Forever Skills

APPENDIX BToday’s workplace trends

It turns out ‘here today’ doesn’t always mean ‘gone tomorrow’.

However, if we were asked to choose a word to critique the modern world, it would be hard to go past the word ‘disposable’. Where once we were obsessed with how well something was made or the quality of the stitching, the woodwork or the engineering, today our focus is much more on price and convenience.

In fact ‘disposable’ is a term that has been used to describe the Western world’s entire economic outlook, from our wastefulness of resources to our short-term attention spans and our hyper-consumption.

And there’s plenty of evidence for this criticism. We squander resources thoughtlessly: our energy consumption is polluting the planet and becoming economically unsustainable, our ‘single use’ attitude is creating land ‘over-fill’ (and islands of plastic in the oceans) as well undermining craft and expertise. Even human beings have come to be treated as commodities that are useful right up until the point that they’re not.

This has also informed our thinking around work and life skills. We tend to only think about skills as being trend-based and time-defined and -limited, but there is reason to think that this might not be the case.

In fact there is a plethora of research into the skills that will matter going forward, what the future of work will look like and where we should invest our education dollar for ourselves and our children.

Many of these studies from the worlds of academia, ...