Creating the University of the Future: A Global Panorama on Future Skills

Abstract

The challenge of promoting Future Skills is one of the currently most debated ones for higher education institutions all over the world. In this chapter, the editors provide a conceptual basis for the contributed chapters as well as an overview of the sections and contributions of this book. The concept and relevance of Future Skills for Higher Education on a global scale is addressed, followed by an outline of how future universities could look like and which trends will shape this future. Followed by this, the five sections of the Creating the University of the Future book are introduced with short summaries of the chapters and the perspectives they contribute to discussing, promoting and reimagining Future Skills learning in higher education.

1 Introduction

In a world which is changing faster than ever before, it has never been more urgent to actively shape this global transformation in order to create the best possible future. Today’s students need to learn the necessary skills for this—Future Skills. The challenge of promoting them is one of the currently most debated ones for higher education institutions all over the world.

Future Skills are skills which enable students to collectively impact societal transformation in order to create more sustainable futures. In other words, we define Future Skills as competences that enable individuals to solve complex problems in a self-organized manner and to act (successfully) in highly emergent contexts. They are based on cognitive, motivational, volitional, and social resources, are value-based, and can be acquired in a learning process (Ehlers, 2020, p. 53). In the public discussion on higher education concepts, they have meanwhile contributed to a decisive change, which we refer to here as the Future Skills Turn (Ehlers, 2020, 2022). The Future Skills concept we follow is based on educational research, comprises 17 skills profiles, and represents a strong alternative vision of higher education. It integrates a variety of Future Skills frameworks and approaches into one comprehensive model, as will be shown in Chap. 2.

The starting point for the enormous concept that is Future Skills is the diagnosis that current concepts of higher education do not confront the pressing challenges of our societies with convincing concepts for the future (Hippler, 2016; Kummert, 2017)—neither the sustainable design of our environment nor the related social or economic challenges. Global challenges are exacerbated by a constantly accelerating globalization process and ever faster digital progress. In this situation of digital acceleration, the characteristic feature is that of uncertainty and the inescapable necessity is that of creative responsibility (Ehlers, 2020). It is the responsibility of all of us to make the best of the possibilities and to find ways to deal with this uncertain future. This is about nothing more and nothing less than the preservation of our planet and our livelihoods.

The institution of higher education is faced with the challenge of reinventing itself—at a time when it is undergoing an enormous growth process and a rate of 70% higher education students of one age cohort or more is predicted in most nations by the year 2050 (Ehlers, 2020). Higher education institutions must address the question: which Future Skills will the graduates of tomorrow need, and how can they support them in acquiring them? Future Skills are first and foremost an educational concept—therefore it is necessary to describe them in terms of educational approaches and root them in existing educational theories. In earlier works, we have done this by creating the so-called Future Skills Triple Helix Model, which was developed within the framework of the NextSkills study (Ehlers, 2020). The NextSkills study has used a multilevel and multi-method research design including desk research, document analysis, expert evaluations, open half-structured qualitative interviews, and Delphi surveys. The aim was to create an inventory of skills needs for the future and analyze and cluster it to so-called Future Skills profiles. A second research phase was then looking at integrating the findings from the first phase with a body of existing concepts and theories. The findings have been further developed with research and teaching experiences for Future Skills promotion in different higher education teaching and learning settings and initiatives.

In the last five years—since 2017 with the publication of the first (explicit) Future Skills study in Germany—the interest in Future Skills for the field of academic education has multiplied and recast the discussion about key competences and other related concepts, such as 21st Century Skills, Graduate Attributes, or soft skills. It draws on a history of discussing competences and skills, starting with soft skills and key competencies, and now integrating transformative, sustainability, and global citizenship skills. There are different perspectives to the discussion, closer to employability matters, individual development, or community and society-oriented approaches. There are many reasons for this, which lie in societal megatrends such as digitalization, demographic change, and the development of an educational society (Ehlers, 2020). These challenges being not limited to regional or national context, the skills needed to master them should also be discussed from a broad perspective and across countries and educational contexts.

