Education 4.0

It’s possible we have an education system that is trying to force humans to compete with machines. Consider mathematics. The math genius and a computer can calculate the same amount of data. The result can be the same, but I am pretty sure that the machine would be faster. Another example is chess. The best human player in the world cannot win against artificial intelligence anymore. Are we living in the world where the technology is better than us? Probably, yes. I believe that we shouldn’t be afraid of this. We should accept these kinds of changes and integrate technology as soon as possible to take advantage of positive benefits and speed up our communication, education, and operational processes.

A man behind desk making notes to write work instructions

Right now, we have an education system which provides us with “professors.” If you have high grades in schools and you continue to the last stage of our education system, you can quickly become a professor. It is expected that you do so. It would be a pity if you went through all stages of our education system wouldn’t share the gained knowledge. In a few past months, I have noticed that a lot of companies have the same approach. These companies possess a lot of specific knowledge about their industry. This knowledge gets shared among their employees from mouth to mouth. The process of sharing knowledge is the same as it is in school where professors speak in front of classes. New employees write down notes, they learn from these notes, and try to get skilled from theoretical experiences.

Imagine that you have the perfect meal recipe. You want to have everyone cook the same way to achieve the same result. You share this recipe with one person. He manages to cook it, but only after 10 thousand hours (10,000 hours of practice can turn anyone into an expert) and makes a lot of mistakes in the process. You would need to invest a lot of time and money in his education before he becomes an expert. I believe this is because of the learning system which has roots back from craft days. The companies didn’t change their approach even though nowadays companies possess a vast amounts of knowledge. They expect students to be experts already. But why do you need an expert if you already own all of the knowledge within your business ecosystem? All you need to do is to give your employees the right information at the right time. This will decrease the learning curve and the number of mistakes. The companies should adopt a more pragmatic approach when they educate their employees because only a few of them are ever going to become experts. Nowadays we can learn much faster with the help of technology. To go back to our cooking reference, you can already see how much more efficient is a cooking video in comparison to a traditional text-based recipe. Few people watch these videos to become master chief at the next garden party. Most are probably just hungry. It wouldn’t be efficient to train everyone into a master chef to satisfy some basic needs like hunger. All they need to get is the right recipe at the right time.

Our educational system will have to change in the future. It will have to become more efficient and pragmatic. We at VIAR are already trying to improve it. That’s why we developed REWO – a knowledge digitization platform, which drastically improves capturing and communicating knowledge to anyone within the company’s ecosystem.