The World Bank’s Sheila Jagannathan: Learning new skills requires un-learning
Ahead of her session at UNLEASH America, The World Bank’s Sheila Jagannathan makes the case for life-led learning.
Why You Should Care
It's not just about your education years anymore.
Embrace the 60-year curriculum - it's the way we all learn now.
Sheila Jagannathan tells us more but for the full rundown, there's only one place to be...
HR leaders, don’t miss out: Join us in Las Vegas for free as a VIP guest at UNLEASH America.
Did you stop learning the day you left school? Didn’t think so. The World Bank’s Sheila Jagannathan – educator, consultant, Harvard alumna and UNLEASH speaker – looks at a life of learning for all.
We join as the discussion looks at the foregrounding of ESG (environment, sustainability and governance) issues.
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Sheila Jagannathan: The pandemic has brought to light the interconnectedness of these global issues, highlighting the importance, the critical importance of sustainable practices in ensuring business resilience and continuity.
Now, HR teams play a critical role in driving the ESG agenda within their organizations.
In terms of practical actions, they can start by incorporating ESG considerations into their recruitment, retention, and talent management practices.
For example, they can prioritize candidates with a demonstrated commitment to sustainable and social responsibility, and they can also ensure that employees have access to relevant training on ESG issues and are encouraged to engage in initiatives that support these values.
Now, HR teams can also work with senior leadership to develop and implement ESG policies and practices across the organization, including reducing carbon emissions, promoting diversity and inclusion, implementing ethical sourcing, supply chain practices, and so on and so forth. And not just internal leadership.
They can also work with external partners to collaborate on sustainable initiatives and communicate the organization-at-large’s ESG efforts.
So just to summarize, the increased focus on ESG is driven by the range of factors that I mentioned, including the pandemic and changing demographics, and so on. And HR teams can play a critical role in driving the ESG agenda within their organization, working closely with internal and external partners as well as senior leadership.
Jon Kennard: I dare say that we’ll be hearing a lot of people talking about it, not just in talks but also on the show floor as well.
Another area of interest of yours is the 60-year curriculum. Give us an overview of this, and how this ties in with the idea of lifelong learning.
SJ: Right. So, business as usual in terms of learning is no longer relevant because of a number of things; the old model or traditional model where we were learning at school, high school, college maybe, for the first 22 years of our life, and then we would work for the next 40 perhaps, and then retire in our sixties.
Now, this model is giving way to a number of newer models, partly because we need to think about the fourth industrial revolution and how the stability of jobs as we know it is changing quite a bit. And upskilling, reskilling and skilling at large is needed more continuously, and not just learning for the first 22 years.
We need to come in and out of learning throughout the phase of life that we are working because skills are changing.
Part of it is technology and so on. The other dynamic one needs to keep in mind is that people are living longer and working longer. Many people are working into their mid seventies. And again, reskilling and upskilling is the currency of the labor market today – without that you will not be relevant.
And so actually the real driver of the 60-year curriculum is the job market and the length of life. It was a movement started by Dean Lambert at the Harvard Continuing Education School, who is one of the leaders of this movement.
There have been many others, and it’s really a new name for lifelong learning, and I call it in my latest book Digital Learning for Sustainable Development – published in 2021 by Routledge – I call it life led learning, but really it’s an initiative that’s focused on developing new education model that enable each person to re-skill as their professional and personal context shift.
It’s that idea that learning for the first 22 years of your life is no longer relevant for our personal and professional context. And the 60-year curriculum enables you to come in and out of learning for a 60-year work life so that you are skilled to take on new jobs or upskilled to perform better in the job you’re in.
JK: It’s a term that I’m fascinated with because personally, I definitely believe that learning isn’t confined to the years of being a child and a teenager. And it’s something that we should certainly take on board for the duration of our work life. So, thank you for that explanation…
SJ: I just wanted to add here that this is evolving: like you said, lifelong learning has been around, but the 60-year curriculum is kind of a new pathway to that that we look at in the relevance of a very volatile VUCA world, but also in the context of the changes of the fourth industrial revolution to jobs as we know it.
There’s a consortium at Harvard, and I’m also part of it, that’s looking at how we can we look at it in the long term. Maybe it’s a subscription model where alumni of a particular school pay a certain percentage to get this in and out of learning throughout their career. So – lots to evolve in the next coming years.
JK: Talking of jobs and their evolution, how would you suggest that we plan to learn for jobs that don’t exist yet? Careers, job titles, areas that are in development and we haven’t really scoped out how they would fit into the rest of the jobs market. How can you do this?
SJ: An interesting question, but it is really relevant in the times we live. I want to start off by framing the context. Richard Riley, who used to be the former secretary of education said, we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist using technologies that haven’t been invented yet to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
And that encapsulates the world we live in.
And I think, another example that comes to mind is many of the new jobs offering good income potential didn’t exist a few years ago. For example, more than four million app developers in India earn decent livelihood, as do about 400 organic farmers in Uganda, or a hundred thousand youth engaged as laborers in China. And this comes from a report published by the World Bank.
So I think a couple of important behavior techniques to keep in mind is, one, we need a different strategy. And this goes back to your previous question – in order to prepare for jobs that don’t exist, and to solve problems that haven’t become problems yet, I think we need a continuous and life-led learning strategy.
I talked about upskilling and reskilling, but as a life-led strategy, the other thing I need to keep in mind, which is more behavioral is un-learning.
It’s not just about learning and re-skilling and capacity development, but it’s also unlearning to make way for new learning opportunities, when some of the technology that we are dealing with, like AI, blockchain and internet of things are completely turning existing jobs on their heads.
And so we really need to unlearn. The third thing is more for professional training organizations, that there needs to be a focus on skills and capabilities, not just on degrees and qualifications. Eg a person may have gone through a four year engineering degree, but sometimes employers feel that they don’t have the skills to hit the ground running.
So I think a renewed focus on practical skills is what employers are looking for. And that is what I think professional training institutions as well as academia needs to keep in mind.
And related to this, we need to also look at a different model of credentialing. Is a four-year degree or a two-year undergraduate degree or a two year master’s always the best method or are there more short-term credentials that can give you this flexibility to continuously re-skill?
These can be specializations, ‘micro-masters’, and others, for example edX, the Harvard/MIT MOOC platform. So a lot of different approaches need to be thought through.
So just to summarize, classroom and digital learning, informal in the workplace and peer-to-peer learning, social, on-the-job, these are all going to be very important. Soft skills are critical in the man machine interface. So communication, teamwork, collaboration, creativity. These become very critical. they are what the people call ‘power skills’, ‘transversal skills’ that will hold you in good stead no matter which direction you’re going…
Listen to the full episode beneath.
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The International Festival of HR is back and the agenda is now live! Discover amazing speakers from the world of HR and business at UNLEASH America on 26-27 April 2023.
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Editorial content manager
Jon has 20 years' experience in digital journalism and more than a decade in L&D and HR publishing.
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