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Minnesota Children’s Press Director/owner Anne Brataas enjoys some free time. The award winning author has been busy teaching kids’ grades one through eight how to write, publish, and distribute books. Photo courtesy of Charles Hathaway
Minnesota Children’s Press (www.minnchildpress.org) exists to mentor rural Minnesota children, ages 5-15 years old, for success in 21st century careers—anywhere in the world—by teaching and modeling story crafting skills, digital media literacy, collaborative creative communication, and next-generation technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) in a remote-work setting.
Through our Story Scouts children’s entrepreneurial publishing club (part of a new 501(c) 3 non-profit based in Grand Marais, we help youth build career-relevant online portfolios, develop admirable work ethics, and reflexively apply outstanding problem-solving skills.
Future of work
Recently, our pro-child mentoring mission attracted the attention of the planners of the “Future of Work” virtual conference held June 8-10 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business Review journal. They awarded me (Ann Brataas) a scholarship to attend, in hopes of helping prepare rural children for a new world of work that very few people understand—or are prepared for, given the unprecedented velocity of changes underway.
Changes in the work model
Changes in the future of work can be summarized in four categories of worker: the remotes, the essentials, the unpaid, and the forgotten. Minnesota Children’s Press aims to help all Cook County children be in the first two categories of future workers, the remotes and the essentials.
Here are the five key conference findings to help guide us in our knowledge/ skills work with youth, as discussed by world-class experts conducting the conference. Their aim is to inspire all those working with youth to implement programs now to help youth adapt to the new “workscape” that is forming. For adults whose old jobs are being displaced, these findings are useful in the design of upskilling programs.
During and after the coronavirus age, all careers will require mastery of remote working skills because the “hybrid’ structure is the new work week model. Office workers will spend three days in a remote/home office and two days on site to meet with teams—or vary the split. But the split stays and the Zoom Boom continues. One new field likely to emerge that is related to this: a therapy or spa industry to prevent and treat Zoom/web meeting fatigue.
Success in remote working requires expertise in “power skills”— once referred to as “soft skills” or “relationship skills.” Power skills include being: a good and empathetic listener. a clear, effective communicator. culturally competent, adept at embracing diversity and inclusive teams. a willing collaborator who can both lead and follow as project dynamics require.
Traditional “hard skills” still matter, such as economic analysis and computer coding. But they will increasingly be performed with the aid of automated systems. This requires hard skills workers of the future to also have a talent for relationship skills—and learn how to partner with machines and have a positive, productive relationship with an AI or bot.
Moore’s Law is nearing its endpoint. The standard benchmark for technological progress developed in 1965, Moore’s Law was based on the idea that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Changes are happening rapidly, in large part due to reduction in chip prices a decade ago that boosted central processing computing power. This processing power boom is fueling advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial Intelligence (AI) at blistering speed. Nearly every week brings a new AI achievement that surpasses human expertise. In early June, Google announced its AI model can design computer chips better and faster than human engineers. abcnews. go.com/Technology/google-researchers-show-artificial intelligence-design microchips-faster/story?id=78241175#:~:text=AI%20is%20better%20than%20other,because%20it%20learns%20from%20 experience.%22& text=As%20the%20AI%20analyzed%20a,and%20better% 20at%20chip%20design.
Cybersecurity is a growth area. As the recent history of hacks and ransom ware attacks attest, the field of computer security for digital assets is a growing employment sector that will need people with talents for network analysis, computer programming, and expert communication, with both humans and machines.
For more information, please visit the following websites: www.minnchildpress.org & The Story Laboratory www.thestorylaboratory.com
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