Opening Keynote: Navigating the Future of Education: Embracing Innovation and Disruption
Good morning. Much better. Much, much better. What a pleasure to be back. Do you know, this is my first time in Manila since nineteen ninety two? I know. Makes me feel very old.
Half the room probably wasn't born in nineteen ninety two, but it's an absolute pleasure to be back and the only thing that seems to be the same from when I was here in nineteen ninety two to now, is there was a typhoon back then when I was here in nineteen ninety two as well. Look, it's an absolute pleasure to be with you today. You can now absolutely tell friends and relatives that you've met Mr. Bean. Right? So and I do Mr.
Bean autographs later if you need it, and it's it's all authentic, I'll even give you a certificate of authenticity if you need it, but, it's a pleasure. Let me just tell you a little bit about about me. I am so lucky because my entire career, and I turn sixty this year, so I'm year of the dragon, and even better, I'm year of the wood dragon. So, I turned sixty this year, so I remember education intersecting with technology from the very first PC. I literally was sitting in the office when the first PC arrived and I was working for an education company.
My my undergrad is in education, I'm a pretty rare university president, because I actually have a degree in education. Kind of ironic really, but it's often often the way. And my entire career has been at the intersection of education and technology. Literally from the mainframe all the way through to today where we're all marveling and a little bit scared by the implications of generative AI. So I've seen every shift, every twist, every turn.
I've heard personalized learning talked about since the early nineteen nineties. I've seen people talk about the promise and the fear mongering of plagiarism intersecting with technology, how the technology is going to eat our jobs, how there's not going to be a need any longer for human interaction. And all of it has gone in different directions, most of it unplanned. But I've had a bird's eye eye view on all of that happening and I did it in two worlds. The first half of my career was in the private sector, where my last job was running global education products for Microsoft out of Seattle, working right alongside the Gates Foundation with the goal of not selling more software or services to education, but actually helping technology unlock greater quality of education and access to education.
And then a miracle happened, Britain's largest university, England's largest university contacted me and said, hey, do you want to come be our president? And so, right at sort of about forty years of age, I moved from being on the technology side to suddenly running a university with two hundred and seventy thousand students, based out of the United Kingdom. And then after thirty years away from my hometown, I got back to Melbourne, Australia, where I ran one of Australia's largest universities, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. And I always had this plan, those of us that teach, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Those of us that teach understand there is no greater satisfaction in life than to share wisdom. So I'd always had this plan, I'd always had this plan that for my last job, I would go back to teaching, I would take my forty years of experience of education and technology, and I'd bring it to as many people as I possibly could.
And that's why I'm just so happy to be with you today. And what I'm going to talk about is the work that I do in my research center now, where I and my colleagues are completely focused on the future of work, the future of leadership in work, and how education needs to adjust and change to make sure that those people we serve, that come to us to realize their potential in life and work, we are giving them the skills and competencies they need rather than the ones that we want to teach. We are serving as many people as we possibly can, no matter what their age, their station in life, their background. We're opening our institutions up to have as much impact as we can. And that's what my presentation is going to be about today.
It's going to be all about my observations as I get to travel all around the world, talking to wonderful universities, and institutions, and primary schools and high schools about the disruption in innovation that I see, and it's sort of a call to action about what we're going to need to do to keep up. Are you with me so far? Are you sure? Yeah, round of applause. Give the bean a round of applause. Okay. Let's dive right in.
Part one of my presentation is going to be all about the global skilling emergency, as it was characterized by the World Economic Forum. Fundamental disruptions in local and global labor markets increasingly demand that learning experiences have tangible market outcomes to address the skills emergency. All over the world, people are questioning the value of a university degree. In the United States, it's got so bad that there's an entire movement called tear the paper ceiling, suspending the degree as the proxy for considering somebody for a role. It's being adopted by hundreds, if not thousands of employers in the United States.
Entire states are saying we're no longer going to ask if somebody's got a degree before we'll consider hiring them. And it's And I think it's really important that we, the educators of the world, don't get angry or cranky or disappointed by that, but we face up to the reality as to why. Why is it that employers, the governments are increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the quality of the graduates that leave our wonderful institutions. And there's a really simple reason why, the pace of change now makes skills increasingly mismatched or repeatedly redundant across a lifetime. This slide is a tale of two worlds, to the left pre pandemic.
And I've got to tell you the pandemic impacted the Philippines and my hometown of Melbourne more than just about any other places on the planet. So we have that in common. So to the left is what was going on before the pandemic, to the right is what's going on after the pandemic. So before the pandemic, this skilling emergency was alive and well, and according to WF, it was driven by three forces. The first is a skills mismatch.
Qualifications no longer meet the gen those generally required for the job, driven by the pace and change of technology and innovation. The second is, skills deficit. A lack of candidates with the required skills to fill specific vacancies, And the third is skills redundancy, jobs disappearing, skills no longer in demand. You know, I am an eternal optimist. I always look at the glass half full, I can find the positive in just about anything.
And so, my whole career, whenever new technology came along, I could look everybody in the eye and say, don't worry, more jobs are going to be created than destroyed by this technology. But not this time. Not this time. All of my instincts are telling me that generative AI is going to destroy more jobs than it creates. Which means educating our citizens for a world that hasn't been imagined yet, is really the number one priority we have ahead of us.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about that. Now, let's fast forward post pandemic, and here's what WEF was saying to governments all over the world. What they were saying was, and all of my research through the beam center absolutely agrees with this, What we're saying is that governments all around the world and they are all around the world need to move to a skills first framework. And there's two enablers to that. Enabling number one is embracing a skills first culture, policies and mindset.
My question to you, does your institution have a skills first culture, policies and mind set. The second enabler which is where it's so hard right now to get this done, is that governments all around the world are either adopting a common skills language or they're considering adopting a common skills language to fuel the power of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence or to put it more simply, to take the friction out between demand and supply. To take the friction out between the skills that we're teaching and what industry needs and getting those worlds to talk more effectively with each other. And you'll notice there are five, subsets of those two enablers and don't worry, you'll be getting copies of these slides, so you don't need to worry too much about taking notes. But continue to take photos because I imagine you're taking photos of me, which makes me feel really, really good when that when that happens.
Just a few quick stats, these are American stats, and this is pre generative AI. Thirty seven percent of the top twenty skills requested for the average US job have changed since two thousand and sixteen. One in five skills requested for the average US job is an entirely new requirement in that occupation, and seventy six percent of jobs changed more from two thousand and nineteen through twenty one in the than in the previous three year period. This slide is there just to tell you one thing, and that is everything is speeding up. Everything is speeding up.
