Work in the future of youth

What are the key aspects that constrain the work of the future today? What are the challenges that young people observe for the future?

On 21st January 2021 we held the agora at El Día Después where young people and experts debated about how to build a future where young people can develop their full potential.

Albert Cañigueral, disseminator and author of El Trabajo ya no es lo que era (Conecta, 2020), began by highlighting the need to mix knowledge. “It might seem like dispersion, but we are moving towards a more complex world where the wealth provided by people is to mix knowledge”. 

In this sense, Cañigueral outlined how important it is to take into account other learning spaces. “New spaces are opening, such as coworking spaces, which could be considered for studies as well, and tools where students can teach teachers.”

A digital gap also amongst young people

Both Lola García and Isabel Fox, secondary students in their 4th year, consider that we have experienced a large leap that we will have to assimilate as soon as possible. 

“In order to work in jobs that we do not know what they will be like, we need to take advantage of what we have learnt in these circumstances”, Isabel Fox commented. Lola García said that “we have the chance to grow more as a society by relying on machines”. 

Virginia Pintó, student in her 4th year of Political Sciences, recalls that within this generation there is still a digital gap for people who do not have the same access to use technology due to a lack of resources or knowledge.

The most demanded skills in the future

The debate was based on the top 10 skills of tomorrow that the labour market will require in 2025, according to a report by the World Economic Forum, highlighting the digital gap generated by not being able to learn these skills in education centres. 

“The way we learn at school is based on robot skills: memorising, calculating, etc. However, skills like these, or you learn them at home or you do not learn them”, recalls Lola García. 

Albert Cañigueral has a similar opinion. “It seems that these skills are assumed to be automatic by default, but you have to learn them. For example, I did so by working as a volunteer in a professional setting”. 

Jorge Ezquerra, secondary school student in his 4th year, also highlighted associationism as a learning space. 

This debate ended by outlining the following resources:

• The Employment Map created by the Telefónica Foundation
• Singularity Experts, an initiative to guide students and professionals against the speed of technology.

The pandemic has revalued school

“When we have not been there we have seen everything that school gives us. On the issue of inequalities, school offers a context of equal opportunities. That is important”. 

Ainara Zubillaga, director of education at Cotec, valued schools “where more things happen than what is learnt in class and which plays a very important role in equal opportunities”. 

In this sense, David Sesmero, student in 2nd year of international baccalaureate, highlighted the loss of in-person classes in terms of socialising throughout the pandemic. 

Ainara Zubillaga also recalled that there are more and more centres that are joining the renewal movement, such as dual education models or service-learning models.

Alfons Cascante, student in 1st year of baccalaureate, added the value teachers. “I love subjects where teachers teach passionately. You can feel it when a teacher is didactic and entertaining”.

And Jorge Ezquerra recalled the importance of subjects, such as education for citizenship and the need to incorporate environmental education and the gender perspective. “We must value in the syllabus the women who led the way and who have broken glass ceiling barriers”.

Uncertainties and trends in the future of work

Anton Costas, Professor of Political Economics and member of the Inequality and New Economic Model Community at El Día Después, was in charge of summarising the debate by indicating three sources that generate concern for the future of work:

1. That technological change could destroy a large amount of jobs (up to 90 million). This possibility is worrying. 
2. Lack of knowledge of what the jobs of the future will be. Jobs change practically every generation and we cannot know what jobs there will be in the future.
3. The feeling that teaching is not responding satisfactorily to this world of advanced technological change.

And in response to that uncertainty, Costas pointed out three other forces that have shaped work demands in the past and that will also do so in the future:

1. The demand for skills and abilities by companies, public administrations, in other words, the employers.
2. People’s preferences about the type of job they would like to do or how they want to live are increasingly defining.
3. The role of society, understood as the public sector or the State, but also the family. For example, schools are a function of the public sector.

And he closed his speech with some proposals that could be #ViableUtopias like some that are being launched by El Día Después:

• The profession of nursery, primary and secondary teachers should be the best paid jobs. 

• Despite the digitisation and robotisation processes that we are going through, memory is not the intelligence of fools. We have to build it, because without it, it is very difficult to think how language can be enriched. 

• We have to ensure that public schools have the same quality as private schools because, otherwise, we reduce the opportunities of those who have less possibilities.

• People’s future is basically determined between the ages of zero and three, a period when school is not public. It is necessary to invest more in this age group. 

• The State is decisive so that robotisation is used by companies to create better jobs, and not to replace jobs.