They lead to an increasing importance of Future Skills as precisely those abilities that allow individuals to possess and/or regain the ability to shape their own lives and social contexts in a world of constant change and in future emergent—i.e., unpredictable—and rapidly changing situations of demand. In terms and concept, Future Skills can be distinguished from those competencies that are not particularly future-oriented. The concept of emergence serves as a differentiating dimension between current or previous competence requirements and those that are relevant to the future. In particular, those contexts of action that exhibit highly emergent developments of life, work, organizational and business processes require Future Skills to cope with the needs. Emergence thus defines the dividing line that separates previous, or traditional, areas of work from future areas of work. Since this boundary is not clearly schematic but fluid, and many organizations are undergoing transformation processes in which weakly emergent work contexts are evolving into highly emergent work contexts, the need for Future Skills is also an evolving domain rather than a binary state of either/or.

Based on the in-depth interviews and the assessment of experts surveyed worldwide, 17 Future Skills profiles (see Fig. 1.1 for an overview)¹ were constructed that are of particular importance for future university graduates. Each profile consists of a bundle of individual competences, so-called reference competences. Future Skills profiles are clusters of future-relevant skills. The various Future Skills profiles can be assigned to three dimensions: those Future Skills that relate to one’s own development (learning—individual development-related), the development of specific solutions (development—individual object-related) and to joint development in social systems (co-creation—individual organization-related).

Fig. 1.1

Future Skills overview according to three main dimensions (Ehlers, 2020)

Professionals—i.e., acting persons—can develop Future Skills in relation to themselves (subject-related), in relation to dealing with a task, topic, or object (object-related), or in relation to the organizational environment, i.e., the social system (world-related). A relation with three poles emerges, each pole being in relation to the other. With respect to actions in highly emergent contexts, all three poles and their relation to each other are always determinant in every action. Because of the close interconnectedness of all three poles and their interrelated integration, we refer to this concept as the Future Skills Triple Helix model. The resulting concept is suitable for the formal description of actions in highly emergent contexts.

The classification criterion for Future Skills profiles is the target of relation:

• relation of an individual to themselves in the present, past or future (subject or time dimension—learning),

• relation of an individual to a certain object (object dimension—development) or

• relationship of an individual to a person or a group in the world (social dimension—co-creation).

All three dimensions are in turn interrelated and influence each other. The three dimensions thus form the Future Skills Triple Helix model (Fig. 1.2), in which the three skill dimensions interact in concrete actions. They enable a better understanding of the factors that make up future action skills.

Fig. 1.2

Future Skills Triple Helix Model (Ehlers, 2020, created by Alina Timofte)

While there seems to be a common understanding of the relevance of promoting Future Skills with learners, students, graduates, citizens, there is a certain responsibility of higher education in promoting these if they want to stay relevant and fulfill the requirements of today’s and tomorrow’s societies. The challenge of promoting Future Skills is one of the currently most debated challenges for higher education institutions all over the world. With this initiative, we aim at facilitating the discussion, of connecting actors, researchers, stakeholders, and all involved in this important undertaking. We want to make visible what is already there and want to inspire to envision what could be there—this is the starting point of our Global Future Skills initiative.

2 Ten Drivers for a Future University

Ehlers (2020) summarized ten drivers (Fig. 1.3) which are influencing the shape and future outlines of a Next University model and which our Future Skills considerations need to be reflective of.

1—Digital Transformation: Digitization is a powerful development for universities. A wide range of publications bear witness to this. However, the current discussion about university strategies shows that digital transformation is not an end in itself. It is becoming apparent that fewer and fewer universities are adopting a digital strategy, and more and more are moving towards understanding digitization as a means of strategically rethinking or sharpening their own university profile. The result is then a strategy for higher education in a digital world, but not a strategy for digitization.

