1 Introduction

“The effects of schooling, the way it alters a man’s capacity and will to do things, depends not only on what he learns, or the way he learns it, but also on why he learns it. That is at the basis of the distinction between schooling which is education, and schooling which is only qualification, a mere process of certificating — or ‘credentialling’.” (Dore, 1976, p. 8)

Setting aside the (serious and ongoing) casual sexism, Dore’s statement defines the challenge facing the evolving higher education systems of every country. Each generation needs to create a university that responds to its needs (Geiger, 2011) and that prepares each generation for the future needs of society. Historically, the degree, and higher education generally, have been considered as necessities for progress and success individually and for communities as a whole. This has evolved over time in many countries, New Zealand in particular, to create a dominating expectation that people start life with a degree (Carnevale et al., 2012; Marginson, 2016c), but also a separation or disconnection from the life that they subsequently lead and the way that their education supports their future success. This can lead to what Dore has defined as the “diploma disease” (Dore, 1976) which speaks to the disconnect between the acquisition of educational qualifications and the application of that education and skill in other contexts.

The diploma disease is apparent where qualifications are needed to gain employment but where the workplace culture prevents any autonomy or initiative in the application of the worker’s skills (Sennett, 1998), a process described as “digital Taylorism” in recognition of the role that this plays in sustaining models of low-value employment (Brown et al., 2011, p. 72). The problems that can arise from the disconnection between education and the enaction of skills has been evident for more than fifty years:

“An ‘inflation’ of educational credentials of this kind involves social waste in two dimensions. First, it absorbs excess real resources into the screening process: the lengthened obstacle course is unlikely to be the most profitable way of testing for the qualities desired, because its costs are not borne by the employers whose demands give the credentials their cash value. Second, social waste will result from disappointed expectations of individuals and from the frustration they experience in having to settle for employment in jobs in which they cannot make full use of their acquired skills.” (Hirsch, 1976, p. 51)

The disconnect also illustrates the problem with the assumptions that underpin human capital theory (Becker, 1993; Fitzsimons, 2015; Gillies, 2015) which states that education is a personal investment generating a capital return that is rewarded through increased wages. Human capital theory is the economic rationale used in countries, such as New Zealand, that have systems funded at least in part through private means or through loans attracting significant interest. The separation of education from its impact on skills needs and investment by employers has led Marginson to observe: “Human capital theory and equal opportunity: these are the foundational myths of modern higher education systems” (Marginson, 2016b, p. 16).

In addition to the problem of equitably and sustainably funding the education of adults, skills challenges for the future reflect two other major themes. The first is the ability of skills development mechanisms to scale well beyond the limits of the existing models while also reducing dramatically the associated costs of development and operation for providers, and the costs of participation and achievement demonstration for learners. The second major theme is that of being responsive to a rapidly changing environment where skill expectations are shifting to reflect personal competencies needed to cope with that dynamism (Ehlers, 2020) and also the impact of growing automation and technology use for cognitive activities to grow productivity (New Zealand Productivity Commission [N.Z.P.C.], 2020).

The scaleability of skills mechanisms has been apparent as a major driver for change in tertiary education since the last millennium. Costs of university education have outpaced inflation for decades, making degree education increasingly unaffordable (Fincher & Katsinas, 2017) even as demand for skills grow and productivity growth stalls in many countries, even without the further burden of the COVID pandemic (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2020). The driver for this cost disconnect between education and the wider economy, also known as the “cost disease” (Archibald & Feldman, 2010; Bowen, 2012), is attributed to the dependence on human faculty and other teachers as the primary mechanism for delivery.

