Wednesday, December 12, 2012

What skills will our kids need in the future?

I've been searching for the skills that my children will require to help them have successful futures.

I recently attended a TEDx event in my hometown, Edmonton. One speaker predicted our children will need to perform three functions well, upon reaching adulthood, to be successful. These were: 1) the ability to search and follow links, 2) the ability to assess the quality of information found, and 3) reading comprehension. He asked us to ponder the question, "Will math be a hobby in 2031 just like shooting and horseback riding have become?". No math? Hard to imagine but the future is impossible to predict.

Clayton Christensen, author of "How Will You Measure Your Life?", explains a model that will help us predict the future capabilities of our children. There are three factors to consider: 1) resources, 2) processes, and 3) priorities.

Resources: "The financial and material resources he has been given or has earned e.g. his time and energy, what he knows, what his talents are, what relationships he has built, what he has learned from the past."

Processes: "What your child does with the resources he has, to accomplish and create new things for himself e.g. creating an iPad app."

Personal Priorities: "How a child will make decisions in his life - which will be on top, which he'll procrastinate doing, and which he'll have no interest in doing at all."

Christensen argues that our modern families spend loads of time, money and effort increasing their child's bucket of resources but we are failing to provide opportunities for him or her to learn processes.

He states, "Many parents are flooding their children with resources - knowledge, skills and experiences. But the nature of these activities - experiences in which they're not deeply engaged and that don't really challenge them to do hard things - denies our children the opportunity to develop the processes they'll need to succeed in the future."

It ends up that my husband and I have already provided our children with many resources and as a result, skills. Instead, we need to improve on our provision of opportunities for them to use their skills to create, to test their knowledge, to challenge themselves, to succeed and to fail. Opportunities to practise processes will help them prepare for an uncertain future.