The One Thing Kids Need to Learn for the Future Job Market
by Asheesh Advani, CEO, JA Worldwide
The future of work is daunting. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), over half of the world’s young people will end up in jobs that haven’t been created yet. How can they prepare? Or, more importantly, how do we prepare young people for this journey of uncertainty?
It’s amazing to fathom that, right now, we have no idea how three out of every five 6-year-olds will eventually make their living. Yet those children will spend the next 12-plus years studying a curriculum that was developed 50 — or, in some countries, provinces, and counties, over 100 — years ago, back when the abilities to perform repetitive tasks and memorize facts were highly valued, while flexibility, self-assurance, and risk-taking were, if not discouraged, certainly not encouraged. As we embark on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will bring new and existing technologies together in ways we can’t conceive of today (smart homes and self-driving cars are just the tip of the iceberg), the exponential rate of technological breakthroughs will not only usher in all those jobs we haven’t yet thought of, but also widen the divide between those who are ready for the jobs of the future and those who are unprepared to make the leap.
At the WEF Annual Meeting today in Davos, I’m speaking on a panel called, “Reshaping the Education Ecosystem.” In conjunction with the annual meeting, the WEF has released a whitepaper entitled, “Realizing Human Potential in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: An Agenda for Leaders to Shape the Future of Education, Gender and Work.” The whitepaper broadens the dialogue about education and sets the stage for solutions that are beyond the usual prescriptions, like elevating technical and vocational education. Teaching technical skills does serve young people in the short-term job market, yes. But by training them only for the technical fields that we can comprehend today, we’re missing an opportunity to prepare kids for whatever may come.
Consider welding, a job that can yield over $100,000 in annual salary after only two years of trade school. Add a specialty like underwater welding — a critical need in offshore oil drilling — and the salary skyrockets. With metal and plastic fabrication in its boom time, training to be a certified underwater welder sounds like a safe bet.
Except that we don’t know whether welding will even exist as a future career. Welding robots are nothing new, but they’ve been so expensive that they’re beyond the reach of most companies. So while it isn’t difficult to imagine a machine that can create a perfect seam between two pieces of metal while submerged under 30 feet water, it may soon be possible to build and maintain that machine with inexpensive parts from a 3D printer. The million-dollar welding robot of the 20th century may be the $500 solution of the 21st. And such a reality may be only a few years away, given that these students built a prototype of a 3D printer-welder combo that can print sheets of fabricated metal. If we train young people only to weld, and if vocational schools sell it to them as a stable source of career earnings, they’ll be unable to cope with a welder-free future.
Without the ability and desire to relearn, retool, and reinvent themselves throughout their careers, even employees with sought-after technical skills can become irrelevant in the blink of an eye. We need to train and nurture an entire generation to succeed in jobs we cannot yet imagine, preparing them to be employable in any field, in any market, and with any technical specialty.
The conversation in Davos today will focus extensively on the topic of job creation: the skills young people need to be relevant in the future. We’re discussing skills such as digital literacy, an entrepreneurial mindset, creativity, empathy, resilience, and more. These skills are critically important, but, in my view, one particular skill must become the focal point of education today. With this one skill, all the others become possible. It’s called self-efficacy, and it’s the lynchpin to a successful future. Without it, there’s no interest in — let alone actual mastery of — soft skills and competencies that lead to job success in a rapidly changing employment market.
What Is Self-Efficacy?
Albert Bandura and Icek Ajzen pioneered the idea of self-efficacy: That people who believe they will succeed are more likely than others to actually succeed. That’s not what we’re usually taught, which is that success results from making plans with the intention of acting on those plans. But as evidenced by the millions of New Year’s resolutions that are never realized, intentionality often doesn’t convert to action. Instead, Bandura and Ajzen discovered that success is based on the belief that plans will turn into action. This confidence in their future success makes individuals more capable of completing tasks successfully, because they work harder, keep going in the face of disappointments and failures, and are more optimistic about their ability to succeed than those without the belief, but with equal amounts of skills and talent.
I’ll try to explain it using a reference that may be more familiar than the writings of Bandura and Ajzen. In The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter sees a future version of himself perform a complicated and life-saving spell that he hasn’t yet mastered in the present. When that future moment arrives and he’s called upon to act — with the lives of loved ones hanging in the balance — Harry knows without a doubt that he can perform the complex spell, because he saw himself do it in the future. It is his utter confidence in his abilities — not the skills he has demonstrated up to that point — that make it possible for him to perform the task. That, in a nutshell, is self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy, then, is a multiplier, a skill that makes all other skills possible to learn and master. Some people call it self-belief or self-confidence, but the meaning is similar enough. It’s also in the same family as Carol Dweck’s concept of the “growth mindset” and Charles Fadel’s concept of “meta-learning.” Likewise, Mark C. Thompson recently described how to build confidence and positivity — even as an adult — by analyzing the good events in our lives. Marshall Goldsmith has also written about creating positive behavior change through “triggers.” (You’ll read more about these four thought leaders below.)