2—(Media) Transformation Society: the development of the media has always led to fundamental social upheavals in historical terms. According to Dirk Baecker (2018), we can analyze that we live on the verge of a “next society” with largely changed communication possibilities and rules. The question that arises is: how can universities prepare their students and graduates for the next society (Baecker, 2018)?

3—Demographic Change: Schofer and Meyer (2005) use university statistics to show that university expansion has been an accelerating process in all advanced countries of the world since the middle of the twentieth century at the latest, but that it is taking place at different speeds. A university participation rate well above the 50% mark will therefore have to be expected everywhere (Baethge et al., 2015; Teichler, 2013).

4—Modernization & Flexibilization of Education and Occupation Systems: three developments can be observed: 1) The labor market is evolving from a professional system of work to a technical system of work (Lisop, 1997). 2) A development from lifetime employment to lifetime employability can be observed (Beck et al., 2014) as well as a development 3) from a professional employee to a company-based labor entrepreneur (Voß & Pongratz, 1998). Beck (1986) also speaks here of a new culture of self-evidence.

5—Open Education & Shared Knowledge Economy: while universities mostly see themselves as the sole producers, administrators and mediators of scientific progress, more and more new models are emerging to make knowledge, scientific results, data, publications and learning materials available. Based on models of the Sharing Economy, the question is asked how a Shared Knowledge Economy can look like.

6—In-Loops and Out-Loops: learning will no longer take place in the sole, exclusive model of qualification at the beginning of a career phase, but learning will increasingly also have to be an academic lifelong activity, as career requirements develop ever faster, and career phases also present themselves as lifelong evolving changing professional episodes.

7—Higher Education in the VUCA² world: both the ability to continuously adapt to the constantly changing environments through learning and the ability to successfully deal with uncertainties are two key future challenges for higher education.

Fig. 1.3

Ten Seconds of Change for Higher Education (Ehlers, 2020)

8—From a Control Illusion to an Enabling Logic: we know that competence-oriented teaching and learning works especially well in environments structured according to socio-constructivist principles. They are didactic models that go beyond pure factual knowledge and problem-solving and penetrate the field of creative self-developed and self-responsible innovation.

9—Informal Learning: universities usually concentrate on the formal teaching and study aspects when designing their teaching–learning scenarios. This involves, for example, using digital media to support the transfer of knowledge. The entire area of informal learning is neglected. However, informal learning is the area where most learning processes have been proven to take place.

10—Alternative Certifications & Micro-Credentials: micro-credentials, badges, nanodegrees and Micro-Masters have been on everyone’s lips for some time now. The underlying idea and concept of academic education, made possible by micro-credentials and micro-qualifications, is to enable lifelong informal documentation of education, lifelong documentation of academic education, in which informal and formal elements, modules, and learning experiences are interwoven through accredited or non-accredited, certified or uncertified, modules into an academic educational biography.

The increased participation in academic education and the increasing digitization of higher education have a mutually reinforcing effect on the organization and design of studies, teaching, and research. A new diversity and decoupled processes are the result and trigger a noticeable creative pressure towards individualization and the lifelong need for academic education. Universities will have to undergo fundamental changes in the way they organize their studies. More students, new target groups, and an unprecedented diversity of target groups, who need to be valued and supported in personalized study situations, are coming to the universities. To this end, the function of higher education institutions with regard to social integration and the social dimension of studying in an academic educational society is becoming increasingly important. In conjunction with this, the concept of lifelong learning is gaining in importance for universities. Many interconnected changes in university teaching and organization are set in motion like a domino effect when this initial shift occurs. There is, for example, the concept of micro-credentials, alternative certification systems that enable learners to organize their own portfolio of qualifications and competences digitally and in a more self-determined way and require higher education institutions to professionalize their systems of recognition and credit. Digitization enables the flexibilization of space and time structures and greater transparency of all study-related information systems over the entire study life cycle. In a digital world, we are experiencing a decreasing importance of knowledge transfer and an increasing need for guidance, support, and coaching in a more diverse world of studies. In addition, the decoupling of processes of teaching, testing, and certification of competences plays an increasingly important role. Based on the changed framework conditions in an educational society and the pressure for change that affects academic qualification processes, new requirements for a modern, further developed higher education model arise for higher education institutions.

