet been invented, so how do we prepare for these jobs when we don’t even know what they are? Michelle R Weise, author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for jobs that don’t even exist yet , is on a mission to change the future of education from being divided and siloed, into an ecosystem which is user friendly for job seekers. Ambition spoke to Weise to investigate how to build a workforce of people who can thrive in these future jobs.
When I had to revise my book because of the pandemic, it really brought front and centre all the deep inequity and the lack of opportunity that existed. The pandemic revealed how inordinately stuck our systems were. We couldn’t help large numbers of people move out of their jobs in the retail and hospitality industries when they were completely decimated and shift them into jobs which were open and in demand. There is an opportunity to take advantage of this unique moment that brought the future to us and made it clear how much work we need to do by pulling down some of the barriers that exist for millions of people. Part of that is to move towards a skills-based hiring environment that allows people to prove they can do the job, instead of relying on blunt proxies for talent such as degrees or credentials. Do you feel MBA programmes are equipping people for a long-life learning career? The question we need to keep front and centre is ‘how do we build and cultivate the best problem solvers for the future?’. That must be something we keep as a shared agenda when we break down the artificial silos of how we create problems to solve for our learners, because whatever we pursue – whether it’s an MBA or a degree in biology or anthropology – no problems exist in a vacuum. The crossing of silos and boundaries exists in any problem we encounter in our work today. If you look at the kinds of opportunity that exist today, not only do we need
Why did you decide to write this book?
One of the impulses for writing the book, was to say: ‘Ok, this concept of lifelong learning is not new – in fact it’s decades old – but it has been very slow to catch fire’. The most helpful model was hearing lots of different experts on ageing and longevity, as well as futurists, talk about a longer life and potentially a longer working life. We are seeing people stay in the labour market for longer. The concept of a 100-year life, or a 150-year life, suddenly makes our systems look deeply inadequate. If we get a college degree, it seems unlikely that two or four extra years of learning is really going to last us a 60- or 80-year work life. That is where the concept began. Instead of being paralysed by inertia about lifelong learning, we flip this model on its head and think about long-life learning: what is this going to mean and how is it going to change our behaviour?
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