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In the new economy, knowledge is king – Metro US

In the new economy, knowledge is king

In the new economy, old jobs require new skills and new jobs outnumber traditional ones so educational institutions need new teaching approaches to prepare students.

Michael Cooke, vice president of academic and advancement at George Brown College, says the increasingly knowledge-based economy means schools have to teach a much wider set of skills to students regardless of field.

“The nature of the economy has shifted in fundamental ways. Increasingly it’s an economy driven by knowledge, information and services and we need to be preparing students today who can invent answers to all the new questions that arise,” Cooke said.

Companies are leveraging employees’ skills in ways that would have been surprising 10 years ago, Cooke says. Skills from a relatively new field like game design, for example, can be applied to things as varied as bank machines and online ticketing while technology has facilitated the creation of entirely new career paths like health informatics, which deals with the creation and management of computer-driven health records and databases.

Even old careers like construction have completely new requirements where an emphasis on raw skills has been replaced by the need for practitioners versed also in technological collaboration, ecological methods, health and safety concerns and cost management. The management and manipulation of information itself has become just as crucial as foundational skills in most jobs.

“There are new jobs which are emerging rapidly and changing quickly compared to traditional jobs. In the past I don’t think a nurse would have thought, ‘I have to have great computer skills,’ but today they have to. Even a car mechanic has to be a computer technician,” Cooke said.

For 42-year-old former office secretary Cathy Cope, changing careers was a necessity after she lost her job. Now, after graduating from George Brown last December, she works as a career counsellor — a job she never even imagined doing when she started working 20 years ago.
Jessi Gillis, 23, a third-year Business Administration student at George Brown, is project manager of the Solid Ground literacy project at the school which provides financial educational for adults with developmental disabilities. She says she chose a program that offered a wide array of business skill training because she feels it will better prepare her for the real world.

“My generation is not focussed on the idea of one career — we’re about building on many different careers and using those skills we’ve acquired to go for different opportunities in the workplace. I feel pretty confident I’ll be able to find a job I’m interested in with the skills I’m learning now,” Gillis said.