Another factor driving costs arises from the dual nature of qualifications. Historically, qualifications have carried significant social impact, signalling the worth of a potential employee in the same way that a bird uses its plumage, in effect streamlining the identification of skills by employers through the proxy of the qualification (Arrow, 1973; Hussey, 2012; Spence, 1973). The operation of this mechanism is evident in the competition to gain access to top-ranked institutions by students and their families (Golden, 2006). Hirsch (1976) identified the coexistence of a material economy and a positional economy which is evident in education. Material aspects are amenable to investments in productivity that drive down costs and increase availability, desireable features for those interested in growing and sustained skills development, while positional aspects benefit from scarcity and are compromised if they become more widely available, as is seen in the operation of elite international universities.

The remainder of this chapter examines this process as it is being experienced in the New Zealand education system. First a definition of Future Skills aligned to the New Zealand context is provided along with a summary of key features and recent changes to the operation of the adult education system. This is then followed by a description of a model for Future Skills development that is framed as a response to the skills definition and contextual challenges of the New Zealand vocational environment.

2 Future Skills Definition and Conception

The New Zealand Government has positioned the future of work as being defined by four major trends: technological progress; demographic change; globalisation; and climate change (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment [MBIE], 2019). This frames the thinking about the skills needed as the country responds to these trends, and the investments in systems and institutions to enact policy responses aimed at building Future Skills by individuals.

Five key competencies have been defined by the New Zealand national educational system as essential to the futures of young New Zealanders. Derived from an OECD conception (Hipkins, 2018) these define Future Skills as managing self, relating to others, thinking, participating and contributing, and using language, symbols, and texts.

More recently, the OECD has described a more expansive set (OECD, 2018) which are framed by three areas: cognitive and meta-cognitive skills, social and emotional skills, and practical and physical skills. These conceptions are quite general in their framing and subject to ongoing revision (Hipkins & Vaughn, 2019), reflecting an awareness that the pace of change and complexity of the modern world means that flexibility, resilience, and the ability to learn throughout life are the real Future Skills needed (Buchanan et al., 2018).

These generalized conceptions of Future Skills drawn from international sources also need to be seen in the light of New Zealand’s economic, political, social, and educational context. The New Zealand Productivity Commission in a recent report on the future of work (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2020) noted that the country’s weaknesses included:

  • Declining school system performance in reading, mathematics and science, with particular issues for Māori and Pasifika students and those from disadvantaged communities generally;

  • A lack of business dynamism, poor capital flows and limited investment, characterised as “weak innovation”;

  • A weakness in business leadership and management capability to drive changes that might benefit from Future Skills; and

  • Minimal engagement with emerging technologies, in part reflecting the lack of capital investment, but also a consequence of a general attitude to business that is driven by cost minimisation and low-cost labour.

The challenges facing the country with its current approach to vocational education are also apparent in analysis showing that attainment of vocational qualifications has no significant impact on subsequent earnings for men (as opposed to women for whom there is a significant benefit) (Hyslop et al., 2020).

The New Zealand school education system is not strongly oriented towards vocational outcomes in the way that those of some countries, such as the Netherlands and Germany are (Deissinger, 2015; Iannelli & Smyth, 2017), and instead has a very open and relatively unstructured curriculum with considerable choice in subjects without alignment to vocational needs (Hipkins & Vaughn, 2019).

The Workforce Development Council (WDC) model recently established by the Government is aimed at addressing Future Skills:

“They will have a forward, strategic view of the Future Skills needs of industries and will help industry achieve greater influence over what and how training is delivered, by influencing government investment, setting skill standards and playing a leadership role across their relevant industries.” (Hipkins, 2021, n.p.)

Exactly what these Future Skills needs are however is yet to be defined with the WDCs less than a year old and not as yet producing detailed descriptions of Future Skills. There is also no unifying Future Skills framework in place beyond the generalized statements noted above. It is also worth noting the focus on government investment, bearing in mind that New Zealand has a very high dependence on public funding for its educational system (OECD, 2021). There is no mention of WDCs acting to lift business investment in skills development in any of the framing policies and establishing legislation enacted by the government, their functions are instead to contribute “to a well-functioning labour market system in which the specified industries can access the skills required to meet their current and future needs” (New Zealand Government, 2021, Sect. 7(1)(f)).

