Preparing Children For the Digital Workplace
“When I grow up I want to be a ….” How can we help children to gain essential technology skills and secure a job in the digital era? At the start of Tech Week 2016, Lalage Clay from the Tech Partnership explains how they are working with children, schools and employers to promote digital skills and careers, and how parents can get involved too.
Medicine, teaching, retail, law, fashion, journalism – all attractive careers that young people are queuing up to enter. But not careers that you would necessarily associate with technology. However, things are changing: pretty much every workplace is now a digital workplace, and pretty much any role you care to mention will have a digital aspect to it. Doctors and nurses must cultivate their tech skills alongside their clinical skills; fashion designers will create their new looks online; and journalists will broadcast their multimedia content across a range of digital platforms.
A frequently quoted statistic is that of pupils entering primary school each year, 75% will end up in roles that don’t currently exist. That’s enough to make any parent or teacher throw up her hands in despair – how can we prepare kids for this unknown future? Ensuring they’re developing their tech skills is the best possible start, for both ‘traditional’ and new roles – and this means developing not just their user skills, but the underlying understanding of what goes on behind the screen.
There’s plenty of imaginative curriculum development and inspirational teaching going on to promote these ideas. Nonetheless many schools struggle to find the right resources to engage students and give them a real picture of the exciting (and well paid) careers that could be open to them. Employers are all too well aware of this – there’s a real skills gap in the tech profession – and are coming together through employer organisation the Tech Partnership to help bridge the divide.
For girls aged 9 – 14, there’s TechFuture Girls, an after-school or lunchtime club that builds their skills through projects based on their favourite topics, from sport and music to celebrities and interior design. For older students, there’s a range of real-life tech challenges available through TechFuture Classroom: there’s Countdown to Chaos, for instance, a real-time simulation of a cyber-attack; or projects from companies like IBM, Capgemini and Intel. All these are mapped to the National Curriculum. And in a new initiative, the Tech Partnership Badge Academy encourages students to gain the tech skills employers value by working towards online badges that provide evidence of what they can do.
If you’re convinced by the need to build kids’ tech knowledge, pointing schools towards these resources is a helpful step. And if you’re a techie yourself, why not sign up as a TechFuture Ambassador and get out into schools to tell young people about your own passion. All the research says that being a role model is the single most important intervention you can make to get kids fired up about the digital world.
The Tech Partnership is the network of employers creating skills for the UK's digital economy. Its vision is that the UK is the go to place for digital business. The Partnership works to inspire young people about technology, accelerate the flow of talented people from all backgrounds into technology careers and help companies develop the technology skills they need for the future.
Originally Released On 02 July 2016