What is it all worth?
In about 20 minutes I’ll be in a taxi on my way to the airport to visit the United Nations International School in Hanoi. In preparing for the conference I’ve been up dating a couple of my slides and like to use Google as an example of what skills companies are looking for in today’s work force.
Here’s the list of job openings:
So looking at the list I tried to figure out which of these jobs you could have predicted would have been here say 5 years ago.
Not knowing what a “DoubleClick Rich Media Campaign Manger” would do I clicked on the link.
Here are the requirements for that job:
Questions:
Which of these skills do students need a college degree for
If you wanted to do this job could you learn the skills without going to a traditional school?
What do we need to be preparing students for if one of the top 100 companies to work for has these skills/knowledge as their requirements?
Just some questions to ponder while I’m on the plane. 🙂
Based on the list of skills you have here, I would say that you wouldn’t have to go to college for this job. But I would also interpret this list to be the skills of a production worker. A job classification that has never required college. Perhaps the college aspect is all the other stuff you learn, the other experiences you have, besides the hard skills. I wonder what skills this persons’ supervisor has or would need? I wonder who thinks up the various strategies for targeting markets? And who pours over data to interpret and predict trends worth pursuing- or better yet to create trends? What qualifications would they need? And what would be the best way to develop these skills?
And, of course if all we are teaching is job skills, then are we really educating lifelong learners?
Another part of this whole question could be: What about Liberal Arts Education?
We see such an emphasis and need for skills based proficiencies that I sometimes wonder what happens to studying great philosophers, art, history and the like. Not everyone can be a Renaissance Man (and by that I actually included females) with skill in poetry, science, art and history but those provide a powerful base for the application of the skills in meaningful ways.
This coming from a Science Teacher!