3 The Global Future Skills Initiative: What Can You Expect?

While there seems to be a newly established consensus on the responsibility of higher education in taking students’ Future Skills development into account, questions remain on how to do so on all levels of teaching and learning—on the policy or macro level, on the institutional or meso level, and on the micro level, meaning in the classroom.

However, in our research, we noticed how many approaches already point to a direction where skills development is central and that many institutions, actors, and stakeholders involved in (higher) education have already started to pave the way for Future Skills development—piloting, trying out, developing programs. While there seems to be no uniform, one-fits-all solution for promoting Future Skills in higher education worldwide, there is a search and experiencing going on in many regions, institutions, settings by sharing ideas, approaches, feedback and co-developing a vision for future-proof higher education—which we noticed in many exchanges on our Future Skills research, in workshops and conferences. We also noticed a rising interest in concrete, hands-on examples of how to promote Future Skills in higher education.

From this, the idea of the Global Future Skills initiative was born—with the goal of increasing visibility of existing and emerging practices and approaches and contributing to new visions, networks, and exchanges by moving visionary Future Skills practices forward. Two methods were used to put this plan into realization: to compile peer-reviewed contributions for a book publication and to do interviews with experts in the field to be released both in the book and in a podcast series.

In this publication, you will find contributions by more than 50 authors from more than 15 countries from all continents except Antarctica and more than 20 different institutions. The map of contributing authors (Fig. 1.4) will give a short glimpse to the geographical variety of the submissions—followed by an overview of the chapters.

Fig. 1.4

Map of contributing authors to this volume

4 Preview of Book Sections and Chapters

We will start with a foundational introduction to the theme of Future Skills in Part I—Setting the Scene—Future Skills in Higher Education in an opening chapter.

In the chapter Towards a Future Skills Framework for Higher Education, based on a qualitative meta-analysis of 13 studies and publications on Future Skills, Ulf-Daniel Ehlers will give an insight and analysis into the existing research and discourse on Future Skills, with a specific analysis of Digital Competences in Future Skills concepts. He proposes a framework encompassing 17 skill profiles which are able to serve as a conceptual model for Future Skills approaches. On basis of its 17 skill profiles, other existing Future Skills models can be categorized and compared with each other.

Laura Eigbrecht and Ulf-Daniel Ehlers will follow up with the chapter The Practice of Future Skills Learning: An Assessment of Approaches, Conditions and Success Factors, analyzing the Future Skills definitions of our contributing authors. As we asked our submitting authors not only to base their submissions on a specific definition and/or concept of Future Skills, but also to add some practical recommendations for Future Skills promotion based on their approaches and experiences, we will also provide an analysis in this chapter, concluding in an outlook for a Future Skills vision for higher education and its conditions for success.

We will go one step further with Part II—Future Skills—Foundations and Shapes of a New Emerging Concept in a Global View and discuss basic concepts and outlines concerning Future Skills in (global) higher education.

For the opening chapter, OECD’s Andreas Schleicher will share his thoughts and experiences on Future Skills in a Future Skills Conversation. “I’ve learnt everything I know from the world”—this is how he refers to his expertise in education from experts and professionals from all over the world—but it is also something to keep in mind concerning Future Skills learning. Not only will Andreas Schleicher share his personal learning pathway, but also his thoughts on the future of education and skills—which should aim at collective agency and integration of teaching, learning and assessment, but not exactly at equipping everybody with the same skill set.

