Hi, everybody, great to be here.
Unfortunately, I'm not going to communicate emojis.
I was very impressed by that.
I don't have an emoji skill, but my eight-year-old daughter, Sophie, actually does.
I'm going to start with the story of someone who uses a lot of emojis and that's my daughter.
Ever since she was really young, I'm talking two or three, she's had a love of animals.
She'd love to be a vet when she grows up.
This is her passion.
She's really inspired by animals and caring for them.
As you can see, we have a pet dog and a cat, Angus and Hamish, and she's dying for a pony.
She said to me about a year ago, "Hey, dad, what do I need to do to be a vet?"
And I contemplated being eight and now 48 and thinking about how skills have changed.
I really couldn't fathom what it would be like another 20, 30, 40 years of what veterinary
science will bring.
But there was something that was key, that I shared with her.
So, if you imagine a time where you're with a patient, a dog or a cat, it's very sick.
Unfortunately, that dog may need to be put to sleep.
How would you deal with its owners and its family?
Things like compassion, resilience, dealing with ambiguity.
The human skills are the things that you really need to double down on.
Being a good person, being kind, some of that family values.
Continue on that trajectory and you will make an awesome vet.
So, that's what we focus on.
But who can imagine what are the skills of the future?
I'm very privileged that I work for a company called LinkedIn.
We've got a really good snapshot of what's coming.
We have over 650 million members on the platform.
We actually track their moves around the skills they're learning, the jobs they're moving
into.
We've got 1.3 trillion exabytes of data that moves around on a daily basis that we get
to play with, to really start predicting those trends.
So, we know that on the World Economic Forum's latest report that 65% of jobs for the next
generation don't even exist today.
How do you predict it?
I'm going to have a bit of fun with you.
Who likes a game?
Yep, okay, great.
So, let's actually start thinking about, all right, what are these new industries that
are coming up?
So, who's ever heard here of the commercial drone industry?
Only started existing in the last five years.
About a quarter of the audience.
Who wants to be an environmental minimiser?
Has anybody any idea what that actually is?
Or a drone docking designer and engineer?
These new roles in industries are only appearing over the last couple of years.
So, imagine the new industries that are coming.
3D printing, you can print a house, you can print an organ.
It's pretty amazing how we can save lives now.
The world is changing, and with that, new roles are appearing, and new skills are being
developed to do exactly that same thing.
I potentially, I love the three dimensionalists.
Hm, I kind of feel like when I was in university, I was doing three-dimensionaling, but that's
another story altogether.
Let's move on to cryptocurrencies.
So, you'd have to be lying underneath the rock not to actually read in the press, had
this whole industry is appearing and people are concerned.
It's turning the financial systems upside down.
I know, I'm concerned.
Do I get on the boat?
Do I not?
Do I invest?
What do I do?
So, who do I turn to?
Maybe a cryptocurrency theorist and an evangelist.
Has anybody heard of that role before?
No, not really.
And then, agriculture.
Now, this is one industry that once upon a time was planting seeds, having crops, thinking
about the cows and the sheep that you had a new paddock.
That industry is changing so radically through automation and technology, and bio-meat factory
engineers.
It's astounding, isn't it?
And molecular gastronomist.
So, just a curiosity from me up here on the stage and looking back at you, who would have
actually heard about the-- let's take a poll, actually, I want hands.
If you've actually heard of 10 of those roles, put your hands up.
Okay, I've got about half a dozen hands.
And this is the future.
These are the roles that we're actually seeing appear on our platform.
And do you feel suitably geared up for them?
I can tell you what.
Most of the world don't.
So, 42% of current and past graduates feel their degree required transformation to keep
pace.
Education, vocation, is being turned on its head because no one can keep up with the pace
of the new jobs that are created by technology.
It's an amazing world we live in.
It's also hugely disruptive.
So, how do you keep up?
Well, with fast shifting to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
I don't know if you know Heather McGowan.
She's a future of work strategist.
I love her dearly, she's amazing.
I've been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with her.
