What Are The Skills Kids Need In The Future?

0:00 i think what indian schools need to do is realize that historically there's been so much importance given to left brain dominant skills that now is the time where we need to start focusing on right brain dominance skills because as we all know with artificial intelligence with machines with technology and the way it is uh all the skills that we are learning or a lot of the skills that we are learning today are going to be replaced

0:24 by machines [Music] india is one of the youngest nations in the world 54 of our population is less than 25 years old and 65 of india's workforce is going to be under 35 years old and there's going to be about 12 million people coming into the workforce annually now that's staggering amount of

0:56 people and there's a lot of work that we need to do so the purpose of today's panel is just to make to cause greater awareness among parents educators and um policy makers and hopefully we can raise some interesting questions and then all work together to get some actionable solutions for our whole country and it's already happening so let me start off this panel by asking naviata who is an advisor to the mount literal school international what do you think

1:23 the skills of 2040 are going to look like and what are you doing to in imbibe these changes in your classroom sure so namitha i'll start by answering your first question there was a survey done by the world economic forum where they reached out to over 350 executives across nine industries uh spanning over 15 of the world's largest economies what they did was they asked these executives that what their perception would be as employers of the skills that

1:53 are needed to succeed um in the future what was really surprising was uh that one of the skills that came up which was creativity uh which was in the top three of the skills needed for the future didn't even was in the bottom ten of the of a similar survey done just a few years back this goes to show us how much skills are revolving and at what pace so we're not even talking 2040 i'm talking just the

2:18 near future and uh to answer your next question on what this means to the indian educational ecosystem of course there were other skills like people management and collaboration and emotional intelligence uh i think what indian schools need to do is realize that historically there's been so much importance given to left brain dominant skills that now is the time where we need to start focusing on right brain dominant skills because as we all know with artificial

2:49 intelligence with machines with technology and the way it is uh all the skills that we are learning or a lot of the skills that we are learning today are going to be replaced by machines so what schools need to do then is to be able to inculcate in our children's skills that cannot be replicated by machines and those are things like creativity innovation collaboration and softer people skills uh so anita i want to ask you some a

3:15 similar question you know as a as the head of a global chain of schools across the country the buddha group you know you've already started infusing a lot of technology into your schools um can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you faced and how you were able to scale this across all the schools that you have yeah so uh i think the podar group has been always been a technology driven uh institution uh but technology in our

3:39 schools is not just a frill not just fulfill value it's a kind of a mindset it's an attitude and i think that's what is um what we need to uh keep in mind when we're embracing technology when we're trying to bring technology into the classroom into the schools because technology is not just about a fee package or a learning management system or an erp solution in a classroom i think it's more to do with how does it

4:06 help build uh skills for 21st century whether it's communication skills or collaboration skills so um and and i'd just like to share with everyone that technology was something that was feared by schools i think education is all about educators and what impact they can have on children and if we want our children to imbibe those 21st century skills if they have to be trained i think our teachers need to be uh trained so they grew up in a different environment so we

4:36 need to remember that these teachers also need to be handheld when technology is being embraced and there's some myths about technology which you know many schools had and as adults we had the technology if it comes into the school it might dehumanize education and education always been about this relationship between the teacher and the students but i found that contrary to you know breaking human relations the bond between the teacher and the thought became so strong because this was a

5:07 situation where the students knew more than the teachers and there was a role reversal that happened both you and naviative touched on you know teacher training and teacher development so that brings me to fatima now you know you are the head the md of three international schools and an expert in teacher training can you speak a little bit about what you whether you think today's teachers are equipped and how they're evolving to embrace some of these

5:32 changes um so truthfully i think we have a fair amount of distance to go um our teachers are like you and i we grew up in an environment that was knowledge based uh we carry a bit of that baggage as teachers in this era as well that needs to change um the skilling needs to be upgraded a bit quicker we're all talking about it we do that as educators in all these conferences we

6:02 talk about technology and we still debate whether it's good or bad uh so we still are not uh as progressive as we should be it should be faster um because the world is growing faster she's just rattled off statistics that in the next 10 years we'll be creating jobs that we don't know what the kids will be taking on so i think that's a fact but actually to answer your question namitha are indian schools per se as a country

6:29 coping with what the children will need to take on in the future uh truthfully the answer is uh no okay we're doing it as progressive schools um in isolated patches in the country and we have you know we have the pleasure of being in many cities in the country but we're not doing it you know in a way that's impactful enough we have to have more peace to it but i call it the bermuda dilemma if your

6:58 child came home with a 50 100 in english what would be your first reaction oh god didn't you study it's a fact we do that as parents as well because we don't celebrate ordinary i think mrs birilla spoke about that we weren't excellent we want excellence and we're not okay to celebrate or ordinary so somewhere our mindset as parents need to change as well and i think this bermuda dilemma as i call it needs to not be in isolation i

