Korea: Creating Tomorrow’s Talent Today
Recently I was a plenary speaker at the Global HR Forum in Seoul, South Korea. This conference attracted a combination of educators from K-20, press, Human Resource managers, government and policy makers, students, and corporate types mostly from South Korea, but a few from around the world. It made for some interesting conversations about the changing nature of work, and how education is or isn’t changing to meet those needs.
Our plenary session was on “Maker Education for Tomorrow” and featured Sherry Lassiter, President & CEO, The Fab Foundation, San Ko, CEO of A-TEAM Ventures, and me, moderated by Inae Kang Professor, The Graduate School of Education, Kyung Hee University. We each got 20 minutes to make our case for how making can make and is making education more relevant and more closely connected to the jobs that really exist today, and will only increase in the future. Then we had the luxury to have a conversation and answer audience questions for another 30 minutes. All of this was being simultaneously translated into English and Korean as needed. It was quite extraordinary. I wish more conferences used a similar format, it gave us all a chance to build on the commonalities of what we were saying, plus expand on the points that the audience was most interested in.
Dr. Kang provided expert moderation, helped provide context, and brought some of her lovely graduate students who had some great comments as well! One of audience questions came from a middle school student who was representing a large group of young people who were also attending the conference. All stakeholder groups indeed!
I hope to have video to post soon! Stay tuned…