Focusing more closely on higher education, Francesc Pedró from the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), in his chapter called Future Skills—Back into the Future? Emerging Trends in Educational Innovation in Higher Education, will describe these trends from an international or even global perspective. While there is a strong discourse on teaching and learning settings going on, lectures are still the most widely used teaching strategy, with a classic university model persisting. However, new Future Skills demands are driving educational innovation—with the main innovation domains in instructional content and design, processes, and technology. Pedró describes the tension between innovation and the classic university model and proposes strategies on how to overcome this.

Tony Bates is taking the challenges of digital technology for skills needs into account in his chapter called Teaching the Skills Needed for the Future. While technology is influencing and changing all domains of our everyday lives, teachers and instructors are facing the challenges of equipping learners with the skills needed to master this change. The chapter explores the skills that will be needed, and ways in which such skills can be developed—those being critically important for the students’ quality of life, be it in universities or vocational education. The good news is: there are many opportunities to develop intellectual and practical skills for work and life activities in a digital age, without corrupting the values or standards of academia.

Future Skills are a subject touching the discussion of the role of universities in society—a discussion that Wolfgang Stark is having a closer look at in his chapter Future Universities as Activating Resonance Spaces. New Roles in Society—Innovative Approaches. Drawn from many debates and explorations with diverse higher education stakeholders, he conceives universities as an Active Resonance Space going beyond business matters, addressing future societal challenges. With the concept of service learning as a participative and empowering approach, a future-ready institutionalization of transformative learning and teaching can take place, with a close link between universities and civil society.

In another Future Skills Conversation, ITCILO’s Tom Wambeke is proposing, for Future Skills-ready education, Building a Creative Ecosystem of Intentional Serendipity. He will give insights into how Future Skills are closely linked to improvisation and how we need to become human chameleons for mastering today’s and tomorrow’s complex problems. He proposes a whole mindset switch which is needed for making Future Skills learning a reality: new roles for teachers and learners, a new sensitivity for lifelong learning opportunities, and the courage to come up with radically different solutions.

Even widening the perspective, Eglis Chacón, Emma Harden-Wolfson, Luz Gamarra Caballero, Bosen Lily Liu and Dana Abdrasheva from the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) propose A New Theory of Change in their chapter Beyond Future Skills in Higher Education: A New Theory of Change. It is based on a survey conducted by the institute which gives a global perspective by reaching respondents from nearly 100 countries. The approach helps to identify Future Skills needs for today’s students and future generations, but also the accelerators for promoting them and the goals this transformation of individuals, institutions and society should lead to.

After presenting these general debates underlying the discourse on Future Skills, we will have a closer look at Future Skills in practice in section III and IV, starting with Part III—Future Skills in Practice—Teaching and Learning.

A Future Skills Conversation with psychologist Angela Duckworth from Character Lab leads into the next section: “If you really want to change the world, the smartest way to do so is through education”. Angela Duckworth talks about character and strengths of mind, will and heart—and emphasizes the importance of other persons to support personal development for growing up well. Initiative, independence, curiosity, and science—these are some of the concepts which will be discussed as important when teaching and learning Future Skills.

But how to put this into practice? A first example is provided by Michael P. Vogel from Germany. In his chapter Team Academy: Future Skills and the Future of Learning, he introduces Team Academy’s innovative higher education model and its first application in Germany for Future Skills development, based on entrepreneurship education and combining educational approaches such as team coaching and real-life action learning. While introducing this model into an existing institutional context might seem radical, the chapter inspires us by showing it is possible, that higher education is already changing—and that Why might be more important for the first steps than How.

Carmen Păunescu (Romania) and Mary McDonnell-Naughton (Ireland) develop a specific Future Skills set and focus on how it can be promoted in different higher education programs. In the chapter Education for Future Skills Development: Cognitive, Collaborative and Ethical Skills, they explain how individuals’ reflective practice and critical thinking can be supported. Entrepreneurship education and nursing ethics education serve as case studies to show how different disciplines, institutional contexts and curricula can be explored and enhanced through Problem-Based Learning to support students’ Future Skills learning—and how ethics education should be an integral part of this across disciplines.

