You’re 23, you’ve diligently worked your way through high school, achieved good grades, selected a career from the tertiary entrance guide, applied to university, spent three or four years and a small fortune learning the skills that are deemed the requirements to get started in your chosen career. Equipped with your degree in hand, you march confidently forward into the workforce, ready to assume the position that you have worked so hard for … but where are the jobs?
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Imagine the shock of that experience. You’ve followed the instructions to the letter, and that’s what our schools teach us – follow the rules, absorb the information we provide, answer the questions correctly and you are rewarded with a move into the next grade. But in real life that’s not how it works, it’s much more fluid than that.
In Australia, the jobless rate for 15- to 24-year-olds has just hit 14.1 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the highest level in 12 years, and unless we make an effort to encourage change in the system, even optimists like us can only see these figures becoming worse.
The workforce is changing so rapidly, entry-level jobs are being automated and offshored at a rapid rate and even highly skilled corporate positions are adapting to a more project based approach, with teams being brought together to ‘get the job done’ and then disbanded afterwards. Job stability is a thing of the past.
To cope with this new landscape, we need our school system to incorporate a new way of learning into the curriculum. We need it to incorporate more creativity and hands on application into the way of learning so that we can develop a new culture of students creating their own jobs rather than just applying for them.
We believe that the time has come for us to consider a widespread introduction of entrepreneurial education into our schools. We’re not saying every student needs to build a global empire, but if every student left school with a mindset that was open to seeing opportunities in a more creative way and knew that failing is okay, this would allow them to become more resilient and solve problems by ‘pivoting’ through difficulties rather than becoming an unemployed youth statistic.
Regardless of whether they end up building their own companies, or working within a company, the pace of technological change shows that we need to help our new generation learn how to think on their feet and be ready to adapt to new circumstances and situations with confidence. They need to know how to collaborate, to focus not only on developing their own skill sets, but on recognising the skills of the people around them, so that as a team they achieve more, more quickly. They need to be free to be creative, to look at problems and challenges from new perspectives. We think it’s time to move from the information age to the innovation age.
Sharon Hunneybell and Sam Winter are the co-founders of Startup Apprentice, an entrepreneurial education program for high school students.