7:28 wish the academic boards would say let's do away with the grading let's create a learning story that has to happen nationwide for them that management and principles to say yes we can give away those class tests we can give away the unit tests and we can give it away the annual exams it can't happen in isolation it has to happen as a collaborator thank you so much fatima so i'm gonna now move to sriram who's the only male member of our

7:56 panel and the obviously the founder of indian raga so sriram has had the best of the east and the west he's grown up in india and been to i think over 50 cities in india and also lived in over 50 cities in the u.s so my question to you sriram is that what do you think is going to be the differentiator and what are students in india and over the world doing to level the playing field yeah so just to expand

8:20 more on that after graduating from mit i lived in 50 cities for a year being hosted by 50 families for a week each i was curious to understand what were they you know as parents looking you know to coach their kids in what kind of skills what was the role of the performing arts in their life and so on and looking at all of them i try to think about when i was in school what was that one course

8:42 or those two courses that today are useful to me and i couldn't come up with a single one so which is what the kids today are going to deal with in 2040 which is why we're having this conversation but i do remember that i would come back home and tell my mom that hey i got like 100 100 in math or 99 100 in math i mean in a traditional south indian family you can't get less than that

9:02 so and she would be like oh but have you made it to the debate team yet and right from then i think some of these parents and communities started seeing the value of extracurriculars so much so that today we're doing all of these classes that mrs bidler pointed out like tons of these classes outside of school and that made me realize that the first time that i was ever on stage the first time i ever worked in a team the first

9:28 time i understood empathy or worked with other perspectives was when i was in performing arts as a child so that's what gave me all of those skills that today i find meaningfully successful and to some degree so which is what we try to do at indian raga and which brings me to the point that i think that the skills that both in the united states and in india we're all talking about our creativity teamwork and communication through and

9:53 through and our curriculum today in ib schools i think there is the realization but there are few of those and only very few can afford them across the rest of the country that realization is still going to take some time but more and more principals schools are all reaching out to us to bring our program into their schools to supplement that so i think to everyone's point there is this whole thing of like financial lack of funding financial limitations and so

10:21 on but the model to go forward in my opinion would be to partner with those who can already bring in that capacity right now if we have to train the millions of teachers and schools in this country to imbibe all of these skills it's going to take till 2040 anyway so i think we should work with existing partners there are many companies that are you know uh teaching you jobs achieving your skills on the job right

10:44 cedra and um at t is a leader in this right they um spend about eight thousand dollars per employee to make sure that you skill up and um if you're not willing to do that you can lose your job so seijo as a management consultant focused on talent and organizational consulting can you tell us a little bit about what companies are looking for in individuals and what organize organizations are doing to help build the right skill set absolutely

11:10 um thanks namita and i think you know you said that 54 of india um is below the age of 25 but what we forget is that 46 is not below the age of 25 and so what we really need to also think about is how do we reskill a lot of the people that are already in the workforce and this is actually a very important question that a lot of organizations are grappling with today um i think

11:39 we talked a lot about this already but digital automation ai is definitely going to change the future of work not just not like in 2040 but much earlier um and i think this is something that has been because of you know social media and the access to information actually been made to be a very big thing and it is of course because the rate of change has uh more than increased 10 times over the last you

12:10 know 25 years so the first thing that i wanted to kind of talk about was organizations are really starting to think about how to leverage people very differently what they are talking about is an open talent economy what this means is they're talking about people that are going to be um you know freelancers um temp workers uh they're gonna be a crowd source talent you know that's gonna be part of it there could be robos in the next 15 to

12:38 20 you know years that could be part of your workforce how do you kind of adapt yourself to work with this different you know kind of workforce so the one very big thing and i think that's the second thing that organizations are realizing right that when you are seeing so much of technology uh driving change what will matter is the human skills and the human skills are going to be what we already talked about creativity adaptability judgment skills

13:05 being able to take all this data and to assimilate it in a way that everybody can understand so that's the second you know thing that i think organizations are really realizing so they're re-skilling people to leverage their strengths so creating whole strength-based training programs is becoming very important in organizations and i think the third thing that organizations are doing very very well is starting to get people to understand the need to collaborate more and it's becoming so important in

13:35 organizations that it's becoming part of the strategy of organizations to say how do i enable collaboration more in organizations i worked with accenture for nine years as a management consultant before i worked for two years with mckinsey and i can tell you that accenture's collaboration tools are absolutely unbelievable for example they have an entire gamification based collaboration tool that enables everybody in the organization around the world 330 300

14:07 and 300 000 people uh to collaborate across the world very effectively using technology and just gamification thank you so much and thank you so much panelists for all your perspectives