How Educational Change is Changing Everything in The Workplace
In 2015, Ernest and Young announced that they would not be asking for college degrees from prospective employees. Google and Apple joined the fray, saying that a college degree is not a good measure of a valuable employee.
Way before this announcement, most technology-related companies had hired or had their founders as self-taught engineers. Their move sparked debate on why talented people should use money and time to acquire a college degree when they could just join the job market. Moreover, the bureaucratic system hosted in formal universities simply cannot accommodate the fast-changing landscape of technology tools.
Outside the tech scene, other companies such as Whole Foods, Costco Wholesale Corporation, and Hilton also reviewed their need for applicants to have college degrees.
However, in Africa, companies have not been as quick in making such announcements. This cements the need to have higher education and the highest qualification.
Technology: the backbone of all industry
It is an understatement to say that technology is becoming the backbone of every single industry in the world. Everyone is automating , with some jobs being created as others die off. Technology skills have turned out to be foundational and more desired than ever.
Dr. Bitange Ndemo, the Chairman of the Blockchain and AI task force in Kenya, emphasized the need for self-learning new technologies outside of rudimentary classwork.
“Africa must seek to play in the league of emerging technologies. No one has ever fought technology and won. The best medicine will always be trying to learn and be at the top of any technology. The significance of these new technologies is far-reaching,” he said in an op-ed.
“You don’t need a teacher in front of you in this day and age to learn machine learning. I am saying this because I teach at the university, and changing a syllabus is like a ship trying to turn at an angle. Others argue that our role is to teach theory. So we have never changed the syllabus to the current needs,” he said during the East Africa Com tech event in Nairobi.
Like most of us have been stating, IT is a discipline that does not require College Degrees. We’ve seen the onset of coding boot camps and other training academies that teach in SILO’s about specific products, applications, or services.
However, I do want to state that the pedagogy learned in formal training institutions is necessary for the technology field to progress. Researchers, Ph.D. holders, Security Practitioners, Professors, and many other well-rounded IT specialists are still needed. For them to learn their skill sets and apply them successfully need more than just a 1-year Bootcamp in IT.
We don’t need formal education for specific jobs, but we shouldn’t throw the baby into the bathwater because there are aspects in formal education that you can’t learn in the job training.
Opportunities in self-learning
Anyone with a passion these days can log on to the internet, research, and even learn various skills they need. This is the new change in education. It is no longer a preserve of the wealthy, but knowledge is almost evenly distributed.
From free ebooks to video tutorials to paid online classes, most African youth can sign up and learn throughae basic smartphone. That is the promise that the internet connection has for developing regions.
In the 2019 StackOverflow Developer survey, apart from having college degrees, 85.5 percent of respondents said that they learned a new coding language or framework without getting a formal education.
Image Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019
Over 60 percent said they took a structured online course to learn a new tech skill and frameworks. Curiosity and passion for learning a new skill are definitely ingredients needed in the recipe.
Blending the old and the new
There are great merits in the formal education system. It cannot altogether be abolished, and we concentrate on digital means of learning.
There could be a great blend of formal and informal education to give learners an outstanding balance of the two worlds. For example, an online short course or tutorial could be used as a yardstick for learners to know which career they could pursue in college or university.
Even when they enroll in the formal systems, they can boost their knowledge and keep updated with the ever-changing technology landscape.
Enterprises can also enroll their employees in practical online training courses. Companies cannot afford billions of dollars on the job training mistakes, but they can always avoid this through ongoing training sessions.
IT is a field unlike any other where you could lose a company millions of billions over with just one simple mistake, and I think we often forget that. Breaches just need one person who doesn’t understand and practice good security essentials. Similarly, developers who don’t practice security in coding can cause worldwide infections (worms and viruses, for example) to be released easily.
The way forward: A solution for the continent
Africa is mostly stuck in the old ways of disseminating education. It has built significant structures. But the other has not caught up with the likes of Japan in teaching relevant skills in a relevant way.
The internet holds hope for educational transformation, whether to build a supplementary system on top of the current one or a green-field initiative for education.
For most, if not all, countries, this is the best way to catch up very quickly. There is no need to reinvent the wheel on certain things. Securing and implementing a database has already been done for decades now. We don’t need to go to school for that. Creating a secure website has been done for decades as well; we don’t need to be teaching that in schools. We need to be teaching the deeper things that you won’t learn at a boot camp or from watching 1-10 YouTube videos.
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