Competences and Education for Tomorrow's Jobs and Challenges: A Company's Perspective

Innovation affects us, our work and our society at a pace that requires from all of us to continuously adopt new methods, practices, tools and devices in our daily life. Some old jobs disappear, new jobs are created, requiring new competencies. To keep with the speed of innovation, universities must update their curriculum at a faster pace, introducing new knowledge, new know-how, sometimes to the detriment of previous subjects. As new knowledge and know-how is produced not only in universities, but also in the industry and the social and public organisations, all parties are now involved in a dual and continuous education system to keep with the pace of innovation. We have observed however that employees and public servants are still lacking some competencies: Understanding and mastering systems and data complexity; data literacy and critical thinking; multidisciplinary competencies; creativity; to name a few. Drawing from these observations and our professional experience, we discuss the need to adapt education and training to handle tomorrow's jobs and challenges. Starting from the known T-shape model of students, we extended it to highlight the competencies we expect from employees in a highly competitive innovation environment: the OTA employee/student model. Consequently, we elaborated a training program named CIOS using and maximizing the Collective Intelligence of an Organization and its Stakeholders. This framework enables the integration of multiple complementary training programs to develop among others the observed missing competencies. Testing the model in both the company and the university context has proven efficient to help people preparing for the future of employment and the challenges ahead.