Experiential learning for a globalised workforce: responses by secondary schools
Creators: name: Nikou, Vivianne
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024

description: The globalisation process and its impact on business and employability competencies have gained greater prominence in government agendas in the past decade. This is a study of how secondary schools in Australia have responded to the need for their students to have global skills and attributes as set out in National Schools’ Curriculum Agenda, formulated under the current Federal Government’s ‘Education Revolution’ Agenda alongside the expectations of Business and Industry. The rapid expansion of knowledge and access to information coupled with the complexity of issues facing young people, suggests that, if the next generation is to succeed as a ‘knowledge nation’, young people must be equipped with appropriate global skills such as: habits of mind, flexibility, tolerance, creativity, diversity, as well as having a depth of personal development, social, spatial and temporal capacities. Without a well developed sense of civic beliefs, values and environmental awareness, young people will not have the desired multi-dimensional capabilities to be global citizens of the future and become adaptive and flexible employees in the ever changing marketplace.<br><br>Business, education and political leaders are grappling with the question of how to produce workers and citizens who can remain competitive in a world that is becoming more globalised. Education is seen to be one of the key contributors to the nation’s economic, social and cultural development. Educational providers play a key role in human capital development. The nations that create the best conditions for growth and development of their resources increasingly have a competitive advantage.<br><br>The challenge for educators, therefore, is to create situations which replicate learning experiences that will relate to situations outside the classroom. Educational providers are considering learning as well as teaching, and are rethinking how people learn to develop learning approaches that will better match the skills and attributes needed for a mobile workforce of the future.<br><br>Using an Interpretivist research paradigm, the researcher conducted semi-structured and in-depth interviews with students from four different schools. According to the students’ accounts of their experience the most important findings from this research indicate that the experiential programs under examination all provided their students with global capabilities such as managing cross cultural ethics, managing change and uncertainty, thinking agility, conflict management, community building and negotiating skills which would better prepare them for the ever-changing global workforce of the future.<br><br>This study concludes that the young people in the sample had a positive and reaffirming exposure to their experiential learning program, where it would be reasonable to assume that experiential learning programs may be positively contributing to young people’s ability to acquire life-long global skill, competencies and attributes, that could enhance their entry into the workforce and may lead to a more able workforce in a globalised world.<br><br>The programs also highlight that learning for sustainable development and life-long learning need to have a practical and active element for the learner.<br><br>The framework used to analyse the experiential programs under examination offered a basic design template for developing experiential learning programs suitable to the Middle Years of Schooling.<br>