Preparing students for the workplace once meant that schools had simply to provide a solid foundation of academic and social skills, producing graduates grounded in the basics and demonstrating responsibility and socially acceptable behavior. Today, thanks largely to digital technology, the workplace has changed. Although the traditional skills are still necessary, employers also expect potential employees to:

• have basic technology literacy skills,
• understand and use teamwork and communication skills, and
• possess higher–order thinking skills such as problem–solving, synthesis, and analysis of information.

Fortunately, the same technology that has changed the workplace has the potential to revolutionize education, enabling schools to truly prepare students for the workforce of today and tomorrow. This section of the Leader’s Guide explains how this may happen.

Today’s workplace is a different place, and even entry-level jobs, such as mail-sorter, now require workers who are comfortable with technology. In fact, the CEO Forum’s 1997 School Technology and Readiness Report (1997 STaR Report) indicates that employers now expect workers not just to be technologically literate, but to be so comfortable with technology that they can suggest ways to adopt it to “trim costs, increase productivity, and improve results.”

Indeed, the very nature of work has changed. Back in 1991, the U.S. Department of Labor released the SCANS Report (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills) which markedly contrasts the traditional workplace with the new high–performance workplace. The traditional workplace, characterized by isolated workers performing routinized and repetitive tasks of mass production, is contrasted with the new workplace, requiring multi–skilled workers empowered to make decisions and expected to work creatively and cooperatively in teams.

More recently, Educational Testing Services (ETS) provided a report on the dominant sector of our current economy — the office, which provides 60 percent of all college degree jobs, 50 percent of all earnings, and most of the past two decades’ job growth (Education for What? The New Office Economy, 1998). These researchers arrive at the same conclusions, but even more emphatically. The ETS study points out that the best incomes will go to those who can think, manage, be flexible, and succeed in flexible organizations.

Traditional education, based on the older “factory” model, is too often inadequate for this new reality. Even worse, too many students often fail to see any connection between what they traditionally learn in school and what they sense will be expected of them in the world of work, becoming cynical over school’s ability to prepare them for careers. Here, then, is where technology can make an appreciable difference.