In conclusion, Future Skills in the New Zealand context remain ambiguous and, despite the use of the term repeatedly by government agencies, undefined in any meaningful way. The definition that has the most currency, and which is used for this chapter, is based on that of Buchanan et al. (2018) which states the Future Skills needed are flexibility, resilience, and the ability to learn throughout life. The result is a need to operate the national educational system in a way that can operate effectively within ambiguity and rapidly deliver skills to society as the need for them is realised. The next section describes the current state of the New Zealand tertiary education system in order to assess its capacity to respond to this need.

3 The New Zealand Tertiary Education System

New Zealand’s tertiary education system was historically modelled after that of the United Kingdom, and although heavily influenced by that of Australia, has since evolved to reflect local policy preferences and the growing importance of the Treaty of Waitangi and Māori models. Tertiary education in 2023 is provided by a range of institutions including eight universities, sixteen former institutes of technology and polytechnic (ITPs) operating under a national body Te Pukenga, the National Institute for Skills and Technology, and three indigenous Māori educational institutions which are called wananga. As well as these public organizations, there are several hundred private tertiary education organizations (PTEs) which operate in a wide range of contexts and scales.

A further complexity of the New Zealand tertiary system is the split between the universities, described as the higher education system, and the rest of the institutions. Universities are approved primarily for degree provision with government policies actively discouraging engagement in vocational education. The rest of the tertiary system is intended to focus on vocational education but also offers an extensive range of degrees, many with very little vocational alignment.

As in many countries, the New Zealand tertiary system has been subject to significant and ongoing change (Crawford, 2016; Department of Education & Training, 2015). The New Zealand ITP sector was given degree-granting status in 1990 which saw their focus shift away from direct service of local employers and communities to a more generalized model that mimicked many of the features of the University system and saw extensive duplication of offerings driven primarily by financial rather than educational or Future Skills outcomes. Despite the intention that this change would lift the level of skills and education in New Zealand, and even after enacting policies to increase access by removing some student fees (Hipkins, 2017), it continued to perpetuate historically situated structural inequities of access and outcome (Strathdee & Cooper, 2017) and its poor performance resulted in recent major restructuring. Symptoms of structural failure were evident in the sector when it became apparent that the majority of Institutes of Technology and Polytechnic were operating significant deficits in 2018 and projections of annual sector wide shortfalls of nearly NZ$300 million by 2020 were predicated (Tertiary Education Commission [T.E.C.], 2018). The reasons for this are complex and included sustained underfunding by the government in an attempt to manage costs as well as excessive and wasteful competition through application of a highly marketized model of operation (Tertiary Education Commission, 2018).

The problems facing the vocational parts of the New Zealand tertiary sector led to the publication in 2019 of a cabinet paper that noted (Hipkins, 2019, p. 10) the “weak governance and management capability in parts of the sector”. The inability of sector leaders to place their organizations within a wider public-good framework consistent with its use of public funding and the purposes identified by the Education Act (New Zealand Government, 2020) was also identified by the Productivity Commission (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2017) in their extensive review of the tertiary system. In the cabinet paper the Minister of Education announced that the problems facing the sector were so severe that he proposed (Hipkins, 2019, p. 1):

“I seek Cabinet’s agreement to consult on proposals for a comprehensive reform of New Zealand’s vocational education system. The proposed reforms will:

1.1. redefine the roles of education providers and Industry Training Organisations, (ITOs) and extend industry and employers’ leadership role across all vocational education through new Industry Skills Bodies

1.2. create a New Zealand Institute of Skills & Technology, bringing together our public Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs) as a single entity, and

1.3. create a unified vocational education funding system, removing barriers to collaboration and flexibility, ensuring a sustainable network of provision, and supporting the wider reforms.”

