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• Preparing Children For Jobs That Don’t Exist February 29
  Pathways World School, Gurgaon
  

The world of work is changing. Advancements in artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning are causing significant disruption in the modern-day workplace by triggering both new job creation to traditional job displacement.

A World Economic Study found that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. In such a scenario, it becomes imperative for educational institutions to anticipate and prepare for future skill requirements.

Pathways World Schools, a group of top-ranked International Baccalaureate schools in North India, have identified four key pedagogical approaches that are a must for preparing children for tomorrow’s “VUCA” (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) workplace.

1. Fostering Soft Skills: With machines replacing human jobs, it is extremely important for humans to focus on “human skills”. Pathways foster these soft skills through various aspects of the curriculum. For example, children learn empathy and emotional intelligence through community service, creativity through their own ‘Personal Project’ and communication and storytelling through workshops.
2. Celebrating Failure: Fear of failure is the biggest deterrent to creativity and innovation; both of which are necessities in tomorrow’s workplace. Pathways fosters a culture of risk-taking by ensuring that its grading practices evaluate the whole journey of the student rather than just the end result in isolation.
3. Exploring Developing Technologies: Pathways believes in sensitizing students to new technologies (as they are developing as opposed to after they have been developed) to enable children to understand the stages of progress. All children in the school have access to new technologies such as robotics, 3D printers, laser cutters and maker spaces in the School’s design and technology laboratories.
4. Promoting Experiential Learning: Many of the jobs in the future will revolve around enhancing human experiences. Pathways enables students to choose from a vast bouquet of co-curricular experiential learning opportunities for skill building such as coding, photography, print-making and storytelling to name a few.