Digitalization is both a challenge to lifelong learning and a part of it. When we discuss its impact, we often focus on two issues: what we will learn and how we will learn.
Viewpoint 1: Traditional degrees lose their identification function
First, to be honest, our traditional degree system is quite outdated. Adapting to the speed of digital change is a huge challenge for our education system because it leads to an accelerated pace of knowledge renewal. We need more flexible, modular, and specialized learning methods to meet tomorrow's challenges.
Unfortunately, the current way does not meet these requirements. As learners invest more money and time to obtain prestigious diplomas, employers will find that degrees or the institutions that grant them have less and less predictive power for employees' future career success. As a result, traditional degrees lose their identification function.
Viewpoint 2: Skills will replace degrees
This phenomenon is further amplified by the increase in personnel mobility: when you can study and work anywhere in the world, the need to transfer your educational achievements to companies or countries becomes a necessity. Our current degrees neither provide flexibility nor the identification of specific skills and abilities, let alone the transferability required by digital society.
This is our second point, that skills will replace degrees in the long run. This process has already begun: recent research shows that more than three-quarters of employers consider informal learning to be very important, while less than half say that formal education is just as important. As long as you can write code or have the ability to lead different teams, it is no longer so important that college teaches you how to program or interact.
However, the problem with informal acquisition of skills is invisibility: right now, we lack sufficient tools to measure everyone's skills and make them fully transparent. Without this refined tagging function, without a specific measure of intangible skills, without the recognition of informal acquisition of skills, any new approach is useless. We need to ensure that technologies can communicate in a transparent and reliable way to fully realize their potential.
Viewpoint 3: Digitalization can measure, match and mobilize skills
Digitalization allows us to do this: measure, match and mobilize skills. Thanks to the implementation of digitalization, there is now technology that can reliably and effectively measure individual skills; we can prove actual learning outcomes and abilities, rather than relying on learning paths. Like people outside the education system, it is always difficult for us to understand why people within the education system focus on how much time students spend in class instead of how many goals they can achieve.
Once we know what a person can actually do, we can match them to jobs, by showing their skills profile, that meets the requirements of any given job. This helps us find the best person for a job, and the best job opportunity for everyone. It is also valuable evidence of whether our skills measurement is adequate.
If the skills visible today are meaningful to the job market, (digitally managed) skills passports will serve as the next generation of degrees, giving skills the specific markers they have been missing, as well as common terminology (such as the European Commission's ESCO acronym). This will not only improve and speed up the matching process, but also provide customized training opportunities for everyone, so as to truly mobilize potential.
Viewpoint 4: Digitalization enables traditional education to transcend
So, digitalization both breaks the previous system and provides a way to fix it. But its impact is also the fourth view of this article: transcendence.
By analyzing millions of job profiles and resumes every day, we can predict changes in skills and skills requirements in real time. Governments and educational institutions will no longer have to rely on incomplete and outdated statistics. With this demand data, it is now possible to measure a person's capabilities according to the skills sets currently needed. Trainers can customize training according to actual needs, and governments can use this analytical ability to proactively meet the development of the future workforce by creating long-term education strategies.
We should see that digitalization will not only disrupt the traditional learning process, but also be a solution that facilitates lifelong learning. If we use digital tools to measure, match and mobilize individual skills and analyze the skills market, we can build a better lifelong learning system.
