Very soon, self-driving cars will hit British roads. According to Daily Mail, four cities will host trial projects. They are Bristol, Greenwich, Coventry and Milton Keynes.
Really, a lot has happened since the first self-sufficient cars appeared in the 1980s. Google, for instance, has tested driverless cars on 1, 60,934 kilometres of roads in San Francisco, United States. According to reports, these cars were left to drive themselves using cameras, radar and laser sensors.
If you are like me, whose son will soon be sitting for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination in February, I guess reports like these are likely to switch you to a thinking mode. What are the likely courses for the future? How, as a parent, can you help your child to satisfy his passion and at the same time study courses that can put enough food on the table?
The world is moving at a very fast pace. Things are happening too rapidly. Gone are the days when being a graduate was enough to guarantee good life. Now, forward-looking individuals consider the prospects of their choices before committing their time, energy and resources to them.
Moreover, experts have predicted that some of the hottest jobs today could be obsolete in another 10 years. Have you noticed that some people in Nigeria are now making money from things that would have been described as mundane 10 years ago? Could anyone ever imagine that make-up artistes and event planners would be making more money than some lawyers and medical doctors? The point is some of the courses that used to be money-spinners in the past are not likely to be relevant 10 years from now.
Unfortunately, as a nation, we appear to be very slow in responding to change. Ordinarily, our universities should be updating their curricula at most every five years to reflect global dynamics. But this is rarely the case.
I won’t even be surprised if there are universities in this country that are still using the same curricula they used when they were established. Many teachers at all levels – primary, secondary, university – rarely update their lesson notes. In many cases, their notes are as old as their years of service. They are passed from generation to generation. They never change, every decade, they remain the same. It is even possible for some children born by teachers and who are in the teaching profession to inherit some of their parents’ lesson notes, provided they are in the same line. It is that bad.
I know for sure that many lecturers use the same handouts for their courses from year to year. It’s a question I ask fresh graduates regularly and the answer is usually positive. A colleague told me of how she found out that her lecturer in university, who happens to teach her daughter in the same university now, gave the daughter the same type of assignment he gave her as a student nearly two decades ago.
Teachers get away with so many anomalies because they are not properly monitored. The regulatory bodies don’t always perform their roles satisfactorily. Take, for instance, the case of outdated curricula in our universities. The Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Professor Julius Okojie, recently lamented that course syllabuses were outdated.
I wonder who should be responsible for the constant updating of university curriculums. Shouldn’t that be the duty of the Quality Assurance Department of the NUC in a sane society? And by telling us the problem, what does the NUC boss expect from Nigerians? Go to the universities and change their curricula or sanction them for giving us outdated courses?
There are just so many things wrong with our system. Our leaders are experts in buck passing. Unfortunately, as a people, we have been so much short-changed that we no longer feel any form of outrage when we are obviously spitefully treated by our leaders. Too bad!
But, bad as it may, our attitude won’t alter continuous growth of education in other parts of the world. The world is moving on, we either catch up with it or remain on the same spot.
According to the World Bank, education in general, and higher education in particular, is fundamental to the construction of a knowledge economy and society in all nations. The sooner we take a cue from this, the better for us.
That is why I have decided to share some of the information I’ve got on jobs that are likely to be relevant in the next 10 years. Believe me, what I found to be the top jobs of the future are not likely to be what you might have expected. You may say it’s a global trend, but I tell you Nigeria isn’t an island either.
According to a futurist company, Tomorrow Today Global, nearly 25 per cent of today’s full-time employees will be working on demand as companies will prefer to hire freelancers for short contracts when the need arises instead of keeping people on staff. Also, frontline military personnel will be replaced with robots.
That is not all. It is predicted that private bankers and wealth managers will be replaced with algorithms, while lawyers, accountants and consulting engineers will be replaced with artificial intelligence.
There will be more jobs for end-of-life planners, senior carers, remote health care specialists, neuroimplant technicians and smart home handypersons. Have you paused to ask why many Nigerians abroad, especially in the United Kingdom and the USA, suddenly become nurses even when they studied courses like political science, sociology in Nigeria? Most of them are care givers.
On its part, WorldWideLearn lists computer programmer, day care provider, elder care specialist, employment specialist, environmental engineer, home health aide, management consultant, networking specialist, physician’s assistant and social service coordinator as the top 10 jobs for the next decade and beyond. So, studying kindergarten education for instance may not be a bad idea.
And according to a former Executive Secretary of the NUC, Professor Peter Okebukola, top jobs that will be in hottest demand in the next 10 years include de-radicalisation counsellors, (remember ISIS and Boko Haram) artificial intelligence engineers, information brokers, job developers, leisure consultants, bionic electron technicians and computational linguists.
Others are fibre optic technicians, fusion engineers, image consultants, myotherapists, relocation counsellors, robot technicians, space mechanics and underwater archaeologists.
I advise administrators of Nigeria’s higher institutions to start developing courses along these lines. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Ten years is still a long time from now. Any serious institution can start working towards adjusting its curriculum to reflect some of these imminent changes. As a nation, we don’t have to always produce graduates that are behind time. There should be a synergy between what the universities are doing and developments in the society.
The NUC should wake up to its responsibility of ensuring that Nigerian universities are globally competitive. Instead of telling us that our universities’ courses are outdated, it should embark on sensitisation programmes via seminars and workshops for university administrators to keep them abreast of global developments. Universities should be mandated to review their curricula and develop courses that will meet our needs. We need to do this so that our graduates would be employable in the next 10 years.
Punch
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