Tag: Business

Education – it’s a 21st Century fail

Posted on by philipdodson

Education – It’s a 21st Century fail

old school

20% of the jobs today didn’t exist 5 years ago, self-employment is on a global hockey stick growth curve, we’re living through the biggest revolution since the industrial one – a digital revolution.

We’ve moved from an industrial age into a digital ideas economy, there is a rising collaborative sharing economy and there is the ever growing and more powerful connected generation. We have an increasing number of social enterprises and people are looking at life very differently.

People are turning their backs on the old world capitalist model, turning their backs on consumption, turning away from the world order of yesterday.

However, how are we preparing the next generations for this new world, how are we equipping the children of today to face this new age?

By largely serving them up the same old out-dated stuff that has been served up for decades. Education in the developed world is largely failing to prepare our young for the world they will be facing.

Giant state run education factories, preparing children to jump through meaningless government imposed hoops, in a typical party political lead box ticking exercise. That will all be undone and changed in a few years time when the other lot take over the reigns of power.

Then you have private independent schools perpetuating the privileged class as they desperately cling on to a Victoriana Imperial world of times gone by.

The net result is the connected generation of today’s youth are bored, disenfranchised and are being sold woefully short of a proper preparation for their lives ahead. In fact not just the millenials, but I would say anyone who has been educated from 1970 onwards.

We need to move towards smaller community based local schools, we need to start properly bringing the digital revolution in to education.

Prepare them for being self-employed, after all 50% of the working population within 10 years will be. Prepare them to embraace social media and the internet, not try to scare them away from it. They are all using it anyway.

Bring coding in to education, teach them how to set up a company, run one, show them about opening a bank account, pensions, real life things.

Stop filling their heads with a chronological historical route march through time, stop teaching things they can look up on the internet.

Allow them to be truly creative, don’t teach them all the same, work out what they are good at and love doing and then help them to succeed in that.

This is not some utopian fluffy pipe dream – just need to stop party politics and open our minds that doing the same old, same old, will get the same poor results. Use imagination and harness children’s lack of fear and imaginations to create truly amazing things.

Bring in meditation, yoga, wellbeing and other proven things. Bring in partnerships with local businesses and other elements of the community.

Teach them all first aid for example, not by a teacher in a stuffy classroom, but get them to work with St John’s ambulance. FT (food technology), why not take them to a real live restaurant or a bakery to learn from experts.

Half of what they are taught is generic, out dated and to be honest they will never ever use.

Everyone needs a bank account, most will fill in a tax return, have a pension, may run a company, the list of real life practical things to teach is endless, yet none are taught.

Stop failing our society with old out dated rubbish and start teaching them what they need and start allowing them the true freedom to be creative.

I have recently been working with many young students and from all over the world – the theme is common with all, they are not being equipped for the world we live in and the world that is evolving.

Many are doing business degrees, yet they are not being shown or taught the most basic things about business or about being an entrepreneur.

So what to do? we all need to campaign for a change in the system and encourage others to do so. We need to get more integration between business people, community leaders and education.

We need to remove party politics from education and most other aspects to be honest. We need to help young people and give our knowledge and experience to them as business people, get involved in mentoring and coaching.

Things have to change.

The changing workspace

Posted on by philipdodson

For centuries, for most of us, work has been associated with a physical space, now work for many has become an activity that you can do anywhere.

This is a much more significant change for the world than the one sentence it took to describe it.

Workplace

This fundamental change is and will have many impacts on our lives, from commuting, to working hours, family time, how we collaborate and communicate with others.

Human beings essentially thrive on being social and a big impact on our well being is being part of a community and having something to belong to. This for most of us was or still is, between 8 – 6 pm, if not longer, Monday to Friday, a company and a physical workplace, our own desk, pedestal, even for the few, our own offices.

There were people to interact with, people to share ideas, people to get support from, people to manage us and people to eat lunch with.

This environment for many in the rising world of self-employment has gone and has been replaced with mainly solitude.

Solitude at home, where after a prolonged period of this solitude, normally leads to a lack of motivation, a feeling of isolation and a good old dose of ‘cabin fever’.

Often the only interaction is with the cat/dog (delete where appropriate), you find daytime TV has crept in (we’ve all watched a bit of Jeremy Kyle), washing to put on, a trip to shops and if you’re like me a quick game on the PlayStation whilst eating lunch.

So often the freelancer, solo-preneur etc., ventures out in search of interaction, motivation and a break from the isolation. They typically head to a coffee shop, where there will be people and a place to work.

However, for those of us who have done the regular coffee shop caper, it’s poor Wi-Fi, too much coffee to ease the guilt, and noise. What you won’t get is any less distractions and you certainly won’t get any meaningful business interactions. Oh and the trip to the toilet means packing up the laptop and losing your seat.

If predictions of as many of 50% of us becoming self-employed within 10 years prove true, then there will be millions of us with this dilemia and need to do work other than at home or in a coffee shop.

The solution is co-working communities, where not only can you get a proper working environment, decent Wi-Fi, good coffee, but you can get the meaningful business interactions that you crave/need to succeed as a freelancer/entreprenuer etc.

Good co-working spaces will go a step further than just providing a desk to work from, they will have that real community, whereby serendiptiy thrives and those chance interactions lead to new ideas, new partners, new suppliers, new customers and just a person to share a bad/good day with.

This where the fundamental change starts to happen, as more and more of us start to work in these communities and experience the huge benefits that working around others brings to our businesses and ulitmately our soul. We will see a massive acceleration in the abandonment of the corporate paid for employment world.

Most importantly, we will see a shift from that old corporate world to a more prosperous collaborative world, where through a community working together, true sharing and helping will make work an activity that we all love, rather than for many of us, an activity we dislike.

We will become liberated from this 9-5 corporate machine that sucks us up from early in life until, once we are completely used, spits us out into retirement to wait to die.

This will change the face of our cities and communities too, as the current commercial real estate will be used very differently and we will see more residential communities being meshed together with working and educational hubs/communities. So that local communities can be re-formed.

We are living in exciting times, where we stand at a line now drawn in the sand, where back one way is the old school corporate/capitalist world and if we dare to step forward, is the collaborative, co-working, sharing world, where prosperity will be measured in relationships – putting people ahead of material wealth.