On the jobs of the future
A resume of someone who engages in critical and creative thinking for a living
Some context: My partner is a well-paid tech consultant. He engages in critical and creative thinking all day, every day. People pay him to run Design Sprints, conduct discovery work and engineer tech solutions. I've been meaning to post his resume online for a while now and this article calling universities to scrap the ATAR (again) prompted me to finally get on with it. It's incredibly frustrating when education policy is created to serve industry despite the authors knowing very little about how industry actually works. We are heading towards a primarily knowledge-based economy, with low level cognitive work being the most affected, not manual work as popular myth suggests.
The thing that struck me initially about my partner's resume was the volume of jargon on the very first page. There's a little about his beliefs and practices around critical and creative thinking, casually expressed, but with an emphasis on learning and knowledge. Notice that he leads with his 20 years of experience?
Scroll down and you'll notice how much implied knowledge is here. To me, most of the language is still technical enough to elude my understanding. Note again that he leads with the ability to solve challenges, but implied in his skill set is a wealth of business-to-business and tech knowledge that he most certainly has not gleaned from being the captain of his netball team, as suggested by Professor Shergold in his calls to scrap the ATAR and replace it with a 'learner profile.'
I suppose this document could be critically read as a skills-based list. After all, it's full of verbs: create, influenced, understanding, design thinking. But read the contributions to client work below and ask yourself whether creative and critical thinking can just be transferred between domains. Teaching them discretely implies there is no need for a domain at all.
The full resume, redacted, can be found here. I'm not promoting this pathway but he ends the resume with a comment about university education being a 'false start' for him. He ended up teaching at UNSW without having completed his degree. He was given a decent education at Sydney Boys High School and has built his career through extending his knowledge base without pause over the last twenty years. And now he is a qualified creative and critical thinker.