Shift happens – preparing children for tomorrow’s world of work
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s question we all ask our kids. And while their answers are sweetly naive – astronauts, doctors and vets are particularly appealing to five-year-olds – it’s a curiously unhelpful exercise in in an age when artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in a host of new possibilities and challenges for the job market.
Parents have the unenviable role of trying to prepare their children for a world of work that is constantly in flux and for careers that may not even exist yet. “When I was growing up there were only two careers that were made available to me,” says higher education specialist, Ronel Stevens, who has spent 17 years designing, implementing and evaluating programmes for more than 25,000 students in the global education, government and NGO sectors. Speaking from the audience at a recent networking event hosted by Henley Business School Africa in Cape Town, Ronel says that from her perspective as a mother, she is very aware of the need to guide her child to be the kind of person we need in the world today but that she does not really have a clear sense of how to do that.
It’s not always easy to guide this generation of digital natives who have their own ideas about what they want to do for the rest of their lives. In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink talks about our deeply human need to direct our own lives. Today’s youth, he says, are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose. It’s something parents need to consider as they contemplate their children’s futures.
“As a child, how can you possibly know what you want to be when you grow up? asks Dr Mzamo Masito, chief marketing officer at Google Africa, who was one of the panellists at the Henley Africa event. “I fumbled my way into what I am doing now professionally."