Online learning is a game-changer for digital skills development, and China is a leader in the field

You advise businesses on digital strategy and investment in China. What skills do students need to do business successfully in East Asia?

Students need technical, cultural, and business skills. Otherwise, what use are technology skills if you cannot put them into a valid business model or identify an opportunity?

Today, the key is having a macro view of what skills you need in order to make an impact. The biggest issue we have with young talent is helping them understand how to apply their university knowledge in a real-world setting and in an agile way.

For example, when it comes to bringing technology to the streets, there is a lot to learn from China. Chinese companies know how to bring tech to market that’s relevant to users. That’s a great skill.

Are universities equipped to help with that? Or do they inevitably always lag behind?

We’ve had many inquiries from universities in the past three years to help them set up a lean program to teach students to design their own skill set. It was not about teaching them particular technical skills, but about helping them identify the skill set they would need in order to create their own career path.

Online educational platforms have made the competition fierce. Soon, students will ask if education is relevant for them or not. Universities have to find answers for that. They’ll need to teach skills that are super-relevant and can be applied immediately after graduation.

We are not there yet. But universities are certainly actors in the economic system, and they need to think about how to make their teaching more agile, and more connected to the real world. 

So it’s about “learning how to learn” throughout one’s life. Are universities and schools teaching this to the next generation? Are they rising to the challenge?

It depends on where they’re based. In many countries, universities face pressure from the market and will move quickly. But you also see a lot of private players who are rising. For instance, a friend of mine in China is creating a school where they teach young students not only to code, but to practice design thinking as a tool, a method for designing their life path.

Whose responsibility is it to address the skills gap?

We’re working a lot with international companies that are keen to invest in digital education for young people. They see the need and the lack of vision in new digital business models, even though the future economy will be built on those models. If you don’t understand data, you don’t understand the currency of the future. There is no physical product anymore that will work without data.

This is a job for policymakers. In some countries, you can see that they don’t understand that the digital economy is here to stay. I just wish industry partners would set the agenda more. and help policymakers make smarter policies for digital skills.

How in particular would you like to see industries push the agenda?

For years, we’ve been working with Huawei’s Seeds for the Future program, and with Digital Seeds in Germany. Every year, we ask ourselves about the relevance of the program for the students: What are the skills they need to learn this year in order to still be relevant next year? Every year, we change the curriculum. It’s a national campaign where young people get the basic skills of designing a business model, applying the technological skills they learn in university, and then creating a pitch at the end of the program to actually communicate and implement their ideas.

This is a great approach because they do it in the Huawei ecosystem, and obviously Huawei is a very competitive company with a lot of insights from all over the world that can give the students realistic feedback on their ideas. This means they’re well prepared to implement those ideas in the market.

This connection to the real-world economy is something that only industries can bring to the table. Politicians cannot, and universities cannot. So it’s up to industries to go into universities and share their experience, and share what skills young people need. Currently, industries are not incentivized to do that at all. In most countries, it’s very hard for them to get involved in the very slow process of creating a university curriculum.

Is the reality that we simply cannot future-proof education? We need to constantly change and adapt, and we had just better get used to it?

Yes, and that’s a skill in itself. It’s a skill set to be agile, to listen, and to be relevant to the market. Also, not to be frustrated or depressed by a fast-changing world. It will just change faster, and we need to develop the skills to make us mentally relevant in a rapidly evolving world.