Calls to Redesign Education to Better Prepare Youth for Future Workforce

Young people need to be creative, entrepreneurial and committed to ongoing learning to face the biggest disruption to the world of work since the industrial revolution, a peak body for youth has said.

The Foundation of Young Australians (FYA) new report, released on Thursday, revealed that in the future no job will be immune to automation.

The New Work Smarts report analysed over 20 billion hours of work completed by 12 million Australian workers across 400 occupations to predict the skills and capabilities that will matter most in 2030.

FYA director of public affairs Maggie Hill told Pro Bono News the report showed that automation would affect every job across every occupation.

“At the moment a lot of the conversations that are happening about automation are focusing on which jobs are going to die and which new jobs are going to be created,” Hill said.

“But what we see as the outcome of this report is that we need to shift that narrative and acknowledge that all jobs are going to require a new set of skills to navigate the change in work.”

By 2030 The New Work Smarts forecasts that young people, on average will:

• spend 30 per cent more time per week learning skills on the job;
• spend 100 per cent more time at work solving problems, spend over 40 per cent more time on critical thinking and judgment, and over 77 per cent more time using STEM skills;
• utilise written and verbal communication and interpersonal skills for 29 hours each week (up 14 per cent) and
• activate an entrepreneurial mindset due to having less management (down 26 per cent, less organisational coordination (down 16 per cent) and less teaching (down 10 per cent).

Hill said  “the good news” was that some of the more “mundane and repetitive tasks” employees were currently doing would be done by digital technology.

She said it was important to get the ball rolling to prepare children for the future workplace.

“By 2030, Australia’s current primary school students will be close to finishing their school education and our high schoolers will be entering the workforce. To prepare them we must urgently transform our traditional education and training approaches and institutions into immersive learning partners,” Hill said.

“We need to make sure we are developing the skills they will need. We see this as a conversation that shouldn’t just be happening in schools or universities or VET, it needs to be happening in government, across industry.

“We really want to see a nation building focus on education strategy, the learning system needs to be redesigned.

“This should encompass enterprise education and careers management strategies where the new work smart skills are core to teaching, learning and assessment across all school and higher education systems.”

FYA also called for “a comprehensive and inter-generational investment in

Australia’s young people” which would include:

• a ‘nation building’ focused education strategy to redesign the learning system from preschool through higher education (and beyond);
• a new skills, training, careers education and real jobs commitment to young Australians; and
• a promise and plan for the equitable intergenerational transfer of knowledge, resources and power in the new economy.

The report is free for download and is available here.