Growth & Jobs | Change how students are educated - Thorpe

Sean Thorpe, president of the Jamaica Computer Society, has said that there is need for an urgent change to how students are educated if they are to contribute to the growth and development of the world's economy.

In a release recently, Thorpe, who is also head of School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Technology, indicated that humans are training machines to undertake traditional tasks, which has resulted in and will continue to cause the disruption of the traditional workforce. He also noted that this current era of automation is creating higher levels of tech-nology, which he described as "Industry 4.0".

"The educa-tion that repurposes how we prepare our millennial generation for Industry 4.0 is described as 'Education 4.0'. Education 4.0 as a principle posits a personalised teaching and learning culture for both the classroom and the workplace, talent identification and management to continuously assist with human-resource pooling, and pipelining for the business operation," he said.

"Considering that automation is powered over Internet-based technologies to manage your small and large embedded device systems, or what we describe today as the Internet of Things (IOT), leads one to ask, what are the skills that will deliver our IOT services in an Industry 4.0 workplace?"

He indicated that the alignment of what Industry 4.0 skill sets are required will be driven by the roles and responsibilities of the different tasks to be done within the smart environment.

"Where those skills continually change over time, what seems consistently true is that data analysis and data security are always required," Thorpe said.

"In the United States job market alone, it is well-established that there are some 2.5 million jobs within data security and data analytics that currently need to be filled. Imagine if some of these 2.5 million jobs were outsourced through BPO (business process outsourcing) to Jamaica and the rest of Caribbean? As our opportunities for response, this would mean employment would grow where we can supply an Industry 4.0 talent pool for these markets."