And when you think about what underpins the Philippine economy to a large extent today, with your renaissance and massive growth in the BPO space, it has to mirror the skills that are required for the rest of the world to remain relevant. So we in the Philippines are not shielded from this disruption, this skills atrophy, this need to innovate. If anything, it's even more important here for our citizens to be able to keep pace on the global stage. Now let's talk a little bit about generative AI. There's a number of stats here.
There's only one I want you to really look at. One hundred million users in the first sixty days for chat GPT. We have never ever ever seen anything like it. Never seen anything like it. Now, I'll let you in on a little secret, one of mister Bean's little secrets.
It actually has nothing to do with the hardware, the software, the language models, the technology. It's not about the technology at all. You know what it's about? It's about the human condition. It's about us and the way we interact with technology, but more importantly, what is it about the lives we lead now that makes generative AI an unstoppable force in our lives. And it's really interesting because when we talk about education and generative AI, nearly all we want to talk about, I guarantee you at this conference, most of what we're going to talk about is to the right of this slide, learning and teaching.
At best, sometimes we stray across and we talk a little bit about research. But this is a heat map. The really smart, really smart institutions are thinking holistically about their institution with generative AI across student services, operations, marketing, research and learning and teaching. The really smart institutions are not thinking about it to lower cost. The really smart institutions are thinking about how can we free up thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of the time of our existing people, so that they can go do higher value tasks inside their institutions.
They're the smart institutions. And if any of you across this heat map are thinking about leveraging generative AI purely lower cost, then you have missed the entire opportunity of what it's capable of. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret and I know it's going to be depressing. Today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life. Think about that.
And most of you are already feeling overworked, underappreciated, you're struggling to be able to have balance between your home life and your work life, not to mention your social life and your spiritual life. Most of us are under this intense pressure, but because of generative AI, today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life, which is why I'm so glad that I'm almost retired. A little bit of data for you from, the LinkedIn, the most recent LinkedIn, it only came out in November last year, global report on skills. Remember, think about who LinkedIn represents. LinkedIn represents knowledge workers of all types.
And here's what the statistics said, so when they poll their members, fifty five percent of LinkedIn members stand to see their jobs change by the rise of generative AI. Twenty three percent of them think it will augment them. It'll be my co pilot. It'll just be right there with me. I thought Microsoft did a brilliant job calling it co pilot because that's the way I think of generative AI.
Thirty two percent think their roles are going to be disrupted, which is sort of political correctness for my job is going away. Head of AI position has grown by double digits since December twenty two, which is kind of ironic because it's all so new. What the heck is the head of AI? Nobody really quite knows and yet, it's in very hot demand. Now, the punch line from LinkedIn, which I totally agree with, is that the smart organizations are moving from experimentation to transformation. You know, in universities, we love to form committees, We love to write policies.
We love to have pilots. We like to research things for multiple years before we deploy them. There's no time with generative AI. You you don't have time. I'm not saying that you're reckless.
I'm not saying that you you don't think about the upsides as well as the downsides, but there is no time to wait. Those who adapt will be the ones to seize the opportunity and channel this momentum into return on investment for their organizations. But a few rather interesting statistics for you. Seventy five percent of the LinkedIn members say they are already using generative AI in their job. So you some of you are saying we're waiting until we've got policies, too late.
Seventy five percent of your people, they're already using it, they're off to the races, they're not waiting for permission, and I'm talking about your staff as well as your students, they're just using it, they're not they're not waiting, and they're using it. This is coming back to what I said about the human condition, They're using it because it saves time, ninety percent of them. It helps them focus, eighty five percent of them. It helps them be more creative, eighty four percent of them. The human condition.
Why would any of us not use something that saves us time, helps us focus and helps us be more creative, freeing us up to have all those other things in our life that we care about? It's unstoppable. It's unstoppable because it solves so many innate characteristics of what we want for our lives. But seventy eight percent of those seventy five percent, they're bringing their own AI to work. They're not waiting for you to deploy something for the university or the school, they're bringing their own. And why are they bringing their own? Because sixty eight percent of them say they struggle with the pace and volume of work.
I bet if I ask for a show of hands here, how many of you struggle with the pace and volume of work? There would be a lot of hands going up in the room right now. And here's the really scary statistic, fifty two percent of AI users at work are reluctant to admit using it for their most important tasks. So we don't even know it's being used. So I kind of put that out there as a provocation for you about how quickly can you move from experimentation to deployment. There are three personality types with generative AI.
The ostriches with their heads buried in the sand hoping it all go away. Darwin's proved that doesn't work out well for those people. There's the hysterics. They're running up and down the halls waving their hands, their hair on fire saying it's all going to come to an end. And then there's the pragmatic middle.
The pragmatic people are sitting in the middle, they're going, I might not like it. I might not agree with it. I might not think ethically it's good for our societies and communities, but I recognize the Pandora's box is open. It's not going away and it's my job to lead with an adaptive mindset to embrace it, unlock its power, take care around the ethics and the application, but my job, my job as a leader in the institution is to figure out how to appropriately embrace it, so that my institution survives and thrives, and my graduates and my staff can unlock their potential for the future. Generative AI, I love this quote.
Generative AI in its quest to standardize and automate creativity, risks pulling us back into a realm of mediocrity, where the unique spark of human ingenuity is dimmed by the uniform output of machines. The one thing that Gen AI will do is it'll take the laggards and bring them back to the middle of the bell curve, and it'll take those of us that were geniuses with skills, and we won't be quite as special. So what are we left with? What we are left with and the skills for the future that are going to be the most important are those enduring human capabilities. It's a renaissance, ladies and gentlemen. We go back to being able to do what we always should have been doing, which is to help develop, nurture, teach and assess those wonderful human capabilities.
Because in a world where the machines are making everything mediocrity, what will shine are the things the machines can't do, which are those enduring human capabilities. By the way, just for fun, that quote was written by ChatGPT, and the image behind that was written by Dali within after I had a conversation with her about that quote. Interesting, So let's talk about that. Ninety one percent, LinkedIn data again, ninety one percent of learning and development leaders state that human skills or soft skills are increasingly important. Ten of the most important skills demanded by employers all around the world, typically eight eight out of the twelve are typically those human skills I've talked about.
Management, communication, leadership, customer service, teamwork, and the list goes on. The challenge for all of us in every program that we teach is to make sure we've got those t shaped graduates. We're teaching all of them those enduring human capabilities and we're giving them enough of the hard skills that they need to go out and get their first job and unlock their unlock their potential. So a question for you after being the little tirade on generative AI, on your devices now you can type in as many words as you want. Where do you, for your institution, see the greatest opportunity for generative AI? Away you go.
