Page 51 - AIMA : Foundation Day Souvenir

as well. Everyone will be expected to be not only tech-literate but tech-proficient. Technology skills (use, control, monitoring), digital fluency, and new media literacy will be the most in demand.
Do today’s new hires have skills for the future? Having mapped the skills for the future, it was also important to see if the HR managers and business leaders are able to find hires with these skills. Running interviews with HR leaders, entrepreneurs, and business managers I found a general agreement that it was difficult to find new hires with skills for the future.
It is also interesting to note how companies are changing the way they hire. I ran a social media poll to understand how companies are hiring right now and how are they likely to hire in future. The poll that asked the participants to vote if their companies hired more for knowledge than educational degrees, more for skills than experiences, and above all, for the right attitude.
The findings of the survey clearly show that traditional hiring is slowly giving way to a more competency-based hiring where skills will be valued more.
Did millennials learn their top three job skills from the professional schools?
Millennials, today, make up for the majority of the workforce. As traditional hiring is giving way to more competency-based hiring, HR leaders are finding it difficult to find hires who possess skills for the future.
Another study on millennials revealed that majority of them do not think that they acquired the top the skills that they currently used intheir jobs from their professional schools. That is indeed a shocking revelation.
By 2025, millennials will make up roughly 75 per cent of the world’s workforce. By 2028, the oldest millennial, will still be quite young and will be entering leadership position. If this soon- to-be-the-largest global workforce, feels that their top skills of today did not come from the professional schools, it certainly is indicative of an existing and continuing gap between what is taught in schools and the attributes desired by the industry.
The gap can be qualified at least in two very significant aspects –
1. The education imparted by professional schools is largely not contributing to the skill development of the graduates.
2. Professional schools do not prepare graduates for the skills needed in the future.
This could also be because most of them are yet to take stock of the future of skills and tailor their curriculum design and delivery on those lines. How many professional schools use the graduate attributes to benchmark their program and then use the principle of backward design to build those learning outcomes into those programs and each course offering?
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