I love how she has this theory in regards to when we're at University at school, you've
learnt to work.
The world's changed.
You have to work to learn.
You know the longer do you go and get a university degree and you stop learning.
And that's you create for life.
Life is a lifelong journey exercise.
I know that we all hear about this and you read about this, and hopefully, in your organisations
or at university, you're being lectured around this, but you really need to embrace it, because
as you saw on the roles before, that I highlighted to you, we can't even predict what's next.
I have a little bit of an idea and I'll share some more with you very shortly.
So, we're somewhere in the middle here.
I want to ask all of you to really embrace this and to change your mindset, to work,
to learn, that every day is a learning adventure.
That you are continually learning new skills to, A, get a competitive advantage, B, make
sure that as we are seeing vocational displacement, we can actually help those, actually re-skill
and get new jobs.
And ultimately, it's all being fuelled by technology innovation.
So, how do you navigate all of this?
It's the 1.5 trillion exabyte question.
So, there's two ways you can actually do this and it's some advice that I'll give you and
some things I'll share with you.
One is a very data and insight-centred approach.
But I think about the great work that RMIT doing around partnering with different vocations
in different organisations, they're really getting data from a multitude of sources to
start predicting what is the future of work and the future of education.
I'll talk more about that in a moment.
The second is around a human-centred approach.
And you may ask what that is, I'll cover it in a moment.
But ultimately, we speak about human skills, and we spoke about human-centred approaches.
That's what comes from the heart and the mind that computers and datas and insights can't
predict.
So, let's take it away and let's talk about ecosystems.
LinkedIn, as I mentioned, we have over 650 million members growing three members per
second.
We have the great privilege of looking at that data and assessing what's next.
And, essentially, we create an ecosystem.
I'm going to talk specifically around the learning here, because, obviously, we're talking
about skills today and I thought it would be very interesting for you.
So, skills, courses, instructors, learners, admins, companies, government.
And they are higher education, like RMIT, coming together to really build a plethora
of information that helps us actually interpret what's happening in the world.
So, whether it's the skills that are being produced and new skills on a daily basis.
Whether it's the jobs, whether it's the type of courses that are being created on the platform
like ours at LinkedIn, or the curriculum that's being created by RMIT and other universities
around the world.
What instructors are actually instructing about.
And then, on our platform instructors have the opportunity through social mechanisms
to actually talk on the platform-- so via chat, lots of emojis hopefully, with their
learners to ask questions that become social, it's viral.
And what happens with all that data is we understand what people are concerned about,
what they love, what they focus on, what they're driving forward with, the skills that they're
learning and so forth.
And with that data creates great insights.
What do we do with insights?
We start to predict.
And having a data-centred approach with great insights really allows us to actually start
thinking about that future of work, those future of skills that will really bring things
together, so therefore, we can actually create a better world.
The second thing to harness on is a human-centred approach.
So, when I actually start thinking about a human-centred approach, I really look at four
core areas.
And I really want us to harness down on a couple of these.
One is accessibility and availability.
So, earlier I shared with you that, hey, once upon a time you got a degree, you went and
learned and then you went and worked.
Life has changed, and it's changing rapidly by the second.
Accessibility and availability are key.
So, as an organisation, as an education institute, as an individual, how do you actually ensure
that you've got accessibility when you need it?
We talk about micro-credentialing.
We actually talk about snippets of information that you need at a point in time that you
may need to discard.
I often say, the biggest learning adventure is actually unlearning.
It's getting rid of the biases that you actually have so you can learn new things.
And having accessibility and availability when and where you need it is important.
You could be on the bus here today to learn a new skill because you're actually meeting
with somebody for an interview after this.
Or it could be that you're working on a large project and there's one particular skill that
you actually need and then you're going to discard with that.
It could be that, hey, the information you have is outdated, and for you to actually
be relevant again in the industry, I need to learn those new skills.
But learning when and where you need it.
Marketing, so this is more applied around education institutes and also organisations.
The world of learning has changed.