The race is on. Type in as many words as you want. This is the bit where being praised to the Internet gods that it all works. Yes, it is. Automation.
Wonderful. What else? Assistance, project management, very cool. Nobody said learning and teaching yet. Let's see what happens. Instruction delivery, there it is.
Registrar's office. Get rid of the registrar. Project management, jump start a writing task, energy forecast energy forecasting, very cool. Quite narrow, but very cool. Creativity, L and D's, solutions, instruction delivery, module development, very nice.
Nice. Optimization, knowledge building engineering, all research humming in the middle, I love it. Assessment, oh, assessment. Have I got some ideas for you around assessment in generative AI? I think that is a wonderful application. What a great list.
Test creation, choosers, co pilots. What a great list. Keep them coming. Keep them coming, so that we can get a great composite look. Well done everybody.
You're starting to get It's interesting though, you can see from the picture, we're still very skewed towards learning and teaching. Can you see how our mindsets are disproportionately locked in its opportunity for learning and teaching? I'd encourage you to think as expansively as you can. Thank you very much everybody for for sharing those. So what's the deal then? I have three daughters, one of my daughters taught me an expression, what's the dealio? So what's the dealio here? What what are we really talking about? Well, what we're really talking about is lifelong learning. Lifelong learning.
In Australia, we disproportionately focus in universities on eighteen to twenty four year olds. The future for us is to focus on sixteen to seventy five year olds, and to do that, we've got to start thinking about knowledge as the new workplace currency. Knowledge is the new workplace currency, and let me tell you a bit about that. It's a tale of two generations. I'm the last of the baby boomers.
The last year of the baby boomers was nineteen sixty four. And for all the people younger than us, I apologize for stealing all the resources and wrecking the planet, because that's what we did. And I'm sorry. I'm just a baby boomer, but I'm still sorry. And life was very predictable in my time.
I got to play from zero to five. I got to learn from five to twenty five. I had a job from twenty five to sixty five, and then I get to go and retire sixty five plus. What I call going skiing to my kids, which is an acronym for spending kids inheritance. That's what I tell them.
I have a spreadsheet that goes down to a dollar at death, so that they have to be motivated for for life. But the world of today for the average fifteen year old is they still get to play, they still get to go to school, but they're going to have somewhere between fifteen and thirty different careers and jobs in their life. So the one constant for them, the only way they'll survive is learning for life. Which means that we need to let go of the old knowledge currency. The old knowledge currency was the degree, the diploma, the testimer that hangs on our walls.
I'm not saying it's not relevant and important, it's just not very helpful anymore. It's very low resolution. It says where we studied and then it gives us a few very unhelpful course descriptions and some numbers next to it, and none of that has any correlation to on the job performance. Where somebody studied and what they studied has virtually no correlation to their on the job performance. So the world we've all moved to now, I've used LinkedIn here, is this high resolution three hundred and sixty degree view of the individual that is all built on the back of structured data, which means it's expressible, it's discoverable, it's verifiable and it is being used by everybody either on the supply side or the demand side for the new world of work.
And yet, we are stuck still largely in transcripts, aren't we? We sort of are stuck that what we give a graduate and then when they leave us is that bit of paper and if they lose it, we'll send them a PDF. What we're not doing a very good job of yet is helping them create this lifetime three hundred and sixty degree view of themselves, powering that wallet and portfolio and staying with them for the rest of their lives when they need us. And if you think that industry is waiting for us to catch up, oh boy, you're sadly mistaken. Let me just give you two examples of what industry is doing. The first are Google professional certificates.
Do you know seventy five percent of people who pay to get a Google career certificate, a claim they've had and they call them graduates, report an improvement in their career within six months of completing the certificate. And there's been millions of people taking them. In twenty one, the latest stat I could find, over eight million Americans alone completed digital skills training with Google, and that was in twenty one. So it's grown exponentially since then. Another one, of course, that some of you will be familiar with is the Trailhead Academy.
One of the largest hybrid educators in the world, fifty percent of their graduates report a promotion or a new role. Now we can sit there and say, but that's not real education. They're not an accredited institution. They're not a university. They're not a college.
Doesn't matter. Their brands matter. Their teaching matters. Why does it matter? Because employers think that those qualifications are good enough to extend somebody a job or promote them or to bring them on and develop them more. And we need to be eyes wide open to that.
We need to be eyes wide open to the fact that unless we step into that space, it others will figure it out and take care of it for us. And in the work that I do with employers around the world, that's because they feel there is this crisis of graduateness. And I've looked at the data here in the Philippines. Employers in the Philippines are saying they want graduates with more grit and resilience. They want graduates with better verbal communication skills.
They want graduates with better problem solving skills and group collaboration skills. And yet, what do we continue to teach? We disproportionately continue to teach hard skills instead of balancing that with the soft and human skills that we need. So that brings us to disruption, part two of my presentation. My hero, the late great Clay Christiansen from Harvard University, who in my opinion wrote the seminal work on disruptive innovation, had this to say, by understanding and embracing disruption, organizations can harness it as a catalyst for growth and progress. And here's my continuum, this is a bit of original work from the bean center that I worked on with a great organization in the United States.
And and here's the way if I was in your shoes and I was thinking about where is the world going rather than where it is today, here's how it would work. It would start with libraries of rich skill descriptors that I talked about before. A trusted repository of comprehensive digital skill descriptors endorsed by the author's brand and reputation, and that can be all of you in this room if you want to step into it. Then it's about lifelong learning experiences, all types of learning experiences, formal and informal, each with unique structured architecture built on the back of those skill descriptors. And I'm talking about formal education, work workplace learning, and the next frontier, self directed learning.
From there, we move to credentials of all type. The way I describe them is we've got micro credentials, meso credentials, and macro credentials. And these learning experience based awards offer a skills aligned portable and independently verifiable record of skill and competency mastery. But that's that's okay, but really the next frontier is knitting them in together into all types of learning pathways. Sequences of credentials that stack towards tangible and transparent academic and labor market outcomes.
And once we've done all of that, what we then need to do is build digital wallets. A high resolution centralized source of truth offering a comprehensive detailed and verifiable record of a learner's achievements, skills, competencies and experiences. What often gets described as a CLR or an LER. And there are governments around the world building them. In the European Union, they've got, their entire initiative across the EU to build wallets for all of their citizens called Europass.
In Australia, we're building right now the national skills passport built on the back of those skill descriptors. So every Australian citizen linked to their my gov account will have their skills passport, which will be digital, all of their formal and informal learning in their passport where they can express it, it can be very it can be discovered, and it can be verified. And it's just a matter of time until it happens here in the Philippines as well. The smart institutions are the ones that are doing that for themselves, getting ready. So when the national wallet comes up, they're ready to interoperate with the wallet.