Michael Wihlenda, founder of the World Citizen School at the Weltethos Institute of the German University of Tübingen, presents to us The World Citizen School Model. Learning Philosophy and Learning System for Global, Socially Innovative and Value-Based Future Learning. This approach started as an extracurricular network for civically engaged student initiatives and developed into a holistic learning system with student engagement and social innovation at its core. It emphasizes on Future Skills as a societal benefit—or, in other words, to conceive Future Skills learning as transformative learning.

Future Skills learning must also be reflective of one’s individual, cultural, and societal contexts and this is a perspective taken by Sandhya Gunness, Karen Ferreira-Meyers and Thanasis Daradoumis in their chapter called Learning Design for Future Skills Development in Small State Contexts. Here, the small Southern African states of Mauritius and Eswatini and the Universities of Mauritius and Eswatini are in focus for capacity building for future challenges—with a high need for graduates’ Future Skills development. Values such as community, resilience, sustainability, and tolerance serve as an orientation framework and moral compass for Future Skills development and teachers’ and learners’ perspectives are explored in order to identify Future Skills needs and approaches for promoting them.

In a different approach and setting, the German initiative Stifterverband contributes to Future Skills education in German higher education with research, frameworks, and funding programs. In the chapter Boosting Future Skills in Higher Education: Lessons Learned from Funding Programs, Networking, Establishing Standards & Curricular Integration, Felix Süßenbach, Judith Koeritz, Andreas Wormland and Henning Koch present a Future Skills framework and programs, focusing amongst others on entrepreneurship education and data literacy, to underline higher education’s responsibility in promoting students’ Future Skills.

While these programs aim at integrating Future Skills education into existing institutional contexts, 42 Coding Schools are taking a different approach to education. In a Future Skills Conversation entitled May the Code Be with You: The 42 Learning Model in Germany, Max Senges from German 42 schools in Wolfsburg and Berlin discusses the educational approach of the schools and how they contribute to their students’ Future Skills learning in a very specific way—with skills profiles such as coding literacy, planetary thinking and life entrepreneurship.

In their chapter Interdisciplinary Project to Build Teaching Skills: A Pedagogical Approach, Mônica Cristina Garbin and Édison Trombeta de Oliveira from the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo introduce an educational approach based on Project-Based Learning and Human-Centered Design, integrating theory and practice and aimed at promoting students’ Future Skills such as problem-solving and collaboration. They accentuate the potential of inter- and multidisciplinarity and promote the integration of theory and practice for students’ Future Skills development.

Ashoka’s Judit Costa gives an insight into Ashoka’s approaches to Changemaking on Campus. When discussing Future Skills, we aim at students and graduates not only reacting to, but designing and co-creating change. With different programs and the tagline “Everyone a changemaker”, Ashoka aims at building a community of changemakers with a responsibility towards society across universities and countries.

How could the University of the Future look like, promoting students’ Future Skills? This is what Juvy Lizette M. Gervacio is discussing in the chapter entitled The “University of the Future” of the Philippines: The Case of University of the Philippines Open University’s Master of Public Management Program. Here, she focusses on the potential of distance education programs in promoting students’ Future Skills, with Public Management students at the core of her research, and makes a strong point for digital learning settings to make learners collaborate and reflect on their self-efficacy and challenges of emergent futures, affecting their work and Future Skills requirements.

Roseli de Deus Lopes and André Luiz Maciel Santana from Universidade de São Paulo contribute a chapter on Using Real-World Problems and Project-Based Learning for Future Skill Development: An Approach to Connect Higher Education Students and Society Through User-Centered Design. They discuss Future Skills from an engineering perspective, with an educational setting promoting Future Skills learning through User-Centered Design and incorporating real-world problems into a Computer Engineering course. Based on this case study, they reflect on the great potential of real-world problems in promoting Future Skills learning.

