The Learning Country – comment by CEO Craig Robertson

Do you know the feeling that something’s right but there’s a missing piece?

I recall the same feeling in defusing the Y2K Bomb.  For you young ones – if you are younger than 40 – it was the switch from 31 December 1999 to 1 January 2000. Us older generation was worried planes would fall from the sky and computers spin into endless loops because 00 follows 99 in the 2-digit year in computer code. Rest assured we were safe because we all had plans a mile thick replete with strategies and mitigations. (The Y2K coordinator at my work held a midnight barbeque on the roof of the building, ready to rappelle down the side if the lifts seized!).

The experience was the first time we realised our dependence on technology. We muddled through on that occasion but today the risks are far higher.

Those stakes have been described in full by the Digital Transformation Expert Panel in the report released a fortnight ago – The Learning Country – Digital Skills Transformation Strategy.

Research it cites predicts that in 13 years (2034) automation will displace 2.7 million Australian workers from jobs, 56 per cent of whom are male and it will augment the work capacity of 4.5 million Australian workers, leading to a 15 per cent capacity uplift to Australian businesses.

The recommendations are focused on current businesses and existing workers as businesses are best placed to benefit from digitally enabled transformation and it is existing workers most likely to be impacted but can generate the dividend for their employer and themselves if the upskilling is right.

As with all these things the important point is to look at the areas of failure that justify governments caring. After all, if there’s a 15 per cent productivity uplift available, why wouldn’t business hop on to it.

There is plenty of justification. Firstly, the Government has realised the lost opportunity to Australia if technology is not taken up. The Budget announced several strategies to build a digital economy by 2030 and, ironically, it relies on humans on several fronts.

Firstly, we need to grasp the opportunity. Head in the sand from businesses offers little apart from a mouth full of sand.

Secondly, ICT skilled practitioners are needed to bring automation to life.

Thirdly, we need workers capable of leveraging the new technology and, as the report points, out jobs will be more human-centred where people come together with automation.

Fourthly, if business is more on-line and reliant on adept users, a broad capability is required to engage knowingly on-line.

The solution?

The ICT Training Package has been renewed but is it an analogue approach to training (enforced by training package policy) in a digital world?

Higher order cognitive skills and capabilities are needed but I’m still searching for qualification reform or the AQF to authorise these into learning.

Governments are reviewing the National Foundation Skills Strategy which will include digital literacy and the extended JobTrainer includes 10,000 places for digital skills courses.

The piece that’s missing from my perspective is a clear answer on what are digital skills and how are they codified for teaching and learning? Globally, there appears to have been little serious effort to describe the best way of collating and teaching digital literacy and skills, especially for the regular worker. Industry can’t do it alone. After all they’ve had to commission this report.

If digital literacy is a foundation skill, then surely it’s just that, a foundation upon which many digital practices can be constructed. Our current training package templates forces foundation skills to be deconstructed to be demonstrated against elements of a task. My reading recovery days in primary school teaching taught me that this is probably the most disempowering of education approaches. I wait with interest to see the new foundation skills strategy.

I’m reminded of comments from the previous chief scientist – Professor Alan Finkel – for good (STEM) education, students need deep discipline knowledge… whatever they’re learning, that knowledge has to be deep. I’m still to see serious attempts by the Australian Industry Skills Committee, which curates knowledge into training packages, for a reasonable explanation of how discipline knowledge is dealt with in VET – even in the most recent ICT package.

I’m not sure either if the answer lies in learning to operate certain software or kit. Ask any programmer who backed C++ or Fortran for their career.

During the past week Microsoft announced it will no longer support Internet Explorer. It will go the way of other world barnstorming technology. Remember Yahoo or Facetime? At its peak, Yahoo was valued at $125 billion (US) and after refusing to buy Google for $3 billion in 2002 because it thought it was overvalued, it has vanished. Myspace was the front runner of social media but it ignored its competitor, Facebook, and sold for $35 million (US) in 2011.

I’m genuinely perplexed about the approach to teaching and learning for digital literacy and skills but I’m confident the Digital Skills Organisation will give it a red hot go.

All up though, let’s hope the Government picks up the recommendations in The Learning Country as that’s a valuable and needed first step. It’s the journey we need to focus on next.