Sharjah (United Arab Emirates) | Tomorrow’s world of work will be a completely different one than it is today. In pessimistic forecasts, scientists assume that 40 percent of all jobs will be cut in ten years’ time because the associated tasks will meanwhile be taken over by robots and machines. This problem was the content basis of this year’s “International Government Communication Forum” in Sharjah, which was recently held by the Ministry of Education. In this context, the majority of participants concluded that it will be crucial in the coming years to encourage workers to develop entirely new skills in a decisive way. The Ministry of Education of the United Arab Emirates is convinced that this suggestion should be communicated more strongly than before via e-learning in order to reach participants where conventional educational institutions do not currently do so.
Dr. Adiy Tweissi, Assistant Professor and Director of the E-Learning Centre at Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Jordan, stressed the need to make education systems more “interdisciplinary” than before. After all, it may well be that a surgeon is also a good programmer, but the current education system does not yet promote this potential.
Conference speaker Dr. Abdul Latif Al Shamsi saw a concrete need for change in the university landscape: “There is a gap in the market when it comes to transforming the graduation projects of students to commercial products – something that is very common nowadays with most apps being invented by young adults”. At the Higher Colleges of Technology they had therefore set up a fund of 100 million VAE-Dirham to promote young entrepreneurs. In addition, it is important that other universities move on to offer job-specific degrees that are geared to the market and modern technology. According to him, the future lies in more targeted cooperation between science and industry.
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