South-east Asian educators should embrace “up-systeming” rather than upskilling, as the region battles swift technological and demographic currents, a Jakarta forum has heard.
Indonesia’s deputy minister for higher education, science and technology, Stella Christie, said the term “upskilling” implied that people’s skills had become obsolete. She said it was more productive to think about “changing the system” than changing the skill.
“Maybe you…have to create a better ecosystem to match and cultivate and accept the skills that the population have,” Christie told Times Higher Education’s Global Sustainable Development Congress. “[They may be] good skills to have, but…do we have the environment to receive the skills?
“I’m not sure if we are redefining skills [so much as] continuously having to make skills into something that truly responds to the market. This is an…age-old problem about what you need to teach in higher education.”
A Harvard-trained cognitive psychologist who has studied and worked in Norway, the US, Canada and China, Christie juggles her political post with a professorship at Tsinghua University. She said higher education institutions struggled to keep up with changes in society.