This resulted in drastic restructuring by Ministerial mandate of the vocational education system in New Zealand (Hipkins, 2019). All of the public vocational providers were combined into a single entity, Te Pūkenga, with a centralized governance and management supported by local community and employers through a fix of committees and governance mechanisms. This was done to address a perceived gap in the national capacity to provide skilled workers for the economy and address sustained inequality with the Māori and Pacific communities; however the challenges are far more complex than a simplified supply chain model.

The framing of the challenges facing the sector in the Cabinet Paper (Hipkins, 2019, p. 1) reflects an awareness of the Future Skills needs facing the country:

“Vocational education can help to ensure that all New Zealanders have the skills, knowledge and capability to adapt and succeed in a world of rapid economic, social and technological change. It can improve people’s resilience, employment security and life outcomes, and reduce social inequities, as the trends driving the Future of Work mean they will likely change jobs and careers frequently over their working lives.”

The cabinet paper, however, fails to acknowledge the important role that employers have played in creating this situation. Instead the Minister states that a major driver for improvement will result from a shift in leadership to this group (Hipkins, 2019, p. 6):

“Employers and industry need to be given, and must take on, a greater leadership role across the entire vocational education system”

The changes to the provision of vocational education currently being enacted are unlikely to change the calculus resulting in employer disengagement from the responsibility for contributing to Future Skills development. Instead, they reflect an ongoing application of the flawed ideology (Marginson, 2016a; Wolf, 2004) of human capital theory (Becker, 1993; Fitzsimons, 2015; Gillies, 2015) that perpetuates a model of investment where the costs fall on the public, the benefits are captured by private interests and the worker is typically unable to see a return on their efforts reflected in improvements in their wages.

The tertiary education system in New Zealand has only in recent decades recognized a general role in skills development for employment (Jung, 2021). This started in the 1980s with an awareness of professional skills needs in the context of specific employment related outcomes and then expanded to the generic skills and attributes needed in workplaces beyond the specific professions (Adelman, 2009; Barrie, 2006; Barrie et al., 2009; Spronken-Smith et al., 2015). In the first decades of the millennium this has expanded to a systematised measurement of employment outcomes and performance management systems (Shah et al., 2015) which are used to frame government funding differentials for qualifications (Tertiary Education Commission, 2023) and immigration policies (New Zealand Immigration, 2023).

The context for skills in New Zealand is framed by the intersecting challenges identified in the introduction. The first challenge is the financial model that is enacted by the system. This includes the funding of education as well as the impact of education on individual financial outcomes. OECD data on spending on tertiary education (OECD, 2021) show that New Zealand education is disproportionately funded from the public resources (53% of spending) in comparison to countries such as Australia (35%) and the United Kingdom (29%), particularly when the impact of government-operated student loans are included as these compromise a significant proportion of the expenditure treated as household by the OECD reporting. Policies such as the fees-free for first year at University and for all of the fees of a vocational qualification (Hipkins, 2017; Hipkins et al., 2020) also obscure the actual funding situation and the extent to which it is publically funded rather than invested in by employers and industries by failing to explicity treat these as subsidies for those groups when reporting the government spending.

This financial environment is a consequence of New Zealand’s highly marketized neoliberal public policy environment (Larner & Le Heron, 2005; Lewis & Shore, 2019; Martens & Starke, 2008; Wheelahan & Moodie, 2017). This has arisen from a massive period of reform in the 1980s and 1990s where New Zealand’s public sector, including the universities and ITPs, underwent reforms that saw increasing competition, and marketization. This has been described as “one of the most aggressive and extensive applications of neo-liberal market policies in the English-speaking world” (Robinson, 2006, p. 42). This saw education reframed from a public good to a private benefit and students expected to pay fees that have increased from the 1990s on average 13% per annum (Healey & Gunby, 2012). The structural inequality this perpetuates (Strathdee & Cooper, 2017) is evident in the New Zealand Treasury (1987) analysis showing that gaining qualifications does not result in individuals earning more (Tumen et al., 2015) and the impact is also apparent in recent declines in participation apparent in the enrolment figures prior to the COVID pandemic (Education Counts, 2022).

