Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Education
New Trends In Management Education In 2020
Excerpts from article by Prof Leena Ajit Kaushal, published in BW EDUCATION
In the recent past, the fast-paced transitional environment has enabled new domains in the education sector. Technology is playing a powerful teaching tool and will continue to do so. Enhanced digital transformation has empowered many avenues of collaborative and interactive learning by diminishing international boundaries. However, the unprecedented pandemic in 2020 compelled educational institutes worldwide to even more extensively leverage digital technologies – from cloud to AI and IoT – to increase their impact and deliver better learner outcomes. It will continue to dominate even in the near future.
Besides Engineering and Medical science, Humanities and Commerce studies have also rightly embraced global technological advances such as Artificial intelligence, Digital marketing, and Robotics, which have indeed become core business tools. Graduates with a firm understanding of these technological trends are in high demand.
Business analytics in all domains, be it HR, Finance, or Economics, have been offered and highly appreciated as an essential business tool in today’s world. Innovative and out-of-the-box thinking has prompted students to opt for various combinations of subjects like economics and psychology with strategy, mathematics, data analytics, or marketing and not to confine within the boundaries of their core specializations. Educational institutes are now flexible.
Emphasis is more on experiential- learning through live projects, which promotes both skill and personal growth among students. Finance Lab at several universities is equipping students to decipher financial data and explore the relevant information. Immersive virtual reality as teaching pedagogy enables recreation of a real-world environment that helps facilitate complex learning which the traditional learning methods cannot. The use of technology-aided education as a pedagogical method is not a modern phenomenon.
Online learning programs offered by several renowned universities also support in-depth learning parallel to the college curriculum. Few government-backed organizations have started offering online education at a much lower regular fee. Educational Institutes have also ventured into MOOC ((Massive Open Online Course), a web-based platform to impart online education to unlimited participants. The learners self-organize their participation according to learning goals, prior knowledge, skills, and shared interests.
Lastly, the intensification of digitalization in the education sector, which became compulsory in 2020, has revolutionized the already underway process. Indeed, with the shift to an online and blended mode of pedagogy, the future will undoubtedly unfold more new forms of blended education enabled with technological strengths that will boost the prospects of digital teaching and fundamentally transform the education system’s structure.
Career
The Psychological Formula for Success After Age 50
Excerpts from article by Arianne Cohen, published in Bloomberg Businessweek
Julia Child launched The French Chef on TV at 50, a year after publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Ray Kroc began franchising McDonald’s at 52. Estelle Getty landed her breakout role on Broadway at age 58, then in her 60s racked up seven back-to-back Emmy nominations for The Golden Girls.
Psychologists have long known that success is fueled by grit, passion, and a growth mindset—a deep-seated conviction that you can excel at a new pursuit. Norwegian psychologist Hermundur Sigmundsson says that passion is by far the most important psychological factor.
But grit—a combination of perseverance and determination—rises through middle age and peaks in your 70s, as do a number of other helpful intellectual traits. Though short-term memory declines after age 35, the mind’s accumulation of facts and knowledge peaks around retirement age. In many ways, that’s when your mind is best suited to dominate on the job.
You’ll still need to overcome your flagging passion and growth mindset.Such an overabundance of determination may be unusual, but gritty, later-life professional success is not. Sigmundsson rattles off examples of colleagues such as a retired professor who started speed skating at 67 and is now a masters world champion at age 85. And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 86, the psychologist who discovered the immersed mental state known as “flow,” is still publishing. “It’s possible,” Sigmundsson says, “to keep the fire burning.”
How to Stoke the Fire
1. Make It Meaningful
Once you pass the half-century mark, avoid work you don’t find compelling. The pandemic provides the perfect occasion to ditch—or be fired from—a position that doesn’t do much beyond keeping the lights on and the fridge full. “When you lose that just-OK job, you have the opportunity to take a big risk,” says Boden. “Take all the good from your past ventures and throw them into the future.”
2. Move Your Body
“Physical activity is very important to keep the gray and white matter in your brain more functional,” says Sigmundsson. His studies show that successful older people are all physically active, including everyone mentioned in this article. Anything that gets your heart pumping, such as walking, swimming, yoga, biking, or weights, will do the trick.
3. Fight Weakness
Which is lowest: your grit, passion, or growth mindset? Help nurture your weakest trait by surrounding yourself with people and deadlines that bolster it. If your entrepreneurial passion is fading, find an enthusiastic business partner and join an incubator program. If you fear you won’t be able to write that novel you keep seeing in your dreams, join a weekly writing group and hire a book coach.
4. Beyond Work
Bonus points for learning completely new skills, which can improve cognitive function. The more novel and mentally demanding, the better—try, say, learning a new language or musical instrument. After a lifetime of playing percussion, Sigmundsson picked up the bass guitar at age 50. “My band needed a bass player,” he says. “Now I’m 55, and I’m quite good.”
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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