Since my eldest son burned out of school, my attitude towards education has been challenged again and again. I’m still figuring it out, as life continues to evolve – especially now my younger son has also needed to take a break from school and learn at home with tutors. 

There’s a lot I took for granted up to this stage in my parenting journey. I always just got on with it at school, and did well, and I broadly assumed that my kids would be similar. Like many parents, I assumed they’d be in school until aged 18 and would jump through all the hoops. This has been one big messy lesson in not making assumptions. 

Reimagining the future

This reorientation of my perspectives on education feels pretty timely. I’ve increasingly started to wonder what future we are preparing children for, and how adequate the education system is, given the major uncertainties we are wrestling with in the world of work.  

It’s impossible for me not to ask these questions for myself, my colleagues and my peers in this sector.  When we do training, what future do we imagine we are preparing for? How can we ensure we are in the best possible place to respond to the challenges and opportunities that will come?

It feels so privileged now that when I started my undergraduate degree (last century!) I had a level of confidence that my good school grades and degree result would open doors. It’s simply not the same for the undergraduates of today.

When I look at the green ‘open to work’ banners that populate my LinkedIn feed, I wonder how hopeful people feel right now about finding new roles soon. It’s an uncertain employment landscape, what with AI, stagnant economies and geopolitical unrest.

I’ve written before that I am troubled by the risks to our sector that are posed by AI – yes, opportunities can and will be created, but it’s not always easy to see the pathways at an individual level for people who are losing their jobs in today’s economic environment.  There also seems to be a structural lack of preparedness in the country more generally for what may come.

The excellent Rest is Money podcast has called this out repeatedly, including in response to the recent Spending Review, where there was a lack of attention from the government towards life-long learning.

So, who is going to take responsibility? Dr Eliza Filby sets out a vision for the responsibility of companies to step up: to train and retrain their employees, given the lack of accessibility – availability or affordability – of training solutions externally. She notes in her newsletter:

In the age when workers will need to outpace AI, businesses need to return to the apprenticeship model. But…. a learning model that never stops, ever. A business learning culture that rewards teachers as well as leaders, learning as much as productivity. That means reviving the apprenticeship model, but reimagined as lifelong […].

If AI is going to transform our jobs every five years, we need a workforce that can transform alongside it.

What does this mean for insights leaders?

What does it look like if leaders in our sector re-think the nature of their responsibility to train their employees for today’s fast-changing world, bearing in mind all the pressures many businesses are already under? This is something I’d love to explore further.  I don’t have all the answers, but I think it means a few things.

• Actively taking a stand against the implicit idea that most learning is done in university (why do many job ads keep insisting on degrees?!) and then employees come just potentially needing the development and refinement of on-the-job skills 

• Cultivating a culture of always-on learning and encouraging curiosity – starting with micro actions such as sharing interesting articles, podcasts and free courses

• Of course, engaging with whatever excellent training resources MRS offers, but also looking beyond this. For me, this is about complementing training in technical skills that are needed for today’s job with resources that help to: shake up our perspectives; meet people with wholly different backgrounds, skill sets and careers; and sustain our curiosity around the macro shifts we see around us. There are so many great free resources if we just know where to look – I am minded to create a library. I’m saying it here and now to make myself accountable for doing it

• Supporting colleagues in developing the so-called ‘soft skills’ (such a misnomer, as soft skills are so much more important than this term implies) to survive and ideally thrive in a turbulent world. In our company, we recently had emotional, performance and stress-management training in our summer away-day, and it opened all of our eyes

• Lastly, encouraging and helping colleagues to take their own responsibility for their learning and development. I would personally feel uncomfortable if a team-member were relying on me as a leader to design and drive this for them. 

In a world where we cannot be confident our jobs will exist as they are in a decade’s time, we need to allow people to figure out how they want to prepare themselves for whatever may come. This may take the form of simply making space for employees’ co-curricular pursuits, such as coaching, charity work, or ‘side-hustles’.

As ever, I don’t have all the answers to the questions I pose. How could I? I would love to start a dialogue on this issue, and if it strikes a chord for you, or you wish to challenge my thinking, I’d love to hear.