Part IV—Future Skills in Practice—Assessment focuses on Future Skills assessment and validation.

Nicole Geier and Ulf-Daniel Ehlers propose an approach which shows how student self-assessments can be integrated into learning and teaching practices at higher education institutions in order to promote Future Skills learning and assessment. The chapter Assessment of Future Skills Learning: Changing Futures in Higher Education reflects on assessment practices and a paradigm shift towards assessment as learning which is taking place, presenting a new vision of skills assessment and an example of integration into the whole student life-cycle.

With a well-established concept, Megan K. Gahl, Abha Ahuja, Raquel H. Ribeiro, Maia Averett and James Genone lead us into the subject of assessing Future Skills with their chapter Active Learning and Integrated Assessment. Minerva’s Approach to Teaching Future Skills. They report on the Minerva Project’s large expertise in transformational education programs for promoting Future Skills, working with a learning taxonomy relating Future Skills to Learning Outcomes, introducing, assessing, and reinforcing them throughout a study program. One learning: alignment is key.

The approaches presented by Grame Barty, Naomi Boyer, Alexandros Chrysikos, Margo Griffith, Kevin House, Tara Laughlin, Ebba Ossiannilsson, Rupert Ward and Holly Zanville focus on micro-credentials and badges as alternative credentialing approaches: Developing a More Granular and Equitable Approach to the Learner-Earner Journey: The Role of Badging, Micro-Credentials and 21st Century Skills within Higher Education to Enable Future Workforce Development. The authors propose different ways to align Future Skills needs and higher education courses by introducing more granular learning supported by badges, micro-credentials and alternative credentials and personalizing Future Skills learning in a lifelong learning context.

Tobias Seidl from the German Hochschule der Medien presents a specific learning and assessment model adopted and integrated at the institution’s faculty of Information and Communication in his chapter Formative Assessment of 21st Century Skills. This approach to Future Skills learning has integrated key competence modules in all BA study programs with a formative assessment approach supporting students’ individual learning journeys.

The State of Skills: A Global View from Burning Glass Institute and Wiley presents insights into how skills needs can be explored and assessed. Emerging skill sets have been identified for the “State of Skills” report in order to discuss how learners can be prepared for new challenges and Future Skills needs.

Part V—Future Skills in Higher Education—The Wider View is dealing with national and international Future Skills initiatives and approaches in making society and lifelong learning future-proof.

Soon-Joo Gog, Edwin Tan and Kelsie Tan from the SkillsFuture Singapore Agency share their experience in developing Future Skills on a national level in Future-Skilling the Workforce: SkillsFuture Movement in Singapore. In Singapore, Future Skills are strongly promoted both in the initial education system and in lifelong learning, with an ecosystem aligning skills needs and training opportunities—tightly connected to the goal of an inclusive and prosperous society.

Part of that ecosystem is the National University of Singapore, and in their chapter Anticipating the Future: Continuing Education at the National University of Singapore, Miriam J. Green, Christalle Tay and Ye-Her Wu let us zoom into Future Skills education in the domain of continuing education. They describe their contribution to Singapore’s Future Skills strategy, collaborating with government and industry—and not only taking students into account, but also university staff and graduates as lifelong learners.

The discussion on Future Skills is aligned with the objective to transform society into a Society 5.0 in Japan. Keiko Ikeda of Kansai University shares these discussions and their meaning for Future Skills development in her chapter Aiming to Build Future Skills for Society 5.0: Educational DX (Digital Transformation) of University Education in Japan. Future Skills development, curriculum transformation, digital transformation and the internationalization of university are presented as drivers for promoting and working towards Society 5.0 in collaboration with multi-stakeholder groups.

The chapter Future Skill Needs for IT Professionals—An Empirical Study by Marina Brunner and Ulf-Daniel Ehlers presents a large-scale quantitative survey on Future Skills for IT professionals