The Future of Work

 A short while back I was asked to speak at an event about ways that we can prepare students for the future of work. I was still working at Google at the time, and I thought there was an angle to the question about preparing students for the future of work that is sometimes overlooked. Here was my response...

I need to start by pointing out that there have been two systems that have influenced my own perspective on the future of work, and the education system is only one of them. The other one has been in “the workplace”, or the enterprise, or business, or whatever you want to call it, in the work I’ve done outside of schools for the last decade or so. I think it’s worth calling this out because as much as schools like to prepare students for “the future of work”, schools are also filled with people who often have only experienced what work looks like inside a school.  I think I can say that what work looks like inside a school and outside a school can look very different. So we just need to acknowledge that when you talk about “the future of work”, the future can look very different depending on what kind of work you do.

I spent almost 30 years in schools and for most of that time I would like to think that I did my best to help students prepare for their future, not my past. That said, I now think most of my understanding about “the future of work”, or what work might look like in the future, has come from my time in the enterprise, much more than my time in school. And even then, I’m not so sure that what work looks like at Google is necessarily the most typical example of what work looks like everywhere.

This is certainly not to downplay the very real and important work that takes place in a school. What teachers do IS real work. What students do IS real work. One of my pet peeves is when people describe things that happen outside of a school as happening “in the real world” as though things that go on inside schools are somehow less than real.  They’re just as real, but also different. 

If you pick up almost any school prospectus you’ll find all sorts of motherhood statements about how those schools are preparing students for the future. For the real world beyond school. Which of course they are. And perhaps it’s this drive to “prepare students for the future” that might lead you to believe that the influence of the “real world” outside of schools is successfully having an impact on the way we design learning in our classrooms, and in many cases, even on the way we design the actual classrooms themselves. Every teacher that visits the Google office inevitably says how much they wish their classrooms were “more like Google”. 

At Google, we work in vibrant, interesting spaces. We function in teams, and collaborate on almost everything. We value good ideas, no matter where they come from, and getting things done often relies on projects and sprints where people work together. In many ways, companies like Google have defined what a modern workplace looks like, and you might suggest, goes some way to defining what “the future of work” might look like.

There’s no doubt that over the last several decades, schools have been placing a much higher value on the importance of collaboration, teamwork, project based learning, critical thinking, and so on - all working methodologies that are valued in most modern enterprises, including Google. So in many ways, this supports the idea that we are already preparing our students for the future of work. And of course we’ve also seen the infusion of technology into the kinds of things that students do, which, again, is a fairly essential component of how a lot of work is done in “the real world”. You could argue that a lot of the things we do in schools these days are, in fact, already very helpful in preparing students for the future of work.

But I’d like to believe that we have been making these shifts in education because there is genuine value in teaching and learning this way, and that treating students as the architects of their own learning is not just to help them be more productive in some imaginary future world of work, but because it treats them as capable learners, and acknowledges the fundamental ways that people actually learn, and is the right and respectful way to help people learn. It seems self-evident to me that students SHOULD be learning how to work in teams and collaborate together on projects that matter to them, and learning how to best support their work, and their thinking, through the wise use of technology.  

I would very much be bothered by the idea that we do all of this because we are only preparing students for the “future of work”, and that the end goal of education was nothing more than preparing students for some imagined distant workplace. That the idea that education should be intrinsically interesting and useful and empowering for its own sake was not enough of a reason to educate.

As John Dewey once said, “education is not preparation for life, but is life itself”