But it's not just good enough to do all of that until they graduate, we then have to understand in their life what they've done with their work experience, their recommendations, their service. We need to be best in class at recognition of prior learning and recognition of lifelong learning, and we need to open themselves up to them to bring them back whenever we need them to come back. That folks is my road map. I've tested it everywhere in the world. Every time I put it in front of a leader that's running an institution, and I sort of talk about this is your future, this is what you need to be able to do, it usually kicks off a pretty interesting conversation.
Because most of us are sort of trapped in the learning experiences and we're really only doing that for formal education. Project. A very small number of you are starting to build dynamic pathways for on ramps and off ramps, and some of you are doing digital wallets, but it's really just a repository for your PDFs of your traditional transcripts, which is better than not having a wallet at all, but you can see where the future is and none of us are doing recognition of prior learning well. None of us are doing that well. And and the only way to survive in that world is to deploy generative AI to be able to take the grunt work, the human work out of it and do it in a much more efficient and sophisticated way.
Are you with me still? Okay. Good. Just just checking because the caffeine is running out. By the way, you do have a highly caffeinated bean with you this morning, I just want you to to know that. And what's really interesting to me is this is a wonderful bit of research that you'll all be given that literally just came out last month from Instructure.
And one of the questions that we asked was how important is lifelong learning as a priority in the Philippines? And as you can see, strongly agree or agree. So everything I've been talking about, you told me before I even got here is important for you, your institutions, your communities that you serve. So, all of what I've been talking about today, if you buy into this vision of a skills first world, if you buy into a vision that technology is going to disrupt the world of work more than ever before, if you buy into my premise that human skills are the new knowledge currency of the future, I want you to take that back. I want you to take that back and ask yourself, is that what your graduates look like? Is that what your graduates look like? Because shame on us if we don't seize the day and step up to our moral and fiscal responsibility and accountability to keep up with our communities and society. It's not going to be easy.
I know there's going to be an incredible amount of internal resistance in your organizations to change and adapt. I've been living that my entire life, but that's where an adaptive mindset comes in. That's where an adaptive mindset of you leaning into those challenges. You have opportunity thinking of being constructive and courageous. And putting the North Star out there and realizing nobody knows quite how to do this yet, but the really smart organizations are looking at the light on the hill and they're saying to their institutions, that's where we're going and they're creating psychologically safe environments for people to take risks, to experiment, to fail, to learn from those failures, but to come out stronger because the smart institutions are on a pathway of advantage.
Instead of fearing the disruption, they embrace it. And they see it as an opportunity to do things that would be impossible in normal times. Then they take that and they say, right, what have we got to do differently with our people, our processes, and our technology? And they build their new toolkits. They get themselves ready, and they deploy. And then they wake up one day and they realize that they were one of the ones that did that and are flourishing.
And they're looking at the other institutions that are around them that are stuck in the past and becoming increasingly irrelevant, and there will be an incredibly an incredible sigh of relief that you had the courage to be an adaptive leader in this environment. So when I talk to universities all around the world as to why they are embracing lifelong learning, this is my top list folks. If you need to go back and build a business case as to why you need to do it for your institution, it's usually because they need to respond to government policy, reach across borders and lifetimes, create access to underserved populations, strengthen their industry partnerships, drive incremental revenue from a new segment of lifelong learners, create an innovation sandbox to improve campus and hybrid delivery, strengthen their employee value proposition for their own people, or to drive the reputation reputation of their institution. That's my list. And it doesn't change very much.
I've been carrying this list around with me for twenty years now, and it's changed a little bit over time, but this is the list. This is the list as to why embrace lifelong learning. So last question for you, why is lifelong learning a priority for your institution? Why don't you just type a few thoughts in for me? Sustainability, I knew that would be number one. Growth in being, success, success, Montessori, quality teaching, progress, career advancement. I love that part of being human.
Relevance, absolutely. Adaptation, income generation, learning never stops, love that. To release human potential, love that. Competence, personal development, survival in life, love that. We've got another survive there.
Social cohesion, I love that one. Truth is under assault in most free liberal democracies. Education creates social cohesion. I love that, whoever put that in there. And it needs to be through life.
Legacy, real world problems, love that. To release human potential, success, survive I love it. We care. Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful.
To fuel souls, now we're getting somewhere. I've finally broken through to you. Wonderful. What a fantastic list. It's not a nice to have ladies and gentlemen.
Lifelong learning is not a nice to have, it never really was. But we got away with it for a while in the eighties and the nineties, the early part of the noughties. We sort of could ignore it a little bit. Not anymore. Not anymore.
That pace of change and innovation, the atrophying of skills, skills have a shelf life, hard skills now, of only two to three years. Remember my tale of two worlds? Baby boomers versus your students today? Forget about us, we're fine. We've got our retirement funds, we won't live till climate change makes havoc in the world, we're fine. Focus on the young ones. Focus on the young ones and those people that are in the workforce today, and make sure that you're doubling down on them to give them what they need.
What a wonderful list. So folks, this is my second to last slide. This is my picture of the disrupted tertiary institution. It's an interest institution that is really really comfortable across lifetimes being in a credential ecosystem. They embrace micro credentials and meso credentials and macro credentials, and they do that through lovely pathways for credit, what we've always done, but they're knitting them together for credit.
And they launch those people then with programs and courses and testimonies and degrees. And they then go out into life and work. And in life from work, they're getting work experience, they're doing informal self directed learning, they're getting on the job training. The really smart institutions then figure out how to build these pathways of recognition. To recognize all of that, to appreciate it, to value it, because they understand it, they can measure it, they can see the data.
And as and when those people need us, we bring them back in again. We bring them back in through micro credentials, through meso credentials, through macro credentials and we walk right alongside them for the rest of their lives. Our societies need accredited institutions, universities, colleges, schools. We need them because we are trust. We have to keep up, because if we don't survive, then our communities and society loses something that I believe is fundamental in free liberal democracies and fundamental in well functioning functioning communities with social cohesion.
But ladies and gentlemen, it's only possible, it's only possible with structured data. So it's not very interesting, it's not very glamorous. But the last word that I'm going to leave you with is it's all about the structured data. None of what I've been talking about is possible unless we think deeply about the way we deploy the technology in our organization. We gather the data or data, however you describe it, to populate those systems.
We underpin the quality of that data into machine learning, generative AI, human intelligence, and we start responding instead of reacting, and we start creating the citizens that we need for the future that we all want to have. Ladies and gentlemen, it has been an absolute privilege to be back in Manila and to be with all of you. Thank you for your time and your attention. Bye for now.