How Can Self-Efficacy Be Learned?
Can self-efficacy be learned? Absolutely. In Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, Bandura suggested four ways to increase self-efficacy:
- Mastering skills through hands-on experience
- Observing others with self-efficacy achieve success
- Hearing that others believe in one’s ability to succeed
- Rerouting negative thoughts into positive ones
1) Mastering Skills through Hands-On Experience
Of these, according to Bandura, the first (mastering skills) is overwhelmingly correlated with learning self-efficacy, and that makes sense: success begets success. If students practice setting a goal, working toward it, staying with it in spite of setbacks, and achieving it, they’ll learn that such a process will work in the future. The next time they need to learn a skill, they’ll believe they can.
I see this every day in my work as CEO of JA Worldwide, especially though our flagship offering, the JA Company Program. Middle-school, high-school, and college students roll up their sleeves and start a flesh-and-blood company, complete with a business plan, company officers, a product that has to be manufactured or assembled, suppliers to source, bills to pay, and customers to woo. The JA Company Program is often a student’s first experience being a CEO, COO, CMO, or any number of other jobs, and instead of reading about entrepreneurs like Richard Branson (whose wealth and accomplishments may seem out of reach) or Steve Jobs (who was born with natural creativity), they’re creating real products with real colleagues and earning real revenues. Living it and experiencing it gives them a taste of what’s possible in a manner that can’t be digested in a textbook. And each success (individual ones and those shared by the team) sets the stage for the expectation of future success.
Although the JA Company Program is our best-known initiative, we have more than 50 other programs that reach over 10 million young people every year. In a JA Innovation Camp, for example, students receive a social or business challenge for which they and their teammates have to find innovative solutions. In JA Finance Park, each student is assigned a career, family situation, mortgage, and other responsibilities, and then has to role-play as an adult dealing with simulated financial budgets, crises, and adventures. In JA Our Nation, students learn work-readiness skills needed for high-growth, high-demand careers. You can see that, at JA, building self-efficacy in young people is part of our theory of change. To students, our programs are hands-on, learning-by-doing interventions that feel quite different from a typical day in school.
2) Observing Others with Self-Efficacy Achieve Success
Students also learn self-efficacy by observing others achieving success, but the correlation is a bit less strong than with hands-on skill mastery. Still, whether observing their peer groups or adults, students who see others believe in their abilities to succeed — and then actually see these others succeed — are more likely to believe in their own future successes.
This, too, is a strength of the JA network. Through our JA Job Shadow Program, which now reaches young people in countries across Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America, and North America, students shadow successful businesspeople who are working in the student’s dream job. The job shadow relationship isn’t just for a day, as many students create a mentor bond that lasts throughout their careers. Every time I meet with JA students, I’m reminded that JA students are surrounded by success, which is a big contributor to the development of their self-efficacy.
Job shadowing isn’t just for students, by the way: My self-efficacy quotient probably doubled when I spent the day shadowing Jonas Prising, CEO of ManpowerGroup, so that I could soak up the work that Manpower is doing around learnability (a topic for a future article). Bottom line: You’re never too old or too experienced to gain confidence by spending the day with successful, self-effective people.
3) Hearing that Others Believe in One’s Ability to Succeed and 4) Rerouting Negative Thoughts into Positive Ones
We know we can teach self-efficacy with hands-on programs that build skill mastery and by exposing students to successful people. But schools and parents have tended to focus on the third self-efficacy teaching method (assuring students that they will succeed, regardless of their behaviors) or the fourth (telling students the key is to think positive thoughts). Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist who is widely known for her research on the growth mindset, explains the ramifications of these teaching methods through her discovery of a “false growth mindset” among parents and teachers. Instead of students seeing themselves or others succeed through hard work, which would reinforce their belief in their ability to succeed, students are assured that they will succeed (whether or not that outcome is likely, and without also discussing the work needed to succeed) or told to “think positively” about an upcoming task — a fake-it-till-you-make-it substitute for confidence. Students who then fail or experience setbacks are applauded for “trying hard,” whether or not they’ve actually exhibited the level of work necessary for success. Such teaching and parenting methods reinforce the idea that students can’t or won’t succeed, because students stop linking success with the work involved; they see it as being all about luck for those who succeed, or about not being born with the right skills for those who don’t.
