Be Who You Are,
Be Where You Are Needed
Collaborate Generously
A Different Kind of Preparation
STEAM, Maker Education, Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking and all of the many and evolving frameworks being used to adapt to our rapidly changing world requires a different kind of career preparation. For me, I have found the intersection between The Arts and technology to be incredibly powerful for leveraging education. What I learned from this in regards to career paths is that who we are should fully inform what we do.
I was counseled over and over in my education to pick something, stop exploring, commit to a known and proven path. I would be in a difficult spot if I had done so. As an unconventional student, I would be competing for really desirable jobs with a rapidly shrinking work force. I would have had a great deal of difficulty using my strengths in the PhD tracks I would have pursued and the college professor job market would have likely pushed me into adjunct work teaching art, poetry or literature. As a Type 1 diabetic, that would have been a hard road to travel. By creating my own path, I was inadvertently preparing for today's job market.
I don't claim any particular wisdom in many of the choices I made but they have given me unique insights. My takeaway is this: In a world of cheap products and highly competitive job markets, those who are able to provide unique insights, creative delivery, and work in a field and in positions where they operate from their personal strengths and interests are better able to maintain competitive marketability while maximizing personal satisfaction. In a world where the next generation of jobs have yet to be invented, much less defined, we have to educate for adaptability and self-knowledge if we want our young people to be able to identify and pursue emergent careers.
This means we teach students
-
know themselves and their strengths
-
identify and pursue opportunities
-
network and collaborate
-
improve or innovate current methods creatively
-
combine their natural interests with the needs of others
-
articulate how new approaches address complex problems
-
design solutions for real problems for specific people or groups