In the past, a career was considered to be a profession, occupation, trade or vocation along a permanent and non-diverse path over a long period. A career could mean working as a banker, teacher, builder, beautician, real estate agent, financial advisor, software developer or any other job that might come to mind for one’s entire life. However, in 2020 and beyond the word is taking on another connotation—the progress and actions taken by a person during their working lifetime regardless of their profession or trade at any particular point in their life. Enter the need to manage a career learning portfolio.

We are being told that the era of frequent job changes is upon us. The Australian Bureau of Statistics notes that over 1 million Australians changed their job or their business during 2017. Over half of these people entered a new industry. The Australian Institute of Business writes “on average, today’s Australian employee changes jobs 12 times throughout their life, with an average tenure of 3.3 years. For workers over 45, the average job tenure is six years and eight months, while for under 25s, it’s just one year and eight months.” With the disruption to the world’s workforce due to the Covid19 pandemic environment, the rise of the gig economy, and an increasing casualised workforce, the frequency of job changes is likely to get even higher.

Similarly, the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA) argues that youth will have ‘portfolio careers’ potentially having 17 different jobs involving five different vocations. Will they need to be qualified for each of these jobs, before entering employment as we do now? Professionals and technicians are reported as those most likely to change their job, which includes educators and L&D professionals. Will they need to engage in three, four or five years of study at an accredited institution before they can seek employment in the field? Given the fast pace of change, by the time they finish under the current educational system, the skill and knowledge required to perform the job are likely to be different from what they studied. In short, the skills of high performance keep changing as technology assumes many of the functions we thought would never change. For example, a classroom teacher’s role changed almost overnight as the pandemic spread with many of the teachers ill-prepared for online delivery.

The FYA 2017 report, The New Work Smarts highlights that by 2030, we will be spending 30 per cent more time learning skills on-the-job. These will relate to solving work problems using critical thinking and judgement, verbal communication, and interpersonal skills supported by an entrepreneurial mindset. More so than ever before, learning will be lifelong critical practice. To support the trend towards frequent change leading to portfolio careers, we need a timelier system of documenting learning and career progression.

Software developers are building intelligent systems to aid HR and L&D departments and large organisations when recommending career paths to employees, conducting job matching, or what Josh Bersin calls “intelligent talent mobility”.

Tertiary institutions are archaic and out of touch with the digital revolution. It is time they take a whole-of-life approach to support learners through their “career learning portfolio”.

Rather than courses that are defined by a list of acceptable subjects, learners need opportunities to create their own programs based on their on-the-job skill requirements, or their portfolio career goals. Direct links, fuelled by intelligent agents and xAPI big data, between what work needs to be done and the institutions where individuals gain their skills and knowledge could just be the life-saver that tertiary institutions need to survive and enter the digital world.

Read more about how Universities can help shape learning in the future.