Entire journey from education to self-sustained careers needs to be transformed - find here the main lessons learned from My Generation at Work
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04 August 2015What needs to be understood in city policymaking, education and employment – and by young people themselves - is that the jobs are not there waiting for you as a package to match the assembled skills created in your education. This is still the prevailing way of looking at things, but it is mistaken. Instead, the competencies, which match the opportunities, represent a composite. Drawn from formal education, free-time activities and informal interests they are ‘carved out’, often from different pieces grabbed from connections and assimilated. This also means young people need to be taken aboard as real partners and cocreators to transform the way skills are developed. Today’s young people need to use opportunity to create skills and networks anywhere.
The second thing to realise is that careers and job requirements, besides asking for self-directed, initiative and communication skills, have become increasingly ‘mixed’, or ‘hybrid’ also in the sense that salaried and entrepreneurial careers no longer exist as separately as they used to. Today you might start with a salaried job, but eventually morph into self-employment or a business, or be a part-time salaried worker, and part-time entrepreneur at the same time. Education is not yet comprehensively geared into this.
All this means, that a more fruitful and realistic attitude towards the new labour market is acting more like an entrepreneur building your own ‘life enterprise’, regardless how you actually start your career, or what you become. You are better prepared for the new labour market with skills to create and manage a hybrid career.
The key policy message coming out from My Generation at Work is that the entire journey from education to self-sustained careers needs to be transformed – education needs to be transformed into enterprising curriculums, career counselling needs to embrace enterprising and relations to work in new ways, and creative spaces of connection need to be established to connect young people, educators, mentors and business people. Not only for the already well off, but for everybody.
Read more about the main lessons learned in our project in the following reports:
- Be Inspired by My Generation at Work Stories - Enterprising Curriculums, Ideas and Connections to Work - Do you want to know about new ways of becoming an entrepreneur? About new ways of educating to be an entrepreneur? How to inspire young people? Get inspired by My Generation at Work stories.
- Enriching Youth Policies in Cities - Do you want to learn more about the journey of the My Generation at Work project? Here you find a reader with the main points of My Generation at Work and a lot of references to materials, tools and websites.
- Cocreating Careers -This paper explores and explains some of the key ideas and suggestions of My Generation at Work concerning this transformation of the ecosystem of career counselling - how to cocreate careers with spaces of connection.
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