Be Who You Are,

Be Where You Are Needed

Collaborate Generously

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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.  

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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.

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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.

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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

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