Building our Next Generation Workforce!

“I have studied Java during my college studies and I am expert in this subject but suddenly I see Python as a language of choice in many areas – What should I do?” This was the question one of the new joiners asked me during one of the sessions where I was addressing our newly inducted College Graduates.  It triggered a series of thoughts which I thought of sharing here.

If we look at the question, it is not just limited to software languages but it is much beyond that.  Education system is (or should be) there to prepare our next generation to face the world much beyond just the selected subjects.  There used to be the time when the life of subjects used to be decades – in this rapid age the life of subjects that one learns is even lesser than the time it takes to master it. The solution is not in changing the subjects or just the contents of the subject but the mindset of our next generation workforce and the way we look at our basic education system. 

In today’s environment – velocity of learning is very important and one needs to inculcate the discipline of learning new things and learning them fast --- that is possible when one knows the trick of selectively unlearning old, selectively retaining previous learning and applying those along with the new learnings. Many of the concepts which we learn during our education and we believe are never used in the real life are the ones which alter our way of thinking – the altered way of thinking then helps us in applying these concepts in many areas of our life subconsciously.  It is also a well known fact that when we learn one subject, it helps us in learning many other related subjects but interesting part is that sometimes this relativity is not obvious.  One of such examples is relationship between Music and Mathematics or Pattern recognition. Whether it is Rhythm or Chromatic Scales or Harmony; there is power of mathematics behind it. Hence when one learns the theory of music; it becomes easier for him/her to visualize mathematics and vice-versa.  Presently, the focus of basic education system seems to be more towards teaching how to succeed – not many institutes produce scenarios to teach the students how to handle the failure.  Again, it is a known fact that success is the result of navigating through many failures – but if we do not teach our next gen on how to face the failure; the result is obvious, we see them breaking apart on the first failure of their life. 

The focus of learning must shift from producing subject matter expert to an Agile learning expert and our education system globally must play a major role in making this happen.  We need cognitive experts who can look at things beyond what has always been taught – influence of newer dimensions (technology, social & cultural change etc) on the situation, selectively using the past experience but willing to learn and adopt newer solutions and doing it all rapidly.  Thoughts?