Implications for the Future of IT
I went over to Essex University the other week to give the 1st year and post-grad computer science students a lecture that focused on something I called “IT Mega-trends” in the afternoon I held a workshop to discuss what implications these trends might have on the students.
We split them into 4 groups each to focus on one of the following topics of population, jobs, education and information along with a set of statistics relating to each topic.
“If you’re 1 in a million in china then there are 1,300 just like you”
“Today’s learner will on average have 10-14 jobs by the age 38”
“Top 10 in-demand jobs by 2010 did not exist in 2004”
“At the start of a 3 year degree half of 1st year material will be out of date by the end of the course”
“40 exabytes (4x1019) of unique new information will be generated this year”
These statistics were meant to act as a disturber to make the students uneasy about their potential futures and included facts such as:
At the end we came back together and drew a mind-map from their output. Iain Langdon, their lecturer re-ran the workshop later in the with some other students from the university and pulled together the following combined mind-map.
I was worried initially that the students wouldn’t engage but to be honest I was struck by how much of what we talked about they were already aware of and that they readily accept that a “career is not for life” that they will be expected to retrain and deal with enormous “rates of change”and what they learn now is really the skills of “learning how to learn”. “Life long learning” was a key phrase that struck in my mind.
I felt pretty good about things on the whole when I left. This wasn’t the ugly mob of disgruntled coders that I’d been expecting to greet a bloke from Microsoft but people who understand much more about the life we are moving towards than I had really given credit to.
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