Professional Learning for Busy Educators

During a recent interview with EdSurge, a LinkedIn executive made the offhand comment that people will change careers 15 times over their lifetimes. The sound of a record-needle scratching cued in my head, and I thought: Is that even possible?

To be fair, the LinkedIn official meant to say people will change jobs 15 times, so some of those switches would be along the same career path. And maybe that number is right, but the narrative is that the number is going up fast.

So just how volatile will the job market be for today’s college graduates?

When a student expresses a passion for the arts, adults often become anxious about their future. What if the student decides to pursue a major in the arts? If they do, will they end up on an unstable career path that will lead inevitably to underemployment, disappointment, and struggle? These are concerns I commonly hear.

With so many job interview how-to guides out there, you'd think we'd all be nailing them by now. A new survey from recruiting solutions company JazzHR, however, shows that candidates still are making employers all over the country do face palms with a few key interview mistakes.

At first glance, it looks as though the group of young adults is building Lego. But these are actually students at the University of Cape Town’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Thinking, and they’re using the colourful blocks to design a prototype. It represents policy reform ideas around transitioning from informal to formal economies. It’s a complex system represented with very basic materials.

This is design thinking in action: human-centred, problem solving activities that ground design thinking in practice. It helps students to understand and innovatively solve challenges.

Design thinking can be used very successfully as an academic programme that goes beyond traditional university practices. It allows universities to prepare a more resilient, adaptive student cohort. These graduates are more competent to enter economies that are constantly changing. This is particularly important when higher education institutions are training students for jobs that might not yet exist or that might have changed or become redundant by the time they graduate.