And acting like a marketer in a university or as an organisation, it's important to reach
your audiences and attract them.
It's not just that attraction, it's feeding them the information they need at that particular
point in time.
It could be say, for example, like in LinkedIn learning where we actually feed the relevant
courses to individuals on a platform when they're actually looking at different types
of content and marketing for them to say, hey, this may be something that you actually
need.
It could be the same whether you're on the RMIT website or it could be whether you're
on the RMIT learning portal that just in time you're actually driving the right content
to those individuals.
So, therefore, they're getting what they need and that they want to learn, because let's
face it, we all have conflicting priorities.
And as an organisation and a learning institute, the ability to market at the right time to
ensure that it surfaces when that person needs is super important.
Tribes and social.
Who doesn't want to be part of a tribe?
If you think back to the elders, past and present of this land today, they worked in
tribes.
They were on the land in tribes.
And they acted in tribes to make sure that they could support one another.
Tribes are in the heart of the human, and it's no different today in the way of learning
and in the way of technology.
We work as tribes, we learn as tribes best.
So, how do you actually create a tribe and a social experience to make sure that you
can come together and learn that you can share, that you can share those experiences and collaborate?
Because not everybody learns by reading a textbook or watching a video, they need to
communicate, they need to ask questions, and providing a portal or platform is important.
As a learner, how are you reaching out to others to create those tribes become better?
And then, finally, around purpose.
Life has changed.
I love millennials and the gen Zs coming up.
All the studies and research and also my individual dealings with them in the workforce is they
really love to work around purpose.
They're much more purpose-driven than us gen Xs or the baby boomers as well.
And it's actually a gift to society, because a lot of, I guess, the challenges that we
had in our generation they're learning from.
So, the ability to actually help them work with purpose and align to their purpose is
going to be paramount to help them with continuous learning.
I'm just going to switch gears, because, I guess, it wouldn't be a LinkedIn presentation
if I didn't share any data and insights.
And I know that's what your all looking for.
So, just really quickly, the top five emerging jobs in Australia.
Who would have thought the customer success manager was the to the emerging job?
The reason for this is because this rise of technology in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
people don't know how to use it.
They need to be instructed.
We work in tribes we like to learn from each other, so these roles are paramount to ensure
that the technology that's being produced and the change that we're seeing is fuelled.
And the other four you're probably not surprised are hugely technology-related and very much
in demand in Australia.
I'm also going to share with you the most demand skills for 2019 as well.
So, if you are a university student here today, this is what I'd be focused on if you want
to get a great job, if you want to be relevant.
If you are actually from the industry today, probably you're not a surprise to maybe thinking
about how you re-skill your workforce around these.
I'm going to start with human skills, because what's more important than human skills?
I shared the story about Sophie, my daughter.
If she carries through with these human skills, she's going to be very viable in tomorrow's
workforce.
Some call them soft skills, I personally prefer calling them human skills.
Creativity, persuasion, collaboration, no surprises up there.
I think what's fascinating though, is when we start looking at hard skills or more technical
skills.
Eight of them are technical, but two are very people orientated.
Sales leadership and people management.
And this really relates back to that whole human skill element that no matter what industry
you're in, people are always going to have to sell and create revenue for an organisation.
And people leadership is the core of who we are so we can align to the purpose that we
spoke before, work in tribes and so forth.
So, a little bit of some data that I thought I'd share with you today.
So, on that note, three core areas may be to take away.
One is that the world has changed, we now work to learn.
Gone are the days you get a university education then you go and work and that's it.
Life is a lifelong learning journey.
The second is data and insights are your friend.
If you scare the data and insights, unfortunately, you're not going to traject in the future.
And as an organisation or a learning institute, how you are truly harnessing those data and
insights to actually help propel your institute or your organisation forward.
And finally, take a human-centred approach.
We're all people, think about the tribes, the purposes you work in and how we bring
people together.
On that note, thank you so much for having me today, it's been such a pleasure to be
here in this theatre, and I'm going to hand back over to Julie, thank you.