Half the room probably wasn't born in nineteen ninety two, but it's an absolute pleasure to be back and the only thing that seems to be the same from when I was here in nineteen ninety two to now, is there was a typhoon back then when I was here in nineteen ninety two as well. Look, it's an absolute pleasure to be with you today. You can now absolutely tell friends and relatives that you've met Mr. Bean. Right? So and I do Mr.
Bean autographs later if you need it, and it's it's all authentic, I'll even give you a certificate of authenticity if you need it, but, it's a pleasure. Let me just tell you a little bit about about me. I am so lucky because my entire career, and I turn sixty this year, so I'm year of the dragon, and even better, I'm year of the wood dragon. So, I turned sixty this year, so I remember education intersecting with technology from the very first PC. I literally was sitting in the office when the first PC arrived and I was working for an education company.
My my undergrad is in education, I'm a pretty rare university president, because I actually have a degree in education. Kind of ironic really, but it's often often the way. And my entire career has been at the intersection of education and technology. Literally from the mainframe all the way through to today where we're all marveling and a little bit scared by the implications of generative AI. So I've seen every shift, every twist, every turn.
I've heard personalized learning talked about since the early nineteen nineties. I've seen people talk about the promise and the fear mongering of plagiarism intersecting with technology, how the technology is going to eat our jobs, how there's not going to be a need any longer for human interaction. And all of it has gone in different directions, most of it unplanned. But I've had a bird's eye eye view on all of that happening and I did it in two worlds. The first half of my career was in the private sector, where my last job was running global education products for Microsoft out of Seattle, working right alongside the Gates Foundation with the goal of not selling more software or services to education, but actually helping technology unlock greater quality of education and access to education.
And then a miracle happened, Britain's largest university, England's largest university contacted me and said, hey, do you want to come be our president? And so, right at sort of about forty years of age, I moved from being on the technology side to suddenly running a university with two hundred and seventy thousand students, based out of the United Kingdom. And then after thirty years away from my hometown, I got back to Melbourne, Australia, where I ran one of Australia's largest universities, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University. And I always had this plan, those of us that teach, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Those of us that teach understand there is no greater satisfaction in life than to share wisdom. So I'd always had this plan, I'd always had this plan that for my last job, I would go back to teaching, I would take my forty years of experience of education and technology, and I'd bring it to as many people as I possibly could.
And that's why I'm just so happy to be with you today. And what I'm going to talk about is the work that I do in my research center now, where I and my colleagues are completely focused on the future of work, the future of leadership in work, and how education needs to adjust and change to make sure that those people we serve, that come to us to realize their potential in life and work, we are giving them the skills and competencies they need rather than the ones that we want to teach. We are serving as many people as we possibly can, no matter what their age, their station in life, their background. We're opening our institutions up to have as much impact as we can. And that's what my presentation is going to be about today.
It's going to be all about my observations as I get to travel all around the world, talking to wonderful universities, and institutions, and primary schools and high schools about the disruption in innovation that I see, and it's sort of a call to action about what we're going to need to do to keep up. Are you with me so far? Are you sure? Yeah, round of applause. Give the bean a round of applause. Okay. Let's dive right in.
Part one of my presentation is going to be all about the global skilling emergency, as it was characterized by the World Economic Forum. Fundamental disruptions in local and global labor markets increasingly demand that learning experiences have tangible market outcomes to address the skills emergency. All over the world, people are questioning the value of a university degree. In the United States, it's got so bad that there's an entire movement called tear the paper ceiling, suspending the degree as the proxy for considering somebody for a role. It's being adopted by hundreds, if not thousands of employers in the United States.
Entire states are saying we're no longer going to ask if somebody's got a degree before we'll consider hiring them. And it's And I think it's really important that we, the educators of the world, don't get angry or cranky or disappointed by that, but we face up to the reality as to why. Why is it that employers, the governments are increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the quality of the graduates that leave our wonderful institutions. And there's a really simple reason why, the pace of change now makes skills increasingly mismatched or repeatedly redundant across a lifetime. This slide is a tale of two worlds, to the left pre pandemic.
And I've got to tell you the pandemic impacted the Philippines and my hometown of Melbourne more than just about any other places on the planet. So we have that in common. So to the left is what was going on before the pandemic, to the right is what's going on after the pandemic. So before the pandemic, this skilling emergency was alive and well, and according to WF, it was driven by three forces. The first is a skills mismatch.
Qualifications no longer meet the gen those generally required for the job, driven by the pace and change of technology and innovation. The second is, skills deficit. A lack of candidates with the required skills to fill specific vacancies, And the third is skills redundancy, jobs disappearing, skills no longer in demand. You know, I am an eternal optimist. I always look at the glass half full, I can find the positive in just about anything.
And so, my whole career, whenever new technology came along, I could look everybody in the eye and say, don't worry, more jobs are going to be created than destroyed by this technology. But not this time. Not this time. All of my instincts are telling me that generative AI is going to destroy more jobs than it creates. Which means educating our citizens for a world that hasn't been imagined yet, is really the number one priority we have ahead of us.
And I'm going to talk a little bit about that. Now, let's fast forward post pandemic, and here's what WEF was saying to governments all over the world. What they were saying was, and all of my research through the beam center absolutely agrees with this, What we're saying is that governments all around the world and they are all around the world need to move to a skills first framework. And there's two enablers to that. Enabling number one is embracing a skills first culture, policies and mindset.
My question to you, does your institution have a skills first culture, policies and mind set. The second enabler which is where it's so hard right now to get this done, is that governments all around the world are either adopting a common skills language or they're considering adopting a common skills language to fuel the power of big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence or to put it more simply, to take the friction out between demand and supply. To take the friction out between the skills that we're teaching and what industry needs and getting those worlds to talk more effectively with each other. And you'll notice there are five, subsets of those two enablers and don't worry, you'll be getting copies of these slides, so you don't need to worry too much about taking notes. But continue to take photos because I imagine you're taking photos of me, which makes me feel really, really good when that when that happens.
Just a few quick stats, these are American stats, and this is pre generative AI. Thirty seven percent of the top twenty skills requested for the average US job have changed since two thousand and sixteen. One in five skills requested for the average US job is an entirely new requirement in that occupation, and seventy six percent of jobs changed more from two thousand and nineteen through twenty one in the than in the previous three year period. This slide is there just to tell you one thing, and that is everything is speeding up. Everything is speeding up.
