What you need to know about education, skills and life-long learning

“More than 1 billion jobs, almost one-third of all jobs worldwide, are likely to be transformed by technology in the next decade,” wrote Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, with the launch of the Reskilling Revolution platform in Davos in January 2020. With the launch, 415 private-sector companies and governments around the world committed to career-enhancement initiatives to reskill 1 billion people by 2030, to ensure they can keep up with the changes brought by the tech revolution and transition to a green economy.

Within weeks, the same companies and governments were grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on workers and students around the world.

While the immediate response was rightly focused on public health, it quickly became evident that skills and education would play an important role in the economic rebound.

The sudden shift to remote work, which is expected to continue, requires digital competency. But even in higher-income economies, 62% of the population have basic digital skills like sending emails, while just 44% have standard skills like creating electronic presentations, according to a recent Forum report.

Meanwhile, 90% of students worldwide were affected by school closures, which the World Bank said could lead to “a loss of $10 trillion dollars in earnings over time for this generation of students, and countries will be driven off-track to achieving their Learning Poverty goals.”

“The COVID-19 downturn gives us ample reason to act at scale, and act now,” wrote Infosys Ltd’s Ravi Kumar S. and Ernst & Young’s Steve George. “While the outbreak has been unsparing in its impact, we’ve seen a correlation between jobless rates and education level.”

Skills and education are critically important to getting us out of the pandemic – and they’ll be even more important when we get through to the other side.

Even before the pandemic, training for the jobs of the future was urgently needed.

With mass unemployment and uncertainty, reskilling becomes even more important to protect workers and ensure the resilience of the economy.

And, it’s worth noting, many of the clusters where we can expect to see future job growth – such as caring, engineering and cloud computing, and content – have particular relevance to the post-COVID world, in which healthcare workers are more essential than ever and in which millions are working, learning and socializing online.

To assist the private sector with commitments to reskilling, the public sector “needs to provide stronger support for reskilling and upskilling for at-risk or displaced workers,” finds the Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2020.

“The public sector can step in by creating incentives for investments in the markets and jobs of tomorrow; providing stronger safety nets for displaced workers in the midst of job transitions; and to decisively tackle long-delayed improvements to education and training systems,” the report continues.

Equally import as training adults is educating children. The quick pivot to remote learning has led to an “opportunity to revolutionize online learning and skills development for every child in the world, no matter where they live.”

And what does this mean for life-long learning? As Guille Miranda, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility and Vice President at IBM, explained, “Just as the pandemic accelerated the adoption of telecommuting, it has also made some older students more comfortable with the idea of digital collaboration. Skills learned during the pandemic to navigate this new terrain will serve these teens well as they enter the workforce in the years ahead.”