Preparing for the tide: skills and education of the 21st century' is the summary of previous GEFF sessions that was presented in Sao Paulo in August 2015. The report focused on the looming global changes and challenged that could only be faced with rebuilt educational ecosystems at different levels and new skills obtained worldwide. The prominent feature of this event was a list of key literacies for every person who would live in the world of self-guided lifelong learning. The message, announced in Sao Paolo, was touched with a sense of urgency, since the forthcoming socioeconomic crises are inevitable and overwhelming with only new network-based adduction being able to resolve them

1. Preparing for the
tide: skills &
education for the
21 century
Pavel Luksha, Global Education Futures
Sao Paulo, WorldSkills International
12 August 2015

2. Global Education Futures: what is it
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A unique international project that aims to understand challenges of educational
systems around the globe from the ‘frontier’ perspective. We seek to understand:
• What skills will be required in the economy & society to succeed in 21 century
and to meet global challenges?
• What changes should be made to existing educational systems and what new
forms of educations should be cultivated to create these skills?
• What policies and non-governmental initiatives can bring forward new
educational models?
Gradual scaling up over last 7 years:
• We started our journey in 2008 with efforts of ‘grassroot’ vision building among
Russian educational innovators
• Since 2011, our vision building work served as a ‘guiding light’ for policies and
new educational projects, including those supported by Agency of Strategic
Initiatives; around 5 thousand experts participated in our vision building
sessions on future of skills & learning in Russia
• Since 2014, we conduct international vision building sessions, where around
300 international experts joined our sessions in Moscow, Silicon Valley, Kazan,
Paris, and Berlin to build vision for skills & education in 20 years perspective

3. World 2035: where are we going
• Future industry:
• highly autonomous industrial cyber-physical manufacturing for mass-
scale production +
• highly localized customized manufacturing (based on 3D printing &
similar technologies), food production & energy generation on
demand
• Green / renewable production, energy, transportation & services
• IT is everywhere:
• total connectivity & mobility
• Intense use of AI / artificial agents (incl. personal assistance)
• hybrid reality (AR / VR)
• wide use of brain-machine communication (BCI)
• Smart / adaptive human-centered technological environments
• Unmanned adaptive transportation is ubiquitous
• Highly personalized services in healthcare & wellness, education,
entertainment etc., supported by authentic serving / ethics of
• Human practices of ‘ludic’ communities that naturally blend working,
living, and creativity
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* This description focuses on ‘global best practices’. We
acknowledge the diversity of geopolitical & economical scenarios
that different countries of the world may face in next 20 years