The financial stresses are further exacerbated by the longitudinal data reported by the OECD which show that, despite the public rhetoric regarding skill shortages, private investment in tertiary education has remained unchanged over the last decade and is very low as a proportion of GDP in comparison with other similar economies (OECD, 2021). The current models of funding education are highly dependent on declining levels of public wealth, with the risks criticized while industries and employers adopt a typically passive approach to sustaining their workforce. The public role as funder in effect subsidises the employer through policies such as the Targeted Training and Apprenticeship Fund, which pays all of the fees associated with apprenticeships and vocational training in a range of industries (Tertiary Education Commission, 2020), and the direct wage subsidies paid to employers (Hipkins et al., 2020). A combined investment of over NZ$700 million was allocated in the 2020 budget.

Globally, economies are seeing a growing divide between highly skilled employment and very low skilled service roles (Bialik, 2010; Coelli et al., 2012). In New Zealand, this has been emphasized by the dependence of the economy on migration at both ends of the skills continuum. Immigration into New Zealand has been responsible for approximately half the workforce growth for the last decade with net migration of between 40 and 80 thousand working age adults annually from countries other than Australia (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2021). The New Zealand Productivity Commission observe that “‘Buying’ skills through immigration is sometimes quicker and easier for employers than ‘making’ the skills New Zealand needs by training people, especially when feedback mechanisms between the domestic education system and employers are weak” (New Zealand Society of Anaesthesists, 2021, pp. 2–3, referring to NZPC, 2017).

Describing immigration as having a de-facto strategy reflects the absence of any actual strategy with priorities purposefully articulated by the government (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2021, p. 13). Policy is developed under a very unclearly stated “national interest” mandate under the Immigration Act 2009. New Zealand has been criticised for following a de-facto strategy framed by low wages, limited investment in infrastructure to increase productivity, and an over-dependence on low-value migration to remediate the impact of the first two factors (Hickey, 2021). The result has included a significant growth in large numbers of people employed in low skills employment. The problem with addressing this is that the impact on these low skilled migrants would most likely be mass unemployment, not investment in their skill development, particularly given the issues already evident that were noted above.

NZPC (2021) observe that there are systematic relationships between the immigration settings driven by skills shortage, and the education systems. They note (New Zealand Productivity Commission, 2021, p. 27) that the current policy settings “may weaken accountabilities on employers to train and develop local workers”, a passive observation that reflects the limited evidence collected by their enquiry and by agencies normally on direct investment by employers. The deflection of responsibility away from employers to substantially invest in skills development is a further illustration of the neoliberal market model dominating New Zealand under both major political parties (left and right of centre) noted above and was evident in the framing of the Te Pukenga restructuring which failed to address employer responsibility for investment (see below).

The dramatic impact that the COVID pandemic has had on migration calls into question the sustainability of this model of outsourced skills development at least in the short term. Closed borders have seen unemployment drop to very low levels (StatsNZ, 2022b) and many employers struggling to attract skilled staff without having to pay a significant premium (StatsNZ, 2022a). The disruptions are likely to continue for some years and should be seen as an opportunity to consider alternative strategies, if only to provide options and resilience in the operation of the national economy.

In summary, New Zealand faces a number of challenges in its engagement with Future Skills needs:

  • An ill-defined conception of Future Skills that prevents any focused development in advance of need;

  • Low investment by key private sector stakeholders directly in Future Skills identification and development;

  • Low returns on investment in qualifications for individuals discouraging participation and creating a drain on capability through outward migration;

  • Low capital investment in technologies to realise the productivity benefits of current and Future Skills; and

  • Overdependence on an underperforming and underfunded public education system.

