Analyzing the Global Frontiers in Education for Work: New Principles for Enabling Innovation

Abstract

In 2012, the World Innovation Summit on Education (WISE) sponsored a team from Innovation Unit to visit sites of radical innovation in education for work (Hannon, Gillinson and Shanks 2013). The 15 chosen sites had been identified as places that were pioneering new approaches to the challenge of preparing people for work in the 21st century. The sites ranged from a radio program providing a hub for microfinance and apprenticeship opportunities in rural Nigeria to a corporate university in Mysore, India, where the IT services company Infosys trains 20,000 incoming employees a year at its Global Education Centre.

Education for work typically focuses on the problem of skills matching: there are surplus jobs requiring higher-order skills or expertise in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), while surplus workers unfit for these jobs remain unemployed. Skills matching – the process of identifying the skills needed by a particular industry and employer, and preparing learners accordingly – is an important task for vocational education, yet as numerous education scholars now argue, it is insufficient as a sole focus (Zhao 2012; Wagner 2012). Innovation expert Charlie Leadbeater recently captured this argument with the words: “The new mission of schools should be to prepare children to work in jobs that do not exist, to solve problems that are not yet apparent, using technologies that are still to be invented” (Mulgan and Leadbeater 2013, 46).