Experiential Learning
and the World of Tomorrow
Andrew H. Potter, Director, UGA University Office of
Experiential Learning
“I’ll Be
Back”: The Future is Coming for Us…
If you have been paying attention, you may have
heard that a robot is going to take your job.
To listen to some of the rhetoric, it seems that most of us will wander
aimlessly across a barren planet in search of work only to realize that the Terminator movies were actually
documentaries sent back from the future.
While we may not be able to identify the exact job
titles of tomorrow, current and emerging trends indicate that:
- 85%
of the jobs in 2030 don’t exist today[1]
- Nearly
50% of current work activities can be automated with existing technology[2]
- By
2030, ~375 million workers may need to change their occupation category[3]
Simply, the future will be different—really
different. Compared to the present and
the past, it will require different skills, different behaviors, and different
mindsets. While the next twenty years will be defined by disruption on a
historic scale that will redefine the world of work and life, it will also
create a period of incredible opportunity for individuals who can innovate,
think critically, collaborate, and communicate effectively.
Getting
“Future Ready”: Who Will Win and Why
How do we prepare today’s learners to thrive in
tomorrow’s world when we don’t even know what it will look like? In short, experiential education is a proven
model that powers cognitive, emotional, and social engagement. This engagement enables learners to foster
the skills and competencies they need to compete and, more importantly, collaborate
to build the world of tomorrow.
As the acceleration of technology fuels the growth
of economies around the globe, research continues to demonstrate that in order
to prepare for this future world:
- Individuals
need to develop strong social, emotional, and high-level cognitive
skills and capabilities as these are difficult to automate and can
transfer between occupation categories.
- Individuals
need to become innovators and problem solvers by leveraging their curiosity
and permitting themselves to fail while iterating on new solutions to old
problems.
- Individuals
need to be able to effectively communicate and collaborate with a
diverse set of people and technologies.
Simply, the success
stories of the future will be about individuals that can create solutions to
challenging problems while communicating and collaborating with an increasingly
diverse and global population. To channel
Aristotle, we will need to become “fully human”. The ubiquitous nature of information and the
application of technology through artificial intelligence will actually
establish emotive and relational skills as the dominant traits of nimble and
adaptable humans in the second half of the 21st Century.
After nearly
twenty years of working in the K16 education space, I have found the
fundamental issue impacting learning and the transfer of that learning to be
engagement. Research continues to
demonstrate that properly designed and delivered experiential pedagogy remains
one of the best ways to engage students so that they can build the skills they
need to succeed in the future.
And we need
to get moving on this important work; the future is coming for us…
Andrew H. Potter is the Director of the
University Office of Experiential Learning at the University of Georgia, one of
the nation’s leading experiential education think tanks. In this role, he directs the strategy and casts the vision for experiential education enabling every
UGA undergraduate student to connect their academic foundations to the world
beyond the classroom. Learn more at UGA
Experiential Learning. Andrew can be
contacted at andrew.potter@uga.edu.
[1] Institute
for the Future and Dell Technologies. (2017). The
Next Era of Human Machine Partnerships.
[2] Chui, Manyika, and
Miremadi. (2015). Four
Fundamentals of Workplace Automation. McKinsey & Company.
[3]
James Manyika, et al. (2017). Jobs
Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions
in a Time of Automation.
McKinsey Global Institute.
