The concept of the ‘job for life’, still prevalent in business, governments and families. This places pressure on the growing individual, who is faced with further pressures as the pace of business life increases and knowledge becomes quickly outmoded and supplanted by new information. As a consequence, governments are beginning to re-evaluate the way they look at training and developing their children. At the same time there is need for parents and children to take more personal responsibility for the learning they take away from training programmes.

For institutions of higher learning, there is a need to align their choice of training with the strategic objectives of the country at the time. Today, in Kenya without a more rigorous identification of what is expected from the training, there is no longer any guarantee that the training will translate into success in life. This calls for the need to identify ‘training needs for the country’ as part of a wider system of ‘learning’, as the current 844’training’ does not do justice to the wide array of new skills, values and perspectives that individuals can develop and bring to life.

At a family level, there is a need for parents to take more individual responsibility for how their children learn, and the need to be more focused on the family and national values and needs in order to extract the right outcomes from the training they undergo. It is important that as citizens, we must be willing to commit to the national aspirations in a way that is appropriate. To achieve these, we need to develop learning experiences that will maximize value for both the individual’s own personal and national development.

As a result, this will shift in learning towards constructive outcomes other than individualistic competition experienced in the current 844 system. This holds that all knowledge is essentially personal knowledge – the learner is at the centre of the process, not the classroom, the lecturer, or the material they are learning from. In the future, training can no longer be merely a valuable thing to do for its own sake. It must directly benefit aspirations, improve specific skills of the individual, and create effective transferable skills for the individual to fit into varied environments.

In the past decade, we have all viewed education in different lenses; Even a relatively short time ago it was possible to think in terms of enjoying a long career with a single employer, building presence and status over a long period of time, this is no longer the case. The roles within organisations were clearly defined and the nature of the work would be consistent. This is no longer the case, as professions have changed and illustrates more clearly than before through the day to day needs of this organisations.

Organisations tend not to take a holistic, whole career approach to their workforce nowadays The impact of this is that the individual has to learn how to manage short-term relationships whilst moving from task to task and organisation to organisation. Sennett argues that as organisations seldom, if ever, provide individuals with a long-term career time frame; the individual has to construct their own career or life narrative.

The other issue is addressing the challenge of developing new skills and uncovering potential abilities as skills decay increasingly rapidly over time. A skill can no longer be viewed as being a skill for life, an enduring presence that will ensure one’s continuing security in the corporate world as once it might have done. Longer serving employees were once respected for the hard won experience they had acquired; they built up valuable knowledge, competencies and skills over time.

These skills were durable and had value. Now, due to the pace of change, there is less advantage in holding such skills. ‘Skills extinction’ has become one of the characteristics of modern corporate life. Adaptability has taken its place. Technological advances mean workers need to retrain every now and then. The notion of a single set of skills that will last an individual their entire working life is as redundant as the pitheads that once dotted the sales concept.

As the 844 system of learning in Kenya beckons, the ability to let go of the past; to accept that no one owns their place in an organized system, and that past services do not guarantee a future with the same employer. The future for any individual is more about potential than experience – what you can do in the future rather than what you have done in the past.

This changes in the way we train will themselves develop and mutate as technology continues to develop at a fast rate of change. As a result, learning will not merely be seen as a useful adjunct to building an individual’s career.

Learning will be seen in its rightful context as a strategic investment that creates competitive advantage for the individual and leads directly to growth and development. Let us embrace the looming change in our education system the prosperity of our beloved country Kenya. This puts a great deal of individual responsibility on each of us to seize the initiative for our national interest.

The writer is a professional chartered marketer and film industry practitioner. Can be reached at timothy.owase@live.com

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