blog

mind the gap.

To be blunt, as a teacher who has spent most of their working life in the tech industry (25+ years), I see gaps. Gaps between how education describes, prepares and introduces students to the world of work, and the reality of the world of work itself. To be polite, education is slow moving compared to industry. Education is becoming increasingly out of touch with the rapidly evolving modern workplace. To keep up, education must predict where modern workplaces are headed and it cannot do this in isolation.

The gap is widening.

With evolution comes opportunity. If luck is where opportunity and preparation meet, then how are students being prepared by education and who is monitoring workplace evolution? Where’s the plan?

Is there an awareness of this gap within education? Does education have the inclination, skillset or time to deliver a solution? It’s not a small problem.

To keep tabs on the changing workplace requires a skillset and an infrastructure. A capability has to be designed and built that can keep up with the ever-increasing inflow of information, with flexibility – by those who know.

Gathering this information is one thing; analysing it, translating it and packaging it for a young, digitally distracted and inexperienced audience is another.

It’s perhaps ironic that the job of translating today’s evolving workplace into a language that the younger generations can digest falls on an institution that is both isolated and ignorant of the environment it aims to study. There are no pipelines of regularly communication. How is young ambition sensed and detected? How is it guided and nurtured? What doors can be opened, glass ceilings broken? What experience can be brought to bear in the average school, today?

What guards against students self-limiting and ignoring the harder more ambitious opportunities their talents deserve?

Something must be done.