Future Ready Symposium Shane Sutherland CEO and Learning System Designer, PebblePad

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The future ain’t what it used to be! Yogi Berra

What is future ready?

“the skills, understandings and personal attributes that make [them] more likely to secure employment and be successful in their chosen occupations to the benefit of themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy” Yorke (2006 )

In the digitally disrupted economy, paid employment no longer necessarily means winning a position in a company, organisation, small business or institution. Increasingly, employment means students and graduates create their own companies, startups, businesses and volunteer experiences, freelance in short term and part-time contacts, sometimes several simultaneously, connect and collaborate to create employment in new and emerging fields and roles, engage in a combination of all of the above, before they enrol in higher education, during their course, and beyond graduation.

“Is our children learning?” G W Bush

Thinking About 21st Century Skills Ways of thinking creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, learning Ways of working communication and collaboration Tools for working information literacy, technology

Employers are passionate about what they would like to see in new employees – young people with a great attitude, great workplace skills and ideally some useful qualifications under their belt. Rod Bristow, Pearson Businesses look first and foremost for graduates with the right attitudes and aptitudes to enable them to be effective in the workplace – nearly nine in ten employers (89%) value these above factors such as degree subject (62%) CBI / Pearson Skills Survey

Many businesses report worrying weaknesses in graduates’ basic skills and general readiness for employment, ranging from 17% reporting shortcoming in graduate applicants’ use of English to nearly half (46%) voicing concerns over graduates’ levels of business and customer awareness CBI / Pearson Skills Survey

"Thank you for your application. I’m delighted to invite you to interview. We were extremely impressed by your 2:1 from a red-brick university and though you didn’t mention the company by name, we could tell from your cover letter you were thinking specifically of us. Your apparent knowledge of Microsoft Office and Excel particularly dazzled us too, as these skills are so rarely found. We’re glad too that you possess excellent creative and communication skills – it wasn’t immediately obvious from your application until we saw the sentence saying so. It really reassured us. I’d like to sincerely thank you for your eight- page CV detailing your employment to date since your prestigious role as table monitor in primary school. It was most illuminating: that you took the leap to be a barista after summers spent babysitting was a bold and unusual step that is sure to help you thrive as a city consultant. Thanks again for your application. It was like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

every year, more than ⅓ of the entire US labor force changes jobs today’s students will have jobs by the time they are 38 50% of workers have been with their company less than 5 years every year, more than 30 million Americans are working in jobs that did not exist in the previous quarter US Bureau of Labor Statistics

The nostalgist is an interior designer specializing in recreating memories for retired people. Canada Scholarship Trust

LinkedIn examined the data of over 259 million members’ profiles to determine the top 10 most popular job titles that were nowhere to be found in x growth in IoS developers (12.6k) 199x growth in Android developers (10.5k)

drive / determination pride subject passion self-regulated resilience criticality application continually learn – unlearn - relearn collaboration creativity problem-solving leading others ownership

Thank you