Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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The future of learning

Feb 2001

Once, the education system provided a basic all-round education and a few years of specialist training to equip us with the skills for a lifetime of work in our chosen field. People could expect one or two career changes during their working lives. Soon, we expect that most people will change jobs up to a few times a year. Sometimes, they will change employer within the same field, like today's contract programmers, but sometimes, entire fields will disappear. Few people work in typing pools or telex rooms today, and there are far fewer insurance brokers than there once were. Technology has decimated intermediary companies, while increasing productivity. Many industrial, clerical, secretarial, administrative, professional and managerial jobs will be made obsolete by improving technology over the coming years. Meanwhile, jobs with a strong interpersonal nature, such as carers, will increase. Demographic trends ensure that we will need more carers and only the mechanistic and informatic parts of these jobs can be automated, not caring itself. Sometimes, only a human will do.

However there will be many new jobs created by new technologies too. There were no web site designers in the 1980s.

Some people mistakenly think that learning IT skills will guarantee a long career. In practice, nothing expires faster than IT knowledge and IT professionals are always working hard on making their jobs obsolete. They have learned to continue to learn. I spend at least a quarter of my time learning. My current knowledge will be useless in 6 months.

With ever-smarter technology eradicating old and creating new jobs, there are three obvious implications for learning.

The first is that many skills have an expiry date. Degree level knowledge in the 'useful' disciplines has a half-life of just a few years. New knowledge and new technologies make much of what is learned obsolete very soon. Human knowledge is now doubling every few years and is accelerating. In such an environment, we must not stop learning when we leave school, we must learn throughout life - or become unemployable.

The second consequence is that we must be adaptable. We may continue to learn within our chosen field; the most up to date travel agent in town will still vanish when everyone books direct via the internet. Being adaptable means either having the ability to successfully use a basic set of skills in a different industry, or being able to learn a completely new set of skills. Of course, this also requires ongoing learning.

Thirdly, as machines take over a wide range of tasks, the remaining jobs will become a partnership between man and machine, even caring jobs. As our other skills become gradually less valuable, we must focus more on our 'human' skills because this is where we ultimately add the value. The machines will certainly go on learning too.

So after providing a basic 3Rs grounding, which will still be needed, we need to teach the ability to adapt and the ability to learn, while improving interpersonal skills. The key to all of these is the will to get better, the desire to learn.