And when you think about what underpins the Philippine economy to a large extent today, with your renaissance and massive growth in the BPO space, it has to mirror the skills that are required for the rest of the world to remain relevant. So we in the Philippines are not shielded from this disruption, this skills atrophy, this need to innovate. If anything, it's even more important here for our citizens to be able to keep pace on the global stage. Now let's talk a little bit about generative AI. There's a number of stats here.
There's only one I want you to really look at. One hundred million users in the first sixty days for chat GPT. We have never ever ever seen anything like it. Never seen anything like it. Now, I'll let you in on a little secret, one of mister Bean's little secrets.
It actually has nothing to do with the hardware, the software, the language models, the technology. It's not about the technology at all. You know what it's about? It's about the human condition. It's about us and the way we interact with technology, but more importantly, what is it about the lives we lead now that makes generative AI an unstoppable force in our lives. And it's really interesting because when we talk about education and generative AI, nearly all we want to talk about, I guarantee you at this conference, most of what we're going to talk about is to the right of this slide, learning and teaching.
At best, sometimes we stray across and we talk a little bit about research. But this is a heat map. The really smart, really smart institutions are thinking holistically about their institution with generative AI across student services, operations, marketing, research and learning and teaching. The really smart institutions are not thinking about it to lower cost. The really smart institutions are thinking about how can we free up thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy percent of the time of our existing people, so that they can go do higher value tasks inside their institutions.
They're the smart institutions. And if any of you across this heat map are thinking about leveraging generative AI purely lower cost, then you have missed the entire opportunity of what it's capable of. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret and I know it's going to be depressing. Today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life. Think about that.
And most of you are already feeling overworked, underappreciated, you're struggling to be able to have balance between your home life and your work life, not to mention your social life and your spiritual life. Most of us are under this intense pressure, but because of generative AI, today is the slowest day of the rest of your working life, which is why I'm so glad that I'm almost retired. A little bit of data for you from, the LinkedIn, the most recent LinkedIn, it only came out in November last year, global report on skills. Remember, think about who LinkedIn represents. LinkedIn represents knowledge workers of all types.
And here's what the statistics said, so when they poll their members, fifty five percent of LinkedIn members stand to see their jobs change by the rise of generative AI. Twenty three percent of them think it will augment them. It'll be my co pilot. It'll just be right there with me. I thought Microsoft did a brilliant job calling it co pilot because that's the way I think of generative AI.
Thirty two percent think their roles are going to be disrupted, which is sort of political correctness for my job is going away. Head of AI position has grown by double digits since December twenty two, which is kind of ironic because it's all so new. What the heck is the head of AI? Nobody really quite knows and yet, it's in very hot demand. Now, the punch line from LinkedIn, which I totally agree with, is that the smart organizations are moving from experimentation to transformation. You know, in universities, we love to form committees, We love to write policies.
We love to have pilots. We like to research things for multiple years before we deploy them. There's no time with generative AI. You you don't have time. I'm not saying that you're reckless.
I'm not saying that you you don't think about the upsides as well as the downsides, but there is no time to wait. Those who adapt will be the ones to seize the opportunity and channel this momentum into return on investment for their organizations. But a few rather interesting statistics for you. Seventy five percent of the LinkedIn members say they are already using generative AI in their job. So you some of you are saying we're waiting until we've got policies, too late.
Seventy five percent of your people, they're already using it, they're off to the races, they're not waiting for permission, and I'm talking about your staff as well as your students, they're just using it, they're not they're not waiting, and they're using it. This is coming back to what I said about the human condition, They're using it because it saves time, ninety percent of them. It helps them focus, eighty five percent of them. It helps them be more creative, eighty four percent of them. The human condition.
Why would any of us not use something that saves us time, helps us focus and helps us be more creative, freeing us up to have all those other things in our life that we care about? It's unstoppable. It's unstoppable because it solves so many innate characteristics of what we want for our lives. But seventy eight percent of those seventy five percent, they're bringing their own AI to work. They're not waiting for you to deploy something for the university or the school, they're bringing their own. And why are they bringing their own? Because sixty eight percent of them say they struggle with the pace and volume of work.
I bet if I ask for a show of hands here, how many of you struggle with the pace and volume of work? There would be a lot of hands going up in the room right now. And here's the really scary statistic, fifty two percent of AI users at work are reluctant to admit using it for their most important tasks. So we don't even know it's being used. So I kind of put that out there as a provocation for you about how quickly can you move from experimentation to deployment. There are three personality types with generative AI.
The ostriches with their heads buried in the sand hoping it all go away. Darwin's proved that doesn't work out well for those people. There's the hysterics. They're running up and down the halls waving their hands, their hair on fire saying it's all going to come to an end. And then there's the pragmatic middle.
The pragmatic people are sitting in the middle, they're going, I might not like it. I might not agree with it. I might not think ethically it's good for our societies and communities, but I recognize the Pandora's box is open. It's not going away and it's my job to lead with an adaptive mindset to embrace it, unlock its power, take care around the ethics and the application, but my job, my job as a leader in the institution is to figure out how to appropriately embrace it, so that my institution survives and thrives, and my graduates and my staff can unlock their potential for the future. Generative AI, I love this quote.
Generative AI in its quest to standardize and automate creativity, risks pulling us back into a realm of mediocrity, where the unique spark of human ingenuity is dimmed by the uniform output of machines. The one thing that Gen AI will do is it'll take the laggards and bring them back to the middle of the bell curve, and it'll take those of us that were geniuses with skills, and we won't be quite as special. So what are we left with? What we are left with and the skills for the future that are going to be the most important are those enduring human capabilities. It's a renaissance, ladies and gentlemen. We go back to being able to do what we always should have been doing, which is to help develop, nurture, teach and assess those wonderful human capabilities.
Because in a world where the machines are making everything mediocrity, what will shine are the things the machines can't do, which are those enduring human capabilities. By the way, just for fun, that quote was written by ChatGPT, and the image behind that was written by Dali within after I had a conversation with her about that quote. Interesting, So let's talk about that. Ninety one percent, LinkedIn data again, ninety one percent of learning and development leaders state that human skills or soft skills are increasingly important. Ten of the most important skills demanded by employers all around the world, typically eight eight out of the twelve are typically those human skills I've talked about.
Management, communication, leadership, customer service, teamwork, and the list goes on. The challenge for all of us in every program that we teach is to make sure we've got those t shaped graduates. We're teaching all of them those enduring human capabilities and we're giving them enough of the hard skills that they need to go out and get their first job and unlock their unlock their potential. So a question for you after being the little tirade on generative AI, on your devices now you can type in as many words as you want. Where do you, for your institution, see the greatest opportunity for generative AI? Away you go.
The race is on. Type in as many words as you want. This is the bit where being praised to the Internet gods that it all works. Yes, it is. Automation.
