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Experts call for multi-pronged strategies in continuous development of human capabilities and resilience
IN ensuring the continuous investment in human capabilities and resilience, lifelong learning for blue- and ordinary white-collar workers, middle-aged mid-career workers, and the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector must be considered on a global scale.
Probably the largest social and economic endeavour that all of societies have to put effort into, lifelong learning systems need to be far more fluid and agile than traditional systems, Singapore’s Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies Tharman Shanmugaratnam opined.
While the mantra of lifelong learning is well entrenched around the world, particularly in societies which have already built reasonably well-functioning education systems, more needs to be done to address the key challenges of developing a whole system that takes people through life.
“No country has gone that far to address the needs of the blue- and ordinary white-collar workers, middle-aged mid-career workers, and the SME population, but it can be done and we have to set our minds to it,” Tharman said.
Blue- and ordinary white-collar workers, he pointed out, are most at risk of stagnating in the face of a far more powerful form of digital automation, but are not quite engaged with the same intensity in lifelong learning.
“We have to find ways to provide conveniently, and in relevant ways, equal opportunities to quality learning for every segment of the workforce,” he stressed in his speech at the inaugural Global Lifelong Learning Summit (GLLS) held in Singapore last month.
The GLLS was jointly organised by SkillsFuture Singapore and Singapore’s Institute for Adult Learning.
Middle-aged mid-career workers, Tharman went on to elaborate, come with real experiences in life, want to have a role in deciding what and how they should learn, and learn quite differently from children.
“The art and science of training adults is quite different from that involved in school and regular university systems. We have to pay attention to that, and not just roll out programmes.
“We have to adapt systems of teaching and learning to meet the needs of these adults – far more problem-centred learning than content-oriented learning,” he asserted, adding that delivering such learning through high-quality programmes is still a challenge.
The SME sector, which accounts for the bulk of employment in every society, Tharman noted, illustrates why the world is “still in the early days of lifelong education”.
“SMEs don’t have the scale to develop their own training programmes, don’t often have a range of job options to allow for career advancements within the firms, and are often preoccupied with their survival and cash flow; the ability to think three or five years ahead is typically very limited.
“We have to think of ways in which the lifelong learning system can address that – how we aggregate skill demands in the sector and deliver programmes that help the SMEs,” he said.
Also speaking at the event, Unesco Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) director David Atchoarena said stakeholders globally should not forget lifelong learning for all, citing the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.
“The most important challenge for public policies is to ensure the strategies will benefit all learners, especially those who are most disadvantaged in society. The effectiveness of the policies will only be measured as successful if they manage to reach all,” he said.
Referencing a recent report published by the Unesco International Commission on the Futures of Education, Atchoarena added there is an emerging discussion on a new right for individuals not just to education, but also lifelong learning.
This, he said, provides the basis for a new social contract for education and has led to over 140 countries adopting the Marrakech Framework for Action, which provides a new vision for adult education and learning in years to come, including the recognition of the need to establish a right to lifelong learning.
“We at the UN are monitoring the development and we have combined more than 50 policy documents from countries around the world which have established lifelong learning strategies or policies.
“We are seeing gradually the emergence of interministerial, intercentral or interstructural holistic approaches towards lifelong learning, and no longer individual, segmented policies being implemented,” he said.
Developing a national framework aside, Atchoarena said, what is also meaningful is to have a territorial approach, which is being promoted through the Unesco Global Network of Learning Cities.
Involving 76 countries, it is an international network comprising almost 300 cities that share inspiration, know-how and best practices among each other.
A new architecture
In developing a system for lifelong learning, it is important to look at the aggregation and anticipation of skill demands across the economy.
“And we need to connect it to the content and methods of training, to those in the workforce and jobseekers, and to the firms, particularly the SMEs, while bearing in mind the wraparound of coaching that we need to provide to workers and the SMEs,” said Tharman.
He also said that the system must be able to help that dual orientation of serving both the needs of the firms and the individuals.
“There is a different set of incentives and motivations on the part of enterprises and individuals, and we must recognise that.
“The enterprises would want skills for today that are specific to their needs, whereas the individuals would want skills that develop their careers not just for today, but also tomorrow,” he noted, adding that education and training institutions may need to be intermediaries between the firms and the individuals.
