A bridge between learning and work

Image from Pixabay

Asking a child what they want to be when they grow up can be a great conversation opener. They will be very honest with you about their aspirations, and tell you how they are going to become a police officer, train driver, nurse or scientist. But as they grow older, and they learn more about the world around them and their potential role within it, children may become a little more circumspect. When they eventually leave school, many children simply don't know where they are headed, because they know very little about the job market.

When I was 16, I was asked by my careers guidance tutor what I would do when I left school. I told him quite frankly that I wanted to be an astronaut. It wasn't an aspiration that was treated seriously, because there weren't many astronaut jobs going in 1972. And yet, as I developed my career around research, teaching and innovation, I did become an 'astronaut' of sorts - an explorer of learning and technology and the connections between the two. If only my teacher had read between the lines.

How do children today express their ideas about what they would like to be? How do they find out what they could do, and what problems they would like to solve? How do schools (and the teachers employed by them) become aware of these aspirations, talents and abilities? How can teachers offer appropriate careers guidance to children while they are still in school, and help them to realise their aspirations? Perhaps most saliently, how are businesses and industry made aware of the raw talent that emanates annually from schools, colleges and universities? How might all of these activities and progressions be managed, and children effectively guided into the very career pathways they yearn to follow?

A new, and in my opinion, unique technology platform might just provide the answers to all of the questions above. Founded by polar explorer Antony Jinman, a new platform called LiketoBe has been designed to create the short-cuts and channels that will enable children, through their schools, teachers and parents to connect and communicate directly with organisations, offering a technology bridge between previously disconnected stakeholders. It will track students as they progress through their education, providing profiles for businesses, and generating potential career pathways for them when students eventually leave full time education. It's a technology idea that I am very keen to support and help develop.

Technology is designed to help us to do things easier, quicker and more effectively. In education, technology should be used specifically to help us to learn, teach, connect and communicate in new and better ways. I believe LiketoBe will enable schools, children, teachers and businesses to connect in ways that were previously inconceivable. It will create new pathways for career development that will have a direct, positive impact on the future of education and work.

Note: LiketoBe is currently seeking crowd funding on the Seeders website


A bridge between learning and work by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.