Wonderful. What else? Assistance, project management, very cool. Nobody said learning and teaching yet. Let's see what happens. Instruction delivery, there it is.
Registrar's office. Get rid of the registrar. Project management, jump start a writing task, energy forecast energy forecasting, very cool. Quite narrow, but very cool. Creativity, L and D's, solutions, instruction delivery, module development, very nice.
Nice. Optimization, knowledge building engineering, all research humming in the middle, I love it. Assessment, oh, assessment. Have I got some ideas for you around assessment in generative AI? I think that is a wonderful application. What a great list.
Test creation, choosers, co pilots. What a great list. Keep them coming. Keep them coming, so that we can get a great composite look. Well done everybody.
You're starting to get It's interesting though, you can see from the picture, we're still very skewed towards learning and teaching. Can you see how our mindsets are disproportionately locked in its opportunity for learning and teaching? I'd encourage you to think as expansively as you can. Thank you very much everybody for for sharing those. So what's the deal then? I have three daughters, one of my daughters taught me an expression, what's the dealio? So what's the dealio here? What what are we really talking about? Well, what we're really talking about is lifelong learning. Lifelong learning.
In Australia, we disproportionately focus in universities on eighteen to twenty four year olds. The future for us is to focus on sixteen to seventy five year olds, and to do that, we've got to start thinking about knowledge as the new workplace currency. Knowledge is the new workplace currency, and let me tell you a bit about that. It's a tale of two generations. I'm the last of the baby boomers.
The last year of the baby boomers was nineteen sixty four. And for all the people younger than us, I apologize for stealing all the resources and wrecking the planet, because that's what we did. And I'm sorry. I'm just a baby boomer, but I'm still sorry. And life was very predictable in my time.
I got to play from zero to five. I got to learn from five to twenty five. I had a job from twenty five to sixty five, and then I get to go and retire sixty five plus. What I call going skiing to my kids, which is an acronym for spending kids inheritance. That's what I tell them.
I have a spreadsheet that goes down to a dollar at death, so that they have to be motivated for for life. But the world of today for the average fifteen year old is they still get to play, they still get to go to school, but they're going to have somewhere between fifteen and thirty different careers and jobs in their life. So the one constant for them, the only way they'll survive is learning for life. Which means that we need to let go of the old knowledge currency. The old knowledge currency was the degree, the diploma, the testimer that hangs on our walls.
I'm not saying it's not relevant and important, it's just not very helpful anymore. It's very low resolution. It says where we studied and then it gives us a few very unhelpful course descriptions and some numbers next to it, and none of that has any correlation to on the job performance. Where somebody studied and what they studied has virtually no correlation to their on the job performance. So the world we've all moved to now, I've used LinkedIn here, is this high resolution three hundred and sixty degree view of the individual that is all built on the back of structured data, which means it's expressible, it's discoverable, it's verifiable and it is being used by everybody either on the supply side or the demand side for the new world of work.
And yet, we are stuck still largely in transcripts, aren't we? We sort of are stuck that what we give a graduate and then when they leave us is that bit of paper and if they lose it, we'll send them a PDF. What we're not doing a very good job of yet is helping them create this lifetime three hundred and sixty degree view of themselves, powering that wallet and portfolio and staying with them for the rest of their lives when they need us. And if you think that industry is waiting for us to catch up, oh boy, you're sadly mistaken. Let me just give you two examples of what industry is doing. The first are Google professional certificates.
Do you know seventy five percent of people who pay to get a Google career certificate, a claim they've had and they call them graduates, report an improvement in their career within six months of completing the certificate. And there's been millions of people taking them. In twenty one, the latest stat I could find, over eight million Americans alone completed digital skills training with Google, and that was in twenty one. So it's grown exponentially since then. Another one, of course, that some of you will be familiar with is the Trailhead Academy.
One of the largest hybrid educators in the world, fifty percent of their graduates report a promotion or a new role. Now we can sit there and say, but that's not real education. They're not an accredited institution. They're not a university. They're not a college.
Doesn't matter. Their brands matter. Their teaching matters. Why does it matter? Because employers think that those qualifications are good enough to extend somebody a job or promote them or to bring them on and develop them more. And we need to be eyes wide open to that.
We need to be eyes wide open to the fact that unless we step into that space, it others will figure it out and take care of it for us. And in the work that I do with employers around the world, that's because they feel there is this crisis of graduateness. And I've looked at the data here in the Philippines. Employers in the Philippines are saying they want graduates with more grit and resilience. They want graduates with better verbal communication skills.
They want graduates with better problem solving skills and group collaboration skills. And yet, what do we continue to teach? We disproportionately continue to teach hard skills instead of balancing that with the soft and human skills that we need. So that brings us to disruption, part two of my presentation. My hero, the late great Clay Christiansen from Harvard University, who in my opinion wrote the seminal work on disruptive innovation, had this to say, by understanding and embracing disruption, organizations can harness it as a catalyst for growth and progress. And here's my continuum, this is a bit of original work from the bean center that I worked on with a great organization in the United States.
And and here's the way if I was in your shoes and I was thinking about where is the world going rather than where it is today, here's how it would work. It would start with libraries of rich skill descriptors that I talked about before. A trusted repository of comprehensive digital skill descriptors endorsed by the author's brand and reputation, and that can be all of you in this room if you want to step into it. Then it's about lifelong learning experiences, all types of learning experiences, formal and informal, each with unique structured architecture built on the back of those skill descriptors. And I'm talking about formal education, work workplace learning, and the next frontier, self directed learning.
From there, we move to credentials of all type. The way I describe them is we've got micro credentials, meso credentials, and macro credentials. And these learning experience based awards offer a skills aligned portable and independently verifiable record of skill and competency mastery. But that's that's okay, but really the next frontier is knitting them in together into all types of learning pathways. Sequences of credentials that stack towards tangible and transparent academic and labor market outcomes.
And once we've done all of that, what we then need to do is build digital wallets. A high resolution centralized source of truth offering a comprehensive detailed and verifiable record of a learner's achievements, skills, competencies and experiences. What often gets described as a CLR or an LER. And there are governments around the world building them. In the European Union, they've got, their entire initiative across the EU to build wallets for all of their citizens called Europass.
In Australia, we're building right now the national skills passport built on the back of those skill descriptors. So every Australian citizen linked to their my gov account will have their skills passport, which will be digital, all of their formal and informal learning in their passport where they can express it, it can be very it can be discovered, and it can be verified. And it's just a matter of time until it happens here in the Philippines as well. The smart institutions are the ones that are doing that for themselves, getting ready. So when the national wallet comes up, they're ready to interoperate with the wallet.
