Postmodern market scenarios and career patterns: Challenges for education

Abstract

Background: This article grows out from the realisation that glabal crises caused by the depletion of natural resources, pollution, climate change, migrations, conflicts, unbridled consumption and increasing poverty have made current socio-economic concepts inadequate in the world that is enmeshed in multi-layered and interconnected relationships and interdependencies.

Objectives: In an age that is governed by the demands of the economy based on sustainable development, it is expedient and exigent to examine future anticipations concerning scenarios of market transformations, career patterns for individuals in these changeable market realities and the challenges which these processes produce for education. This article aims to provide such urgently needed insights.

Method: To achieve this objective, we rely on research explorations using the method of document analysis. The studied documents included future scenarios developed by the Infuture Institute and The Future of the Work, a report that contains a range of futurist depictions of what may happen with our world, with a special focus on work. The visions outlined in these documents are metaphorically described as Working Forever, The Useless Class, People per Hour, Through the Glass Door and There Are No Jobs on a Dead Planet, or are portrayed as the blue world, the orange world and the green world. The study of these reports triggered our reflection on related challenges in education.

Results: The findings yielded by this study include a set of developmental shifts in education which we outline in the article, showing the passage from traditional education based on the teacher–student knowledge transfer to personalised, community-oriented education; from directive education to life design education; from institutional education to education at workplace and in the community; and from education for competition to education for collaboration, sustainable development and decent work.

Conclusion: In conclusion, the article spells out implications for competencies, directions of development and learning, the forms of career and counselling or guidance interventions as resulting from the futurist vision of the world pictured in the discussed scenarios for the labour market.