Curiosity is a skill that you would want to keep throughout one’s career and continuous learning is going to become critical as has been proven by the tremendous strides AI has taken in the last few years.
According to Patrick Kyllonen, a distinguished presidential appointee at ETS who is attending the conference of Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, AI can handle tasks which were considered to be only possible for humans.
“This can only mean that we are going to be required to have to reskill, upskill, to learn new skill and that is going to need orientation, curiosity, to have the attitude to be able to relearn and reskill to be able to do new ways of things,” Kyllonen said speaking to Observer.
He has conducted innovative research on (a) higher education assessment, (b) workforce readiness, (c) international large-scale assessment (e.g., Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA), and (d) 21st century skills assessment, such as creativity, collaborative problem solving and situational interviews. According to Kyllonen, AI is already affecting the nature of the work and it is never going to be a crude technology as it is today.
“It is going to be increasingly sophisticated and enter into various aspects of our life. This is going to affect what skills are valued. One of the things we are doing at ETS is to identify exactly what the nature of the work is going to be as a result of this incursion of AI into our lives. So we are looking at skills that are relatively future proof and what the machines will not be able to do and what is essentially human and that is going to be an important deterrent on what education is going to be like in the next few years,” he pointed out.
In other words, education prepares people for the life of work — a life of prosperity and satisfaction. If the nature of work changes, education is going to respond to that change. Education will then focus on the skills that are going to become increasingly important in the future.
The traditional professions such as medicine, engineering and computer science are all affected by AI.
“AI is going to cause a fundamental change because right now the early education is focused on math, language, science and they are continuing to be important, but what we are experiencing is that schools teach more than math and science.
“Schools teach students how to communicate with each other, how to talk to the teacher, how to listen to the teacher, how to turn in assignments on time and schools teach students and learners how to develop love for learning and that is going to become increasingly important in the future because the rate of change is going to increase. So lifelong learning is going to be increasingly required of all of us. We can no longer count on leaving school and stay in the same career for 40 or 50 years,” Kyllonen noted.
We have to plan on mid-career changes and that is going to require lifelong learning, which in turn is going to require curiosity and ability to learn and study new things even when you are already working on a job or already in a career.
He added that curiosity is going to be increasingly important as a way of motivating an individual to engage in lifelong learning, which is going to be a pathway to survival.
“There is a long line of research on the work of the future and one of the findings has been that the nature of the work is going to continuously change. And that is going to put pressure on all of us to keep up with it,” he said.
What is required is mindshift emphasising on lifelong learning.
Kyllonen said that this is why government, private sector partnership is important to create access to continuous upskilling and reskilling.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