But it's not just good enough to do all of that until they graduate, we then have to understand in their life what they've done with their work experience, their recommendations, their service. We need to be best in class at recognition of prior learning and recognition of lifelong learning, and we need to open themselves up to them to bring them back whenever we need them to come back. That folks is my road map. I've tested it everywhere in the world. Every time I put it in front of a leader that's running an institution, and I sort of talk about this is your future, this is what you need to be able to do, it usually kicks off a pretty interesting conversation.
Because most of us are sort of trapped in the learning experiences and we're really only doing that for formal education. Project. A very small number of you are starting to build dynamic pathways for on ramps and off ramps, and some of you are doing digital wallets, but it's really just a repository for your PDFs of your traditional transcripts, which is better than not having a wallet at all, but you can see where the future is and none of us are doing recognition of prior learning well. None of us are doing that well. And and the only way to survive in that world is to deploy generative AI to be able to take the grunt work, the human work out of it and do it in a much more efficient and sophisticated way.
Are you with me still? Okay. Good. Just just checking because the caffeine is running out. By the way, you do have a highly caffeinated bean with you this morning, I just want you to to know that. And what's really interesting to me is this is a wonderful bit of research that you'll all be given that literally just came out last month from Instructure.
And one of the questions that we asked was how important is lifelong learning as a priority in the Philippines? And as you can see, strongly agree or agree. So everything I've been talking about, you told me before I even got here is important for you, your institutions, your communities that you serve. So, all of what I've been talking about today, if you buy into this vision of a skills first world, if you buy into a vision that technology is going to disrupt the world of work more than ever before, if you buy into my premise that human skills are the new knowledge currency of the future, I want you to take that back. I want you to take that back and ask yourself, is that what your graduates look like? Is that what your graduates look like? Because shame on us if we don't seize the day and step up to our moral and fiscal responsibility and accountability to keep up with our communities and society. It's not going to be easy.
I know there's going to be an incredible amount of internal resistance in your organizations to change and adapt. I've been living that my entire life, but that's where an adaptive mindset comes in. That's where an adaptive mindset of you leaning into those challenges. You have opportunity thinking of being constructive and courageous. And putting the North Star out there and realizing nobody knows quite how to do this yet, but the really smart organizations are looking at the light on the hill and they're saying to their institutions, that's where we're going and they're creating psychologically safe environments for people to take risks, to experiment, to fail, to learn from those failures, but to come out stronger because the smart institutions are on a pathway of advantage.
Instead of fearing the disruption, they embrace it. And they see it as an opportunity to do things that would be impossible in normal times. Then they take that and they say, right, what have we got to do differently with our people, our processes, and our technology? And they build their new toolkits. They get themselves ready, and they deploy. And then they wake up one day and they realize that they were one of the ones that did that and are flourishing.
And they're looking at the other institutions that are around them that are stuck in the past and becoming increasingly irrelevant, and there will be an incredibly an incredible sigh of relief that you had the courage to be an adaptive leader in this environment. So when I talk to universities all around the world as to why they are embracing lifelong learning, this is my top list folks. If you need to go back and build a business case as to why you need to do it for your institution, it's usually because they need to respond to government policy, reach across borders and lifetimes, create access to underserved populations, strengthen their industry partnerships, drive incremental revenue from a new segment of lifelong learners, create an innovation sandbox to improve campus and hybrid delivery, strengthen their employee value proposition for their own people, or to drive the reputation reputation of their institution. That's my list. And it doesn't change very much.
I've been carrying this list around with me for twenty years now, and it's changed a little bit over time, but this is the list. This is the list as to why embrace lifelong learning. So last question for you, why is lifelong learning a priority for your institution? Why don't you just type a few thoughts in for me? Sustainability, I knew that would be number one. Growth in being, success, success, Montessori, quality teaching, progress, career advancement. I love that part of being human.
Relevance, absolutely. Adaptation, income generation, learning never stops, love that. To release human potential, love that. Competence, personal development, survival in life, love that. We've got another survive there.
Social cohesion, I love that one. Truth is under assault in most free liberal democracies. Education creates social cohesion. I love that, whoever put that in there. And it needs to be through life.
Legacy, real world problems, love that. To release human potential, success, survive I love it. We care. Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful.
To fuel souls, now we're getting somewhere. I've finally broken through to you. Wonderful. What a fantastic list. It's not a nice to have ladies and gentlemen.
Lifelong learning is not a nice to have, it never really was. But we got away with it for a while in the eighties and the nineties, the early part of the noughties. We sort of could ignore it a little bit. Not anymore. Not anymore.
That pace of change and innovation, the atrophying of skills, skills have a shelf life, hard skills now, of only two to three years. Remember my tale of two worlds? Baby boomers versus your students today? Forget about us, we're fine. We've got our retirement funds, we won't live till climate change makes havoc in the world, we're fine. Focus on the young ones. Focus on the young ones and those people that are in the workforce today, and make sure that you're doubling down on them to give them what they need.
What a wonderful list. So folks, this is my second to last slide. This is my picture of the disrupted tertiary institution. It's an interest institution that is really really comfortable across lifetimes being in a credential ecosystem. They embrace micro credentials and meso credentials and macro credentials, and they do that through lovely pathways for credit, what we've always done, but they're knitting them together for credit.
And they launch those people then with programs and courses and testimonies and degrees. And they then go out into life and work. And in life from work, they're getting work experience, they're doing informal self directed learning, they're getting on the job training. The really smart institutions then figure out how to build these pathways of recognition. To recognize all of that, to appreciate it, to value it, because they understand it, they can measure it, they can see the data.
And as and when those people need us, we bring them back in again. We bring them back in through micro credentials, through meso credentials, through macro credentials and we walk right alongside them for the rest of their lives. Our societies need accredited institutions, universities, colleges, schools. We need them because we are trust. We have to keep up, because if we don't survive, then our communities and society loses something that I believe is fundamental in free liberal democracies and fundamental in well functioning functioning communities with social cohesion.
But ladies and gentlemen, it's only possible, it's only possible with structured data. So it's not very interesting, it's not very glamorous. But the last word that I'm going to leave you with is it's all about the structured data. None of what I've been talking about is possible unless we think deeply about the way we deploy the technology in our organization. We gather the data or data, however you describe it, to populate those systems.
We underpin the quality of that data into machine learning, generative AI, human intelligence, and we start responding instead of reacting, and we start creating the citizens that we need for the future that we all want to have. Ladies and gentlemen, it has been an absolute privilege to be back in Manila and to be with all of you. Thank you for your time and your attention. Bye for now.