Overlaying all of these is a fixation on a model of education defined by formal qualifications and their regulation by government agencies rather than on development of human capabilities and knowledge for the future. This is sustained by the self-interest of employers who act in many countries to influence the qualification system both directly through investment (in some countries) and employment, and indirectly through political influence on government funding mechanisms and educational policies (Marshall, 2018a). The impact of this has been seen in the attempts to reconceive the university in new forms including the university of technology, the enterprise university, and the entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998; Fayolle & Redford, 2014; Marginson & Considine, 2000). Despite these attempts, increasingly the degree is being challenged as being disconnected from the needs of society as it grapples with its Future Skills development needs (Calonge et al., 2019; Dlabajová & Nekov, 2017; Ehlers, 2020; Kinash & Crane, 2015; Zaber et al., 2019). This has seen disengagement by employers cited (Ernst & Young, 2015) although such observations are not necessarily consistent with the evidence from employment data and employer research suggesting that the situation is more complex than it might appear on the surface (Gallagher, 2016).

The next section presents a mechanism for responding to this wicked problem and responding to the complexity it embodies through a focus on the power of communities and social engagement to motivate a shift towards Future Skills development.

4 The Universal Learning Community: a Laboratory for Future Skills Development

More than fifty years ago, the state of California enacted the Californian Master Plan under the leadership of Clark Kerr (Marginson, 2016b). This plan was guided by the desire to see public investment in tertiary education having a positive impact on reducing social inequality. The plan used a centralized coordination of activities to maximise scale and efficiency and to leverage collective power in negotiations with suppliers and other stakeholders and prioritisation of expensive and constrained resources such that they had the greatest impact on the public good. This was a plan for an age where education and skills development occurred at the start of adult life and where centralized management and control was normalized both in public life and in the operation of businesses. In many respects, this plan reflects the observations and predictions of sociologist Martin Trow who created the conception of mass education (Trow, 1973) to describe the behaviours and expectations made of an education system when its scale and impact grows beyond the historically framed elite model of the early university. Mass education systems are typified by the impact that education has on society, particularly the economy, and the need for a large-scale workforce delivering a clearly defined set of skills to an industrialised economy efficiently and at low cost. These drivers create the context for a regulated bureaucracy and systems aimed at maximizing the economic efficiency and impact of education (Marshall, 2018b).

In contemplating Future Skills needs, the Government has acknowleged that centralised control and education at one stage of life no longer meet our needs and that a more contextualised and lifelong approach to skills development is needed for the future (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2019). The current framing of skills development in New Zealand is firmly anchored in the mass education sensibilities of a previous millennium. The Future Skills identified as important to New Zealand are defined in response to a dynamic world and the consequent need for continuous development of the individual. This leads to the conclusion that the role of the formal degree qualification for school leavers is a starting point for a lifetime of learning. Future Skills development depends on systems that empower learning limited only by the energy and interests of the learners. Instead of a curriculum defined in detail in advance generically for all, skills education should respond to individual needs at a point in time, with objectives that they are responsible for defining, and achieved outcomes that represent value to themselves, peers, their employer and the communities they participate in.

Skills development responding to needs implies a context for those needs, which suggests that in-place learning in employment and community contexts is important. This leads to the proposal that skills learning for employment is a workplace activity that needs to be recognized as such and done as paid work, not an activity that occurs elsewhere with costs and outcomes separated from the employer. It also implies that skills development takes place in a community of employees, all learning simultaneously but not synchronously, as experience, roles, and skills will vary. Finally it implies that the measures of success need to be those that are valued directly by those involved, often through accepted measures of productivity, rather than abstract proxies supplied by credentials—micro or macro.

We need to revisit the challenge of educating adults over their lifetime from first principles. Rather than framing skills development as a problem of qualification provision defined by models that draw on the epistemology of the industrial age, it needs to be seen as an opportunity to identify new learning modalities that use post-industrial concepts. This takes the framing into the space that Trow described as universal education (Trow, 2010). Here, the participation in education is routine and experienced by essentially everyone in society according to their needs and interests. Qualifications in a universal space are at still useful as a marker of important transitions but the primary focus shifts to the enablement of lifelong learning.

