Future Skills – The Future of Learning and Higher Education

In times of organizations in global networks and of constant acceleration to product cycles, the model of qualification for future jobs seems to be questioned. With ever-faster technological advances penetrating all spheres of our lives, work and society, leading to an excess of information and choices, it seems that society is barely beginning to develop ways of dealing with it.

It is in this context that the research initiative Future Skills – The Future of Learning and Higher Education was launched in 2015 under the responsibility of Ulf-Daniel Ehlers and Sarah A. Kellermann of the Baden Wurttemberg-Cooperative State University in Karlsruhe, Germany.

This is a research on learning and changes in organizations for the future, their vision of the future, workplace and definitions of future skills. This involves a methodological and data triangulation in three separate modules built one over the other.

A first module provides an analysis of organizational competencies and skills development concepts, using expert ratings from a sample of more than 120 business and public organizations to identify future advanced organizations. The second module presents a series of in-depth interviews with more than 20 experts on human resources and business, as well as students from 17 different organizations. And a third module consisting of the Delphi Survey on future skills, and drivers and scenarios for the future of learning and higher education, a survey covering the space for development in which HEI will evolve in the future. It describes future skills within a model that is structured in three dimensions: subjective, related to individual development; objective, social oriented; and organizational and environmental matters.

This research seeks to clearly establish which drivers of change in HE will be relevant in the near future and how HEI that are driven through these pillars of change will develop. It also intends to obtain clarity on the description of future skills and their nature.

Access Future Skills – The Future of Learning and Higher education. Results of the International Future Skills Delphi Survey through the following link