Ready for any possible future

What will make people successful over the next few years? What will a job look like in 2030 and what competences will be mostly needed?  

As a College and a lifelong learning organisation, we ask ourselves this question continuously, this is what keeps us awake at night. Our College students are asking us to prepare them to be well equipped for this future, and our business customers are asking us to help them in transitioning their organisations and people into future roles and competences.

This is the “raison d’être” of my job as Chief Learning Architect, looking ahead and tuning our educational models and contents in the present to be future-ready.
The technology tsunami we are living in would suggest that very technical skills preferably in the area of computing and artificial intelligence should be top notch. But this is just the tip of the iceberg! We need to dig deeper, to look at the 2030 work picture by considering two documents: 

• “Realizing 2030: a divided vision of the future” by DELL and The Institute For The Future (IFTF),
• “The Future of Jobs Report 2030” by The World Economic Forum (WEF)

Research show that: 

“85% of jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet” (IFTF)

Independently if the number will be 85, 60 or 50, the degree of change implies that as a student (or as a worker) you need to invest into skills and competences more than on a job profile.  

“82% of business leaders expect humans and machines will work as integrated teams within their organisation inside of five years” (DELL)

At H-FARM College we have introduced AI not only as a subject of study, but also as a way of learning.

In specific courses the students are stimulated to actively use large language models to better refine their work. Students learn how to interact with AI and how to get the best, while learning also the risks and how to avoid mistakes in the usage. We are experimenting with AI used as a help for professors too. Does not matter if it is about creating supporting material, compelling exercises, auxiliary analysis on assignments, AI is going to be a classmate for the students and an active assistant for the professors.  

At H-FARM College, AI is fully integrated into the activities and the content. After all, AI is here to stay, so here we are learning to embrace it and also how to use it with integrity.

“Employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years” (WEF)

Harvard Business Review (October) notes that the shelf life of executive knowledge is now only 2.5 years.

The WEF study highlights two important findings. 

The first one is the breadth of the impact. 44% of workers’ skills disrupted means 1 out of 2 workers will need to seriously invest in their skills.

As H-FARM College, we educate our students to not learn just facts. 

We help them to build a growth mindset thanks to the Personal Development Program. With the Enhancing Courses and through the “on the job” activities we teach them how to think analytical and creative.

Indeed, the second finding of the WEF report is comforting us. When ranking the top 10 skills to be future ready, what we find at the top of the list is analytical thinking, creativity and resilience, flexibility and agility. Again, at H-FARM College all these skills are learned and practised across all the degrees and they are part of the identity of each and every student. 

Thanks to our Inspirational Talks program, business leaders and experts across different sectors come to H-FARM College to share their real life stories, their values and fragilities directly with students. So, our students can find themselves sitting down for lunch with top executives, famous business leaders and inspirational people. This is fostering motivation as well as stimulating students’ curiosity. Just by chance, we discovered the 4th and 5th skills of the WEF top 10 list, motivation and curiosity.

Only time will tell if what we are doing will reach our goal (“be ready for any possible future”), but surely we are proud of our students always performing great in works with businesses from every sector and showing the strength of our educational model with concrete results.

If you want to be “ready for any possible future” and you like to be different, why not take ownership of your future and see what H-FARM College has to offer you.

Pierluigi Fasano, Chief Learning Architect, Professor of practice