Icdk outlook No. 04, May 2019 The Future of Education

3.3 
Implications for other generations 
3.3.1 Life-long-learning: re-skilling the existing workforce 
It is not only the educational institutions that are responsible for teaching the soft 
skills in demand. Businesses play a vital role in re-skilling their workers, and life-
long learning is becoming increasingly important in the age of automation. A large 
number of companies, including in the US, are acknowledging their responsibility in 
ensuring constant learning among their workforce. More than half of large private-
sector organizations believe that corporations are responsible of taking lead in 
addressing the potential skills gap related to automation over the next five years, 

---

 
 
Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education 
19 
and less than 10% deem it up to the educational system
21
. Some companies in the 
US already prepare for the future of work by educating and reskilling their own 
workers. As an example, the American Telecommunications company
AT&T have 
invested $1B in re-skilling their workers. The initiative is aimed at 100,000 of 
AT&T’s 250,000 workers to re-orient their skillset towards software instead of 
hardware and hence prepare them for a future, where many hardware functions 
and tasks most likely will become automated
22
. Companies (as well as workers) 
thus play an increasing part in up- and reskilling, and the rise of educational 
technology provides efficient and flexible ways of delivering corporate training. 
3.3.2 Primary education: closing the skills-gap of tomorrow 
Acknowledging the need for different skills in the future is also taling place in lower 
levels of education in Silicon Valley. Children will need to learn how to understand 
technology both ethically, creatively and technically. Even though companies play a 
role in re-skilling their workforce it is double the work if the workforce coming out 
of the educational system is not prepared for work in a digital world. This also 
means fostering an interest within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and 
Mathematics) in primary education to supply the skills in demand in the future. 
Some signals of change are already showing, as an increasing number of 
educational technologies are being used in schools, where especially gamification is 
becoming a trend to ensure motivation as well as active learning among children. 
One way of doing this is by gamifying the traditional curriculum, which is not only a 
way to motivate children but also a way to orient learning towards new skills.