4. World 2035: big challenges ahead
• Increased complexity of society and accelerated change of technologies &
social practices
• What worked before may not work in the future
(new practices / skills / professions)
• We need new systems of governance: collective intelligence + AI
• Complex but fragile: global security depends on grassroot resilience &
peacemaking
• Greening of economy & society:
• New R&D to reduce human impact on nature or to make it beneficial
• Rebuilding of cities
• Displacement of human labor by robotics & AI
• Creating new jobs, esp. self-employment & human-centered services
• Reducing effects of inequality created by new technologies
• New models of living: moving to sharing / coop economies
• Balance between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ worlds: reducing negative impact
on individual & collective mind
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5. 5
Omnipresent
ICT
Robotics / IoT /
autonomous
energy / …
21 century literacies:
• attention management /
mindfulness
• information hygiene
• programming (as task-setting)
Expanding domain of
‘new service economy’
focused on creating
unique human
experiences through
• personal
connection
(empathy /
bonding)
• creativity
New urban jobs created
around
• green cities
• healthy cities
• distributed &
connected cities
Domain of support to lifelong education (that expands to include
personal development, body & mind fitness, therapy etc.) becomes a
new large economic sector with dozens of new types of jobs
Design, coordination &
maintenance of complex
tech environments (ca.5%
of jobs)
Management + knowledge work as complex problem solving with
dynamic collective intelligence
Future skills: what do 21 century
economy & society want?
Skills of the future are needed not only for employability & successful career-
building, but also for good citizenship and higher quality of personal life.
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6. Future skills: key literacies & basic skills
• Concentration & attention management
• Empathy & emotional intelligence
• Collaboration (as a critical skill that should be embedded in
many aspects of work & learning)
• Thinking: critical thinking, problem oriented thinking, system
thinking, co-creative thinking
• Creativity
• Working multi-disciplinary environments + emerging ‘lingua
franca’ (incl. system engineering & economics)
• 21 century literacies: global awareness, health literacy, civic
literacy, environmental literacy, financial literacy etc.
• Information / technology / media skills, including information
hygiene
• Flexibility & adaptability
• Ability to unlearn / relearn throughout life
• Responsibility (incl. ethics of human work / human service)
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7. 7
The current educational model is flawed by design: it prepares people for
skills of the past, not skills of the future!
• We cannot teach people to be creative by giving them standard tasks
• We cannot teach people to be collaborative by putting them in
competition against each other
• We cannot teach people to be lifelong learners if we deprive them of self-
exploration and courage to learn, if we blame them for mistakes
• We cannot teach people to be empathic / emotionally intelligent by
removing emotion and focusing on cognitive abilities only
• We cannot teach people to use IT properly if we remove it from the school
• We cannot teach people to be mindful if we are not mindful
Educational processes and formats need to be redefined to enable the
development of 21 century workers / citizens / humans
What is How: adaptation of
education to future skill demand
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8. Self-Guided Learners:
natural lifelong learning
everywhere all the time
Global learning platforms: best of the available
knowledge & skills, global content
(‘billion student universities’)
Local learning ecosystems: existing (schools /
colleges / universities) + new formats helping to
serve
Ed tech tools that
help create
personalized
trajectories in
learning, career,
well-being etc.
Communities of
practice that
provide peer
support / guidance
Skills of the future in curriculum
Big shifts ahead: learner-centered
lifelong education
Transformation of professional education & training systems should play along with
the larger transformation of ‘industrial’ educational systems into ‘network-based’
educational eco-systems that cater to learner needs on the lifelong basis
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9. +20 years
National content
& standards
School /
university
Global
learning platforms
City & area
educational ecosystems
that support lifelong learning
City / area
(intermediary level)
Dramatic shift: from local-national to regional-global
National level (intermediary)
Global level
(lack of authority)
Up to 2010s Mid-2030s
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10. Key areas of change in education:
what needs to be done
Industrial / national / international
qualification & competence systems:
getting ready for self-guided lifelong learning, incl. lifelong ‘competence passports’ /
personal portfolios / unbundling of degrees etc.
Traditional education system
(schools / TVET / higher education):
• rebuilding curriculum for 21
century skills (incl. collaborative
not competitive design of
education processes)
• opening to practical, socially
embedded, sustainability-minded,
cross-generational learning
• learning is flipped
• teacher & learner(s) as partners
• new teacher skillset
Online learning:
• take over routine elements of
flipped school / university
• create opportunities for mobile 24/7
personalized learning
• integrate with game universes & social
media & professional networks
Urban / community learning:
• integrate opportunities for lifelong
learning & development (incl. family,
personal crises etc.)
• urban learning innovation labs as
social innovation labs + urban
entrepreneurship hubs 10

11. Last but not least: sense of urgency
Within next couple of decades, effects of technological, economic and social
transformation may bring us into a series of painful crises
• Information swamping or/and artificial intelligence beyond our understanding
• Destruction of 60-70 % jobs in industries & industry-related sectors due to
automation & artificial intelligence
• Destruction of sectors and national economies dependent on non-sustainable
energy & materials
• Cumulative environmental problems (incl. climate change, industrial pollution
and destruction of biodiversity) that render large territories uninhabitable:
‘climate refugees’, ‘water wars’, etc.
• Financial, political & military crises as a result of these massive transformations
The answer to these global challenges is skills that workers / citizen / humans
should acquire.
The creation of new skills on mass-scale depends on rebuilding, upgrading and
expanding our local, national and global educational eco-systems.
We only have years, not decades, to start the transformation.
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