Gone are the days when getting into a top-tier college and graduating with a fancy degree was sufficient to succeed in life. For future jobs, this career mindset needs to change.

The rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has turned the old linear paradigm of education-employment-career on its head. It raises concerns about our educational institutions’ ability to prepare students for professions that don’t yet exist. Are we preparing our students to work as a designer of flying cars or as a machine risk officer? Do we have the right resources?

The answer is negative.

Students these days are facing numerous challenges when preparing for their future career prospects. So, let’s take a look at what these challenges are and how you as an educational institution should proceed to prepare students for future jobs. Because almost 67% of primary school children will be working for jobs that don’t yet exist.

Common Challenges That Students Face When Preparing for Jobs

• The rapid pace of technology change
• Fewer study models and limited resources
• Stringent employee selection procedures

Since you can’t predict any student’s future career choice, how will you help them overcome their challenges? It’s time you started inculcating in them future-proof job skills that they can apply in any industry to rock their jobs. Listed below are some of the most important skills today’s students need to succeed.

Important Skills Students Need to Thrive in Future Jobs
Problem-Solving
The days of feeding material into a machine and waiting for an outcome are over. Today, each one of us needs to be able to think independently and solve more complicated problems. For students, developing problem-solving skills is much easier than most of their experienced counterparts. All they need is the right context for coming up with ideas or making decisions. 

Offering project-based learning is one of the best ways to make them work individually as well as together in a team. It requires them to come up with an essential issue that does not have an easily found or specified answer, promoting various skills in them such as creativity, brainstorming, entrepreneurial skills, and critical thinking. 

More real-world experiences encourage students to analyze community needs and create strategies that help make improvements that not only benefit their peers but also everyone else in the community. 

Through working on projects as part of a group to plan events, start a business, establish websites, and maintain social media accounts, students learn more about their areas of interest and develop social-emotional learning (SEL) skills.
Collaboration
In a COVID-19 struck world, collaboration has become more important than ever. Students need to know how to work together with each other and communicate effectively, especially when working online. Digital tools are helpful in connecting people across the world with each other. Therefore, train students to use these tools and assign them tasks that make them interact with their peers online, regardless of their background or place of living. 

When students have a common goal to achieve, they learn the importance of planning, assigning, executing, and accountability.

Essential Life Skills
Life skills—the talents and behaviors that enable kids to deal effectively with the challenges and pivots of everyday life—allow students to be as adaptive as possible. We know that life skills will never become obsolete as future jobs and workplaces will have greater challenges and problems that will require students to be highly proactive in finding solutions. 

The workload is only going to increase for future employees. Therefore, time management and organization skills are a must for students to master. They must be able to figure out how they should prioritize multiple tasks at hand and manage their time well. 

• Entrepreneurial Skills

The future work environment will be quite uncertain as we may continue to see new businesses come and go. Though opportunities will vanish as well as they appear, entrepreneurship will stay. Thus, it is important to teach students entrepreneurial skills.  

To have an entrepreneurial mindset is to learn to be adaptive to new situations, jobs, and technologies. The future is expected to be AI-dominated and only those open to changes will be able to adapt and succeed. 

The more focused students are on growth rather than on the fear of change, the more they will thrive in life. 

Apart from imparting these skills in students, educational institutions should also take certain other measures to ensure that their students are ready for future jobs.

3 Key Steps to Take to Make Students Future-Ready

• Implement Place-Based Learning

Place-based learning is defined as anytime, anywhere learning. It means using the power of place and not simply the power of technology to personalize learning. It is about taking the focus of learning away from traditional study material to a particular geographical area or its culture. This helps students not only learn but also develop empathic skills. 

To help students apply their learnings to real-world problems and situations, you can consider collaborating with businesses, groups, or professionals. As they will learn more about worldly issues, they will also be encouraged to do their work with complete dedication. 

• Offer Digital Learning

Students today are digital natives, and they are often more adept at adapting to new technologies than their teachers.

The majority of occupations across continents and industries now require digital skills before anything else. Since not every student might have access to technology outside of their school or classroom, you must work on inculcating in them digital skills. Include in your study curricula the most basic digital knowledge such as the difference between reliable and unreliable sources of information, the difference between data and information, and information sharing and associated risks. 

• Focus on the Future

In many aspects, students’ real lives begin when they graduate and begin to apply their education in different areas, managing finances and life goals. Therefore, schools should concentrate not just on whether students have mastered the learning material, but also on where it will lead them in the future. 

As of now, schools are only concerned about the amount of knowledge a student has grabbed and if they earn the promotion from one year to another. Students (even the best ones) also only attend school as a means to an end. But we must not forget that school-level education is a stepping stone toward their long-term objectives.  

You must make an effort to redefine education and learning. Netflix is a great example to learn from. Imparting education the Netflix style will allow you to provide educational content that is relevant to your students’ needs. All you need to do is create a similar educational app and witness the student crowd signing up for it and engaging with it crazily. Because with an app or portal, you will enable students to learn from anywhere they are, whether it is their home, college, or workplace. 

Make your education portal AI-powered and watch yourself getting real-time feedback from your students and their parents. You can also provide them with real-time feedback on their performances or improvement areas. This approach will help you identify any gaps and improve your education techniques thereafter.

Conclusion

The need to reskill and retrain the workforce for future occupations has left our entire educational system and society shaken. As many growth opportunities as we are seeing right now, it is also a time of equal risks. The future of students will be determined by how you as educators respond to this moment and what choices you make in the coming years.  

The best we can do as educators is to stay informed about how the future of education and the future of work are evolving. Staying informed entails understanding the job market, the skills our students require, and how we may assist them in developing those talents. We owe a duty to all kids because they will be the architects of our future. We must create learning opportunities for them that will prepare them to be leaders, designers, problem solvers, and innovators.