Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change,” said Peter Drucker, the management guru. In a world that is increasingly become more volatile, the imperative to keep ourselves relevant has become more urgent and important than ever now.

Buckminster Fuller, the architect and futurist from the last century coined the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”. He noticed that until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. Today, on average, human knowledge doubles every 13 months. And in certain fields, the rate of doubling is much faster. With the exponential growth of knowledge, people will need to learn how to learn something new many times over during their life time.

In recent months, the pandemic has changed fundamentally how we live, learn and work. Some believe that the education sector is finally ripe for the digital transformation. While each level of education faces its unique challenges, it is the higher education segment that may end up, by necessity, triggering a learning revolution. The pandemic has also hastened the demise of some traditional industries and models of operations. Some of the manual jobs that have been automated may never come back again. The issues in front of us are:

• What is the role of higher education institutes in reskilling and upskilling the workforce, including people who are not traditionally served by universities?
• How should higher education institutes rethink the delivery, the curriculum, pedagogies and their business model, as well as the role of educators?
• How can education institutes collaborate with businesses and across borders to enhance the relevance of learning?

• higher education institutes
• talent development intermediaries e.g. consulting firms, executive search firms, professional associations and business chambers
• people interested in education innovation