This leads us to a new conception for Future Skills development—the universal learning community. A feature of this model is its framing as a social network drawing on the human need for connection and meaning through our membership of groups and communities. Although technology is a potentially important enabler of changes in work, particularly in professional contexts (Susskind & Susskind, 2022), it is not the defining feature of the universal learning community.

The Implication of the community model within a workplace or industry is that the different skills and experiences will see participants engaging with each other to support each others’ learning. The resulting experience can be expressed through the New Zealand Māori term “Ako” which captures the relationship between learning and teaching as one of reciprocity, i.e., that in teaching someone, learning also occurs for the teacher (Hemara, 2000). Historically, Ako was experienced in the Māori culture in a very tightly controlled manner respecting the worldview, customs, and spirituality of that culture (Mead, 2003). The features of the Ako conception translated into the context of the modern New Zealand bi-cultural society are (Marshall, 2014, p. 57):

  • The design of education in the form of relationships between people who are not equals but treat each other with respect.

  • The work of the participants is structured by a set of implicit and explicit cultural norms and expectations independent of the subject being studied.

  • Learning is active, and the act of learning stimulates and provokes a pedagogical response from the teacher that facilitates deeper learning by both the learner and the teacher.

  • The learner and the teacher are participants in a larger community that supports and sustains them and which values both of their contributions to the life of that community.

Finally, the Ako conception reshapes expectations regarding curriculum, shifting it from the structured form enacted in mass education in qualification frameworks to a more fluid framework negotiated by the participants collectively in real time. This is not a completely informal experience: “Ako requires all participants respect each other, respect the systems that sustain their learning, and explicitly participate in a community of shared endeavor” (Marshall, 2014, p. 67). These differences are summarised in Fig. 30.1.

Fig. 30.1
Two diagrams summarise the frameworks for mass education skills and universal education skills. Mass education skills involve the learning and skill development in a learning environment and the learning and skill application in the workplace. The universal education skills involve the Ako concept.

Mass and universal education skills frameworks

Full size image

A natural laboratory for the exploration of the universal learning community for Future Skills development is evident in the regulated professions where these features are already present. These groups, including the military, police, emergency, and health care, already recognize the value of practice networks, distributed leadership and continuous professional development. The shift needed to start implementing a new model with such groups is thus relatively subtle.

Currently their continuous professional development is framed by the compliance requirements imposed on individuals to maintain their professional certifications under the regulatory environment operating in a mass model of education. The focus inevitably is on the efficiency of the compliance mechanism rather than the efficacy of the learning mechanism under this model, and the resulting burdens of compliance reduce responsiveness to meeting Future Skills needs which by their nature are not fully evident in the contemporary workplace.

Networking with colleagues is separate, often undervalued by employers, and limited in many cases to individual mentoring, occasional seminars, and social events. If the focus shifted to using professional networking as the context for experiencing and engaging in development, with recognition given to those participants who enable regular networking connections, with formal development an adjunct, then the opportunity arises to have a system that can evolve rapidly in the face of emerging changes in the practices and knowledge of the profession.

Modern off the shelf collaboration tools, now a common feature of the COVID workplace, provide all of the necessary infrastructure needed to enable work in this new model to be educationally recognized. Rather than providing training, content, and assessment activities, the role of educators becomes one of enablers, participants in the universal learning community, rather than outsiders operating in disconnected learning environments. The shift in pedagogical approach from certifier to mentor is linked to the skills of professional reflection, evidence-based practice, and self-analysis. The record of learning is no longer the responsibility of the education provider, but rather that of the learner and is evident in their portfolio of work and the recognition it achieves from colleagues as evidence of the cognitive and meta-cognitive skills, social and emotional skills, and practical and physical skills of the learner and their capacity to manage the ongoing learning they are taking in light of Future Skills needs (Scully et al., 2018).

