THE SKILLS SHE’LL NEED TO GET A JOB
WHEN the kids of today grow up and enter the workforce it might be all robots and coding but Geelong experts insist good communication skills will still be vital.
Industry leaders across the Geelong region gathered at a forum hosted by Skilling The Bay last week and gave an insight into what the employment future might look like for the next generation.
While a host of topics were discussed by the panel, most expressed the need to maintain a strong balance between digital education and basic people skills for young graduates entering the workforce.
ICT chairman and panel facilitator Nick Stanley said they were seeing a number changes in the working environment that future employees would have to adapt to.
“We’re starting to see very much a virtual work environment which can be quite challenging to nondigital natives,” he said.
“Those people who haven’t been brought up with the iPhone and having to deal with using things like gotomeeting, voicepoint, virtual meetings and that sort of thing.”
He said one of the challenges the region’s workers now face was maintaining personal skills in a technology-saturated environment.
Australian Industry Group STEM skills project manager Maggie Farrell said educators and employers had to remember to balance personal skills with technology use.
“It’s not just about machines and you have to be really careful not to get captured by the technology so that you lose sight of how you deal with a client, which is a really important skill as well,” she said.
Epworth Hospital CEO Damian Armour said the medical industry now needed employees who could work with digital technology as well as patients.
“They need digital literacy because the input of information required by a nurse is not necessarily written on a piece of paper any more,” he said.
“We’re very looking for our employees to be digitally literate.
“There’s an increasing proliferation of medical devices that are effectively robots.
“Our staff being able to interface with the robots is now a very important part of providing safe and capable care. It will also require the employee of the future to be more flexible and more mobile.”
Geelong Grammar creativity and innovation co-ordinator Tim Patston said he agreed it was important to make sure students were ready for a digital workforce but they also needed to be able to communicate on a human level.
“Human connection is what brings it all together,” Dr Patston said.
“It doesn’t matter how good you are with technology, if you can’t interact with another human being then you’re in trouble.”
He said the school expanded its curriculum to keep students up to date with changing technology but made sure the basics were still covered.
“We augment our teaching with the digital space — digital technology is designed to make things easier for students but if you don’t understand the creation behind it there’s a problem,” he said. “Understanding of the basics behind it is really important because you don’t want to be ignorant when using it.”