Finding a way to aggregate different lifelong learning platforms is just as important to avoid fragmentation in the system, which is unlike a school system with a national curriculum or national system of credentials, or a university system.
“Complexity is an enemy for most individuals, enabling them to stop planning their future with some companies. We have to ensure the system aggregates information and different platforms. Make life easier for ordinary workers,” said Tharman.
Another key part of developing the architecture of lifelong learning is evolving the existing system of credentialism, he offered.
“We must evolve it so we don’t have just one credential in life but move towards a system where people think of a portfolio of credentials – formal education, skills-based credentials, and industry-validated or education institution-validated credentials.
“The formal credentials we know of today will themselves have to evolve in a way that the degree itself builds in microcredentials,” he said.
Weighing in, Aaron Benavot, a Global Education Policy professor at the School of Education in the University at Albany, the United States, said a comprehensive conceptualisation of lifelong learning should be accompanied by a holistic comprehensive accounting that would involve a lot of information and data, be it at the national, regional or international level.
“By and large, we have this in very few cases. We have a data evidence challenge. The vast majority of information about lifelong learning is primarily at the formal level.
“We know nothing systematically about non-formal and informal learning, and that is part of the reason it remains invisible, and why many lifelong learning policies remain fairly marginalised in many different settings,” he said.
To enhance the visibility of lifelong learning, Benavot emphasised mobilising resources and political will.“Until and unless the international community makes a serious effort to mobilise resources and political will to capture the myriad of ways in which people are learning informally and non-formally, in addition to formally, the agenda is going to continue to be marginalised,” he said.
He also recommended reconsidering “putting all eggs in the SDG4 basket”.
“There are other baskets in the SDG agenda that have promise. The climate agenda, for example, is useful for us to consider developing the lifelong learning agenda,” he said, adding there is much to be had in developing intertwining interests in lifelong learning with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has an agenda called Action for Climate Empowerment in which there are six themes: education, training, public awareness, public access to information, public participation, and international cooperation – all of which involve lifelong learning in various forms.
He also put forward the need to rethink some of the theories of change.
“Most of the theories of change are focused on individual outcomes. They are important but part of the challenge is to figure out how we can speak to the relationship between engagement in lifelong learning and the kind of societal problems that are being met in this kind of programmes.
“We need to develop evidence around a more institutional, broader, macro, societal impact of lifelong learning, be it economic, political or environmental,” he said.
What’s happening regionally
South Korea
“Our lifelong learning journey began in the 1980s when the Constitution of the Republic of Korea declared that the state has an obligation to promote lifelong education. Under the Constitution, there is also a Framework Act on Education and a dedicated article that states all forms of lifelong education of all citizens shall be encouraged. There is also a Lifelong Education Act specialising in the promotion of lifelong learning in the country.
We then introduced several landmark policies but more importantly, in 2008, the National Institute for Lifelong Education (NILE) was established by the Education Ministry (MOE). NILE connects systems among institutions and various ministries, recognises non-formal and informal learning, and promotes informal education among adults at the national, province, local and municipal levels, among others.
We had a national plan promoting lifelong education in 2002. Every five years, we renew the master plan. We are now working closely with the MOE towards making the fifth plan. We try to maintain the participation rate of 40% to 50% of the population, and to focus more on the uneducated and underprivileged in the country.
The potential student population is reducing dramatically in South Korea due to its low work rate, in addition to recent demographic changes. Many universities are looking at recruiting older people into degree programmes, and national institutes try to promote and establish independent colleges and institutions in individual universities so that the target learners can access the university programmes more easily.
Among our other initiatives include: financing and supporting 30 universities to recruit more adults into degree programmes; implementing the Korean Massive Open Online Course (K-MOOC) for South Koreans to access higher level programmes for free; and collaborating with broadcasting companies such as the Korea Educational Broadcasting System to create more easily accessible K-MOOC programmes. In addition, the MOE has designated 50 cities in South Korea as members of the Unesco Global Network of Learning Cities.” – NILE president Dae Joong Kang
Singapore
“We have taken a life course approach to education, reframing our thinking from ‘MOE for Schools’ to ‘MOE for Life’. We have a six-pronged approach to achieve this.
