Imagine we are in the year 2050 and it is Christmas/New Year break. You will most likely find me in a quaint town with majestic views thinking about what next. After a busy year, this will be my chance to recover from the digital overload and be reinspired. I do hope that in this future, there will still be books that we can touch, fresh air that we can feel, and music that stirs the soul.
As a professional, I will still be a passionate believer in “where there is Skill, there is a way”. Perhaps, I will be working to position ‘human talent in a machine world’. Hopefully, by then, Skills would have become a global currency and a generation would have embraced ‘VOCATION AS THE NEW SUPERPOWER’.
Promoting the skills, talent, and capacities of individuals and institutions is my career calling. I am working at the intersection of digitalization, human talent, policy reform. Having invested the last 2 decades in understanding the role vocational skills and training can play in building resilient societies, I have learned time and again that both public and private sector institutions understand the close linkages between skills and competitiveness. They are also willing to invest in reform to reap the return on investment in human development. But the pace of change often does not match the pace of reform or education planning. That is the space professionals like me are trying to ill by creating platforms, curating a community of practice, and advising institutions to prepare for this change.
Once such platform that I curate and manage is #TVETChat on Twitter. It is the rare global twitter community dedicated to everything Vocational Skills and Training. The #TVETChat is hosted by practitioners as ‘Guest moderators’. At #TVETChat there are no titles, paid spots or product placements. It is a volunteer group of practitioners from more than 22 countries coming together every week to discuss, share and learn.
I write, chat and share regularly via the alias – theskillspundit – on twitter and through @TVETChat . This blog is a place to put all these experiences together, share the lessons learnt, ask some tough questions and work with you – hand in hand- to prepare for the next global transition.