Charles Fadel, founder and chairman of the Center for Curriculum Redesign and author of Four-Dimensional Education: The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed, agrees with Carol. I got to meet Charles recently, and we talked in-depth about meta-learning, or thinking about thinking, which he explained is one of the most critical requirements for educational systems in the future. (In fact, we liked Charles’ work so much that we asked him to write about it for a JA audience.) When students meta-learn, they self-reflect on how they approached their goal, determine whether and how they can change their behaviors the next time, and set out to try again — and forward-thinking schools have started incorporating the meta-learning process into the curriculum. For students, failures and setbacks become a learning opportunity and a catalyst for future successes. Instead of parents and teachers offering a half-hearty, “Good effort” after an attempt (which may not have included a focused and effective effort), they can work with students to self-evaluate and be self-reflective about the approach they took.
Mark C. Thompson, who is the New York Times bestselling author of Admired: 21 Ways to Double Your Value and co-founder of the Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship, is part of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches project with me. Mark recently wrote an article about two life-changing habits for 2017, and in it, he refers to Martin Seligman’s research into daily self-analysis. “Every night for the next week,” Seligman advises, “set aside 10 minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today, and why they went well.” His advice is echoed in this captivating and hilarious TED talk by Shawn Achor, a Harvard alum who has noted that successful people tend to move the goal post on happiness, so that actual self-fulfillment is realized with difficulty, if at all. Seligman’s techniques are helpful in addressing this issue, too.
You’re not just mulling the less-than-successful parts of your day, but the wholly successful parts, too. This is another example of meta learning, of course, which enhances your self-efficacy. Although Mark’s advice is advice for adults, it works for young people, too. In my family, my wife, Helen Rosenfeld, and I ask our twin pre-teen boys to show gratitude for three events or people they encounter throughout their day. While they easily come up with one or even two, they have to dig deep for the third, often flipping situations they perceived as neutral or negative into positive ones for which they can be thankful. We’ve seen evidence of how this is building optimism and self-confidence in our kids. One of my sons, for example, tells me how this daily routine has changed his perspective on little disappointments: “Instead of complaining about the ice cream flavor that I wanted running out, I would be grateful that we even got ice cream in the first place.”
Until I met Marshall Goldsmith, I didn’t fully understand the power of daily routines to improve self-efficacy. Marshall is also one of the world’s leading leadership thinkers, who coaches many of the most successful job creators at Fortune 500 companies and policy leaders at organizations such as the World Bank. Marshall’s recent book, Triggers, is a prescription for taking personal responsibility for behavior change and recognizing environmental and psychological triggers that set you back. One of Marshall’s recommendations is to use a daily routine of “active questions” that measure our effort, not our results. For example, if you’re faced a challenging relationship problem with your friend, don’t blame your friend, your social circumstances, or your bad luck. Instead, he recommends asking yourself daily (daily!) what you have personally done to address the issue. Self-confidence is borne from personal responsibility.
So What?
Self-efficacy can sound like a riddle: An individual’s belief in the ability to adapt to the workplace of the future is what allows an individual to adapt to the workplace of the future. Said another way, young people must believe that they can successfully adapt to a rapidly changing world as a necessary condition for these children to successfully adapt in the face of rapid change. Moreover, the confidence necessary to be adaptable and learn continuously depends on having confidence in the ability to become more skilled than before.
That’s why JA is so focused on measuring and tracking self-efficacy, difficult as it is to both understand and measure. With well over 100 million JA alumni who have completed our programs, we’re able to compare cohorts that are identical in every way, except for their participation in JA, and then map how JA impacted their financial and career successes. Junior Achievement USA recently released a study of our alumni in the United States that correlates the self-efficacy gained through JA Finance Park with money-management decisions later in life.
We also need to determine how many touch points are required for self-efficacy to permeate into a student’s very being. We know it’s a lot, which is why JA can’t do it alone. No single non-profit organization can. Developing self-efficacy is a job that has to include parents, daycares, schools, after-school programs, other non-profit organizations and all the other ways that young people spend their time. It’s going to take a lot of people and organizations — a lot of interventions — before a child has the confidence that self-efficacy brings.
In the future workplace, individuals with self-efficacy will understand that their skill sets aren’t fixed, but instead can be learned and updated to match the needs of the work at hand. Challenges and setbacks won’t be overwhelming but will open up deeper opportunities to learn. Mastery of new skills will not only be possible, but expected. The young people of today will be the self-effective workers of the future, who will move seamlessly through the jobs, careers, and technologies that we can’t envision today.