1. Helping our workers make sense of their future skills needs and take ownership of their skills upgrading.
Currently, every Singaporean has access to the SkillsFuture Skills Passport that documents their skills, certificates and licences acquired throughout life. This helps them to track and identify potential skills gaps. In addition, the MySkillsFuture portal guides individuals to subscribe to courses they need to close the skills gaps for their next jobs. We intend to improve such customised skills advisory for all Singaporeans. We will also be strengthening support for mid-career workers, especially those in their 40s and 50s who face greater risk of displacement or stagnation. We are looking at ways to reduce the high opportunity costs of training for these individuals.
2. Organising our system to better articulate and aggregate the demand for new skills, and to activate the supply by the institutes of higher learning and private training providers.
We are piloting different models where intermediaries will be formally appointed for their sectors, and given the responsibility and resources to aggregate enterprise demand, activate training supply and facilitate the matching of jobseekers to job vacancies, especially among the more fragmented sectors. These intermediaries may be the trade associations, business chambers, institutes of continuous learning, the labour movement or even other new and innovative institutions.
3. Leveraging technology for us to achieve retraining and upskilling at scale and at speed.
For example, SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) is already working with workforce analytics firms to trawl for information on the Internet, job boards and talent portals to help identify new and emerging skills relevant for Singaporeans. SSG publishes these insights on a regular basis to inform individuals of in-demand skills and jobs to guide decisions. We now also publish a yearly Skills Demand for the Future Economy report.
4. Deepening research into adult learning pedagogies, and elevating our Institute for Adult Learning (IAL) into a National Centre of Excellence for Adult Learning (NCAL).
Singapore established the IAL in 2008, initially as a training centre and qualifier for adult educators. Over time, it has developed expertise in research on andragogy, built links with enterprises and, more importantly, established a strong international network. We will increase our investment in the research into adult education pedagogies. The IAL will also spearhead the proliferation of new training pedagogies and technologies across training providers for adult education. As a national centre, it will corral the expertise and knowledge already built up in our local universities, polytechnics and private institutions, build on the body of local and international research established in adjacent fields, work closely with the industry, and exchange views through international networks.
5. Upskilling and reskilling our training fraternity.
As we strengthen our research into adult education, we must translate these new and fresh skills into our teaching fraternity’s skillsets as well, and this must also be done at speed and at scale.
6. Tightening the nexus between frontier industry and academia.
We have emphasised this to the institutes of higher learning, and encouraged them to ramp up industry attachments for their staff, to ensure the currency of their knowledge. We must broaden the schemes available for industry practitioners to be part of the teaching fraternity either as part-time faculty or as adjunct lecturers.
Different players in our ecosystem – individuals, industries and institutions – will all have to work closely together, and we will need to develop new systems, intermediaries and portals to guide our people in order to achieve this.” – Singapore’s Education Minister Chan Chun Sing
Indonesia
“Our Indonesian President Joko Widodo initiated Prakerja, which was launched in 2019 and implemented in 2020, with the purpose of increasing the productivity, competitiveness and entrepreneurship of the workforce in Indonesia. Our priority is to lessen the skills gap in our society with this large-scale programme involving five million participants per year and a policy board comprising 14 ministers headed by the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs.
There are more than 1,000 training opportunities in the system which match the trend of vacancies in job portals and are also relevant for SME entrepreneurs. After being selected to join the programme via online registration, participants are given vouchers with certain values. With the vouchers, they can go for any training on six e-marketplace platforms. After the completion of training, they will get cash incentives and receive job recommendations that match the training that they have completed.
Through the training, participants can develop hard skills and soft skills which help strengthen their know-how, as well as leadership, interpersonal, cognitive and digital skills. The training includes areas such as sales and marketing, administration, mechanical repair, foreign languages, information and communications technology, finance, agriculture, and food and beverage, and is curated step by step by the e-marketplace and assessors from universities. In Prakerja, participants are given the responsibility to develop their skills based on their preferences.
In developing Prakerja, we studied a lot of data evidence and research. We wanted to make sure the programme answered the problems in the market: money (solved using vouchers), information (solved via the e-marketplace platforms), and time (solved with the flexibility of online training). We involved many partners, namely, banks, job portals, e-marketplace, training providers, local governments, research institutions and private companies.” – Project Management Office (PMO) Prakerja executive director Denni Puspa Purbasari
