The End of "The Job"?

What major use for mobile phones came as a surprise even to BT? Chris Winter, advisor to BT, asked this at the NAACE conference in February 2000. The answer may surprise you as it surprised me. The largest unforeseen traffic turned out to be teenagers sending text messages to each other in class. This modest extra feature which digital technology allows has unexpectedly become a lifestyle for modern youth. Ask any parent of a teenager if they have heard of text messages on mobile phones and you are likely to receive exclamations of agreement.

The fact that children are doing this in school may worry you. "They should be doing their lessons", I hear you say. But this misses the point. We still tend to think that teenagers should absorb facts and then use them to pass exams and get a good job with prospects and a pension. In reality the world is changing and the number of such jobs is diminishing rapidly. As long ago as 1994, William Bridges wrote in Fortune Magazine, "The world is on the verge of another leap in creativity and productivity but the 'job' is not going to be part of tomorrow's economic reality. In its place is an emerging enterprise where workers will become more responsible for managing their own lives and will sell their skills to employers or customers across a globally connected market."

This new world is happening now, but our education system is still preparing children for the old one. You see, the current school structure is a legacy of the past, designed for an industrial society. Grammar schools educated the top 20 percent to be managers; technical schools trained the next twenty percent to be engineers and the rest were essentially dumbed down to work in the factories. The problem is that we don't live in an industrial society any more. It has already changed and millions of factory jobs have already gone, together with many other traditional jobs. Government preoccupation with five GCSEs at grades A to C is simply part of this legacy. GCSEs are based mainly on memory skills so only about 50 percent of the total population will ever reach the target. The rest will leave school having failed to reach expectations. Is this really best for Britain in the twenty-first century?

So what is the answer? It may lie in the views of Alan November, who says that children, of all abilities, will need entrepreneurial skills. He compares the future with the past, pointing out that until the industrial revolution people generally worked as and when the work needed doing. In the future they may do so again - building, making, serving - in response to the market around them and not to the dictates of a nine-to-five job.

Which brings us back to the teenagers with their mobile phones in class. They could be sending text messages to centres across the world seeking answers to their questions. They don't, of course - they're asking each other about football and boyfriends. But they could be and that is the important thing = they could be using the technology to manage their lives, accessing information and people on a day-to-day basis. We should be encouraging this, rather than waiting for someone to give them a job. Entrepreneurial youngsters are the ones who will succeed in the modern world, not those who can just regurgitate facts and get good GCSEs. You'll find these young entrepreneurs tapping text into their mobile phones right now. Don't discourage them, they are Britain's brightest future.

You can find out more about Alan November at www.anovember.com