Week 30 The Broader Professional Context
Week 30 Broader Professional Context
I
will use Rolfe’s reflective model for this:
What?
Looking
with interest at the “Addressing Current and Future
Challenges in Education” (Daggett, 2014), all five trends have significance in
the College I work in, as with most schools in New Zealand,
I have been more inclined towards Trend #2 “Heightened
Demand for Career Readiness” which is a
reflection on my specialist skills in teaching in the Technology area. We have
the Technology learning objectives, where we teach the students to think, plan,
construct and problem solve as they progress. I have always insisted that my
students acquire some construction skills first to give them a platform to be
creative, as I have found, over the years, that it’s great to have an idea but
with no practical knowledge you can’t get much further without help and in my
job I am trying to foster both skill sets, the thinking and the doing. I believe this wholeheartedly when it comes
to career readiness a belief that if you have command of a skill it will allow
you to push further into areas which are unfamiliar; Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development
(1978).
So
what?
In my subject
area we have the perfect capacity to future proof our students and this comes
in the guise of design thinking. We teach the students to analyse, discuss,
evaluate, empathise, reflect, and all this through working with a client. We
teach the group work and with more flexibility we are now accommodating the
lower levels of students who do have the skills and that astute thinking but
not necessarily the academic abilities to capture it. With blended learning we
encourage them to reflect, discuss and evaluate their own, and others work by
using video and oral recording and speech to type apps. By seeing a gap in our
student’s abilities, we are trying to amalgamate more effectively, both skill
sets.
One area of huge
need is our country’s trade skill shortages as we have seen in the building
industry.
In her online article, Eleanor Wenman (Stuff, 2018) quotes “Officials
from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment
(MBIE) say demand for builders and related tradies is set
to increase until at least 2022, with a forecast of 50,000 to 60,000 additional
workers needed by then.”
While this is an immediate short-term need for our potential
trades based students, this is hands on practical and localised to a need here
in our own country. We as teachers can be working to facilitate the preparation
of our students into fulfilling critical shortages; and this is happening with
the partnerships of the ITO’s in this instance, the BCITO, running programmes
in schools.
From the global perspective Daggett, (2014) says,
“There is an increasing missing middle in our labor
market. The reason is that technology is now doing to the middle-level jobs
what it did in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to entry-level jobs: people are being
replaced by technology that can do the job better and less expensively. The
growing tier of upper-level jobs requires increasingly sophisticated skills and
the ability to be a lifelong learner in a technological, information based
environment.” (p.6).
With a
son studying Game Design this year, I was interested to learn that although
I thought this was a future proofed career, the actual nuts and bolts of the
job are rapidly being synthesised by computers. This could be frightening to
those who are studying in that field now, but my son has the answer in that he
says as it changes he must be flexible and continue surfing the wave of new
knowledge to keep ahead of the game. It is with that mind set, as teachers, we
have to work with our students to have that same growth mind-set too. We must enable
them to work with the technology as it is constantly morphing.
Now
What?
Jobs that are on the Long Term Skills Shortage list in New Zealand (2018),
are the same type of jobs that are wanted globally by many countries. We will compete for the same skill sets in
workers. We have to future proof our student’s skills in both College and
Tertiary training to completely cover those needs. Education has to be relevant
and future focused to be globally competitive and Universities have to take this
on board with their courses offered for the jobs of tomorrow. The rise of work
placed training is important, the ITOs, and flexible learning strategies for on
the job training are also valuable, and higher institutionalised learning is not
as relevant as it once was, which is shown by the figures in the USA,
“48% of
employed recent four-year college graduates are in jobs that require less than
a four-year degree and 37% of employed recent four-year college graduates are
in jobs that require less than a high school diploma.” (Daggett, 2014).
They are not doing a great job at
tailoring courses to suit the workplace requirements. I would hope that, after
all the work we are trying to do in Secondary schooling to future proof, it is
not a fruitless exercise if the Tertiary sector, here in NZ, are not following
suit and being flexible and innovative too.
“Education
and lifelong learning is going to become more crucial than ever. By
constantly learning new skills, updating your current skill set, or
experimenting in different in industries, you’re guaranteed to be prepared for
the job roles of the future.”(Getsmarter, 2018).
Get Smarter (2018), Retrieved from https://www.getsmarter.com/blog/career-advice/job-demand-10-years/
NZ Immigration (2018). Retrieved from http://skillshortages.immigration.govt.nz/long-term-skill-shortage-list.pdf
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher
psychological processes Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wenman. E. (2018), Retrieved from https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/103495394/nz-needs-more-than-50000-construction-workers-by-2022-to-keep-up-with-demand
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