I follow John Hagel posts for there is such a great range in his thinking. This particular one describes his considerations on the future of jobs. He posits himself opposite STEM education by claiming that it maintains a disciplinary attitude toward learning, a condition that so far has kept us from acknowledging the rapid changes occuring around us. He also argues that STEM education is vulnerable to automation and that it considers all people as techies at a time when technology enables all of us to use it even without a tech education.

What I find most interesting is that Hagel encourages a complete rethink on education as a defense mechanism to this reality and that he focuses on qualities such as “creativity, imagination, curiosity, and emotional and social intelligence that transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries” and make students passionate about their work. This view represents what I believe in and it is a notion at the core of my research. (One needs to be passionate about sth in order to be curious enough to learn things about it.) He takes it a step further by saying that in the following years we will all become enterpreneurs instead of employees and this alone implies an increased passion anyway. Hagel supports this vision in what he detects to be the current emerging economical model where smaller companies will prosper in the more fragmented parts of the economy.

I’d like to keep Hagel’s most favorable prediction as far as architects are concerned that craftspeople and artists will prosper in the near future. It is about time that the creative people -and not the managers- project their potential to not just buildings or artifacts but to a new approach of understanding the world and being in it.

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