Israeli writer Yuval Harari, author of the bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus, stated: “a new class of people will emerge by 2050: the useless”.
As the world evolves, driven primarily by new technologies, millions of people will lose their jobs. However, millions of new positions will also be created.
But where will people turn to acquire the knowledge needed to remain relevant? Harari goes further: “people will not just be unemployed, they will be unemployable”.
This means that the ongoing need for upskilling will become critically important — otherwise, there will be no room for those who remain idle in the face of these changes.
And what role do schools play in this context? It is straightforward. Which school is preparing children and young people for this new landscape? Which university is currently teaching the best management practices used by Amazon, for example?
We still teach the same way we did decades ago. And this could create an even greater problem: schools may become irrelevant in this process.
Consider this: would you enroll your child in a Latin class? The answer is no! Yet we have our children learning the Pythagorean Theorem, when they should instead be learning about Artificial Intelligence.
The world's most innovative companies no longer require degrees when hiring. Academic credentials no longer matter. What counts today are the skills the individual possesses.
And if the skills the market demands are not being taught in schools and universities, people will find them elsewhere: YouTube, open courses, articles and content on the internet, and so on.
School administrators need to grasp this shift very quickly and adapt to this new reality. Long-format courses no longer work, as the market evolves at an incredible pace.
Billion-dollar companies are being built in under 2 years, using unprecedented technologies and management techniques. And yet we still offer 4-year Business Administration degrees!
The EdTech Conference 2020 will showcase one of the most compelling examples of the importance of this transformation. Kroton, the world's largest educational group, has undergone a complete reinvention — it even changed its name and is now called Cogna.
Now I ask: if the world's largest educational group — an enormously successful one — understood that it needed to change, what are other schools and universities waiting for?
If you want to understand more about all of this, you need to be at EdTech Conference 2020, Latin America's largest conference on innovation for the education sector.
