Promoted content: Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Education at Microsoft Two thirds of children starting schoolnow will end up working in jobs that don't exist yet. That was the conclusion of the World Economic Forum's "Futureof Jobs" report, released in January this year. Of course, most of those children will never have heard of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – or indeed any Industrial Revolution. But 4IR is nevertheless happening all around us. Digital transformation is merging the physical and data worlds so that organisations can engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and reinvent business models – all the while, reshaping the workplace. At the recently concluded BETT Middle East and Africa (MEA) Leadership Summit and Expo, where I had the honor to deliver the keynote address,over 2,500 education policy makers, leaders and experts from over 50 countries discussed the defining challenge of our shared future – how to equip our young people to become the custodians of our planet and subsequently meet the same challenge for their own children. Increasingly, those experts are coming to realise that automation and digital transformation alone are not enough – that technologists and educators need to come together to envisage new strategies for enhancing learning outcomes across the region. This is all the more pressing given the admirable ambitions of many nations in the Middle East and Africa, to cement the gains of recent innovations by pursuing sweeping economic reforms – with education at their heart. Progressive learning-models One thing is clear. Our current students are the future national leaders, government ministers, CEOs, business founders, executives and professionals who will fulfil these visions, so how do we equip them with the skills for the years to come? To be sure, the role of technology in the classroom is changing, as new learning models emerge from past experiences. The instructional, lecture-based school hall, driven by dictation and repetition, is being steadily supplanted by more progressive ways – those of collaboration, interaction and soft-skills training. The soft skillset This need for soft skills – the ability to work in groups, think critically, communicate clearly, listen attentively and, when appropriate, defer to the judgement of others – has become a recurring theme in educational research findings around the world. For example, a recent Microsoft-commissioned study by McKinsey sought input from 2,000 students, 2,000 teachers and 70 thought leaders across the world. The research found that children starting their education now would be better prepared for the post-Fourth Industrial Revolution workplace if they had a strong foundation in soft skills, particularly the social and emotional. The study also showed that only 42% of employers consider today's graduates as having developed those attributes to an adequate level. Additionally, it was found that emotional and social attributes were twice as effective in predicting a student's academic results as home environment and demographics. The need for such talents is indeed pressing, as up to 40% of jobs in growth industries now require soft skills. The MEA perspective In the wider Arab world, almost 4.5 million children are not in school. In Africa, 17 million children will never attend school and 37 million will not learn enough in school to prepare for their life beyond it. More than 28% of the Middle East's population is aged between 15 and 29 – that's more than 108 million young people all needing to learn the critical-thinking, creative and communication skills that are in such need in the digital age. Society will look to today's students to fulfil the roles that go along with these technologies, as well as to plug an increasingly wide skills gap in the field of cyber-security. It is for this very reason that Microsoft has committed itself to helping every student and teacher achieve more. We believe that equipping each classroom with the capability to deliver new approaches to learning – provides students with the rich, immersive, collaborative experiences they need to ignite their innate curiosity and creativity. By adopting new approaches to learning, from mixed-reality solutions to hands-on lesson plans, we can provide students with the immersive, collaborative experiences they need to develop the soft skills their future workplace will demand. These are some of the discussions at this year's BETT MEA, and we look forward to discovering the joint initiatives required to deliver truly student-centric approaches to education and underpin future employability and economic growth.