The professions listed above have an advantage in this space through their ethos of collective responsibility and shared values that define their professional identity to a large extent. They are not alone in having this sense of common purpose, others such as the New Zealand Māori and Pasifika communities could benefit from a model that empowers their definition of success from within their own cultures, setting aside the features of an educational system created to solve problems for a different culture in a different time and place.

5 Conclusion

By definition, Future Skills are always prospective and somewhat disconnected from the contemporary environment. They reflect beliefs and aspirations for the future experience of individuals, communities, and nations. The Universal Learning Community model provides a sustainable mechanism for supporting individuals as the Future Skills needed for their lives start to emerge as possibilities that are then translated into tangible needs for themselves, their community, and for society.

A major advantage of the model is that it addresses the disconnect between those defining possible Future Skills and those who will enact these in their own communities. Top-down mass models of education reflect the expectations and systems of an earlier industrial society which is rapidly being seen as failing to meet the emerging needs of the millennium and changing values with regard to wealth creation, inequality, sustainability, and our collective and individual place in a global society. The model is also very strongly aligned to the conception of Learning Cities and its objective to “create and reinforce individual empowerment and social cohesion, economic and cultural prosperity, and sustainable development” (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2015, p. 9). The Learning City is defined (p. 9) as mobilizing its resources in every sector to:

  • promote inclusive learning from basic to higher education;

  • revitalize learning in families and communities;

  • facilitate learning for and in the workplace;

  • extend the use of modern learning technologies;

  • enhance quality and excellence in learning; and

  • foster a culture of learning throughout life.

The universal learning community outlined in this chapter is a means by which universities can contribute to this vision, placing themselves in a key leadership role within the living city. The implication for those leading higher education institutions is to recognize the importance of developing organisational capabilities for enacting learning in contexts other than those of the established university campus and classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic has been recognized by some leaders as stimulating positive changes in organisational decision making, flexibility and capacity to enact new learning models (PwC, 2020) and this can be used to further explore new partnerships for the operation of emergent universal learning communities. A step on that pathway can be the use of work-integrated learning or internships but only if these are recognized for the Ako they enable, and not merely seen as being in service of the certification of qualifications.

For individual faculty, the importance of anchoring their scholarship in the wider community cannot be overstated. Those in disciplines associated with professional groups will already be aware of the importance of sustaining their place in the profession, but here also there is a need to act to build networks and connections, not to merely analyse and document.

The model of skill development proposed here strips out the qualification systems and replaces them with a focus on the learner as an agent for their own and others' skill development—“microlearning” if you will. This has the virtue of not requiring abandonment of existing approaches before it is enacted. Formal degrees and established training and skills models can co-exist with microlearning and complement each other. In all likelihood, degrees or similar qualifications will remain an important transition into complex areas of work requiring a broad and deep knowledge of a field. The microlearning model enacted through a universal learning community offers a means by which that foundation can be sustained throughout a life. It can be experienced within a community rather than requiring costly periods away with all of the associated disruptions and disconnections from the context that learning is intended to be used within. By shifting the focus from the credential to the learning, the skills development experience can be framed and reframed continuously to meet current and future needs.

The remaining challenge lies with employers who must invest in creating the environment that enables microlearning, rather than continuing to see Future Skills development as a problem for others to solve for them. Here, the professions need to act to sustain themselves by using their influence over employers and leaders in different industries to create universal learning communities within workplaces. Peter Drucker is said to have observed that “The best way to predict the future is to create it”, analogously then, the best way to have the skills needed for the future is to create the environment where those skills are themselves created.

Future Skills in Practice: Our Recommendations

  • Future Skills need to be understood in terms of a context that leads to their identification, development and application.

  • Qualifications need to be understood as important enablers and starting points for learning but insufficient in meeting the needs of individuals and societies for Future Skills.

  • Higher education institutions need to develop systems, capabilities and experience with learning in communities and professional settings beyond the traditional academic campus and classroom.

  • Higher education faculty need to develop the relationships and capabilities needed to associate their scholarship with the wider community.