Changing the system ‘more important than upskilling’

South-east Asian educators should embrace “up-systeming” rather than upskilling, as the region battles swift technological and demographic currents, a Jakarta forum has heard.

Indonesia’s deputy minister for higher education, science and technology, Stella Christie, said the term “upskilling” implied that people’s skills had become obsolete. She said it was more productive to think about “changing the system” than changing the skill.

“Maybe you…have to create a better ecosystem to match and cultivate and accept the skills that the population have,” Christie told Times Higher Education’s Global Sustainable Development Congress. “[They may be] good skills to have, but…do we have the environment to receive the skills?

“I’m not sure if we are redefining skills [so much as] continuously having to make skills into something that truly responds to the market. This is an…age old problem about what you need to teach in higher education.”

A Harvard-trained cognitive psychologist who has studied and worked in Norway, the US, Canada and China, Christie juggles her political post with a professorship at Tsinghua University. She said higher education institutions struggled to keep up with changes in society.

“People say that the only constant is change, and when we think about redefining skills, we have to be thinking about these changes,” she told the conference. “Most of all, we have to be thinking about redefining…the pace at which we teach skills.”

Habibah Abdul Rahim, director of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organisation, said new skills were necessitated by the “megatrends” of globalisation, migration and climatic and demographic change. Habibah, formerly Malaysian director general of education, said the region’s “demographic window of opportunity” – where working age people outnumbered dependents – was projected to close by 2030.  

By 2055, she said, the aged will outnumber the young. “This means that if we want to increase income, it has to be from [a] no one-left-behind policy, as well as growth in productivity.

“I don’t know what you call it – uplift, upskill, upgrade our system – but definitely, our people need to have higher levels of education [and] skills. Technology adoption is moving faster than workforce capability development. Without investment in skills…digital transformation risks widening inequality”.

Burmese academic Chaw Chaw Sein, appointed as Myanmar’s union minister for education last July, said the march of technology in a nation facing “many challenges” had forced an emphasis on vocational education.

“As a rural-based country…Myanmar is focusing not only [on] agriculture but also small and medium enterprises,” she said. “We need the talent of workers [and] the workers must be educated. We need to catch up with technology.”

Sein, a former head of the Department of International Relations at the University of Yangon, said Myanmar’s government had allocated 9 per cent of its budget to education and was also promoting “stronger linkages” between education and industry.

Ricmar Aquino, of the Philippines Commission on Higher Education, said his country had fast-tracked its skills development by enabling people who had lacked the opportunity for higher education – “especially the youth” – to earn degrees by being “immersed with industry”.

The scheme, known as the Expanded Tertiary Education Equivalency and Accreditation Programme, enables workers to have the skills they have acquired on the job assessed for “credits” towards degrees. “We are giving our people the chance to…develop their skills outside of the formals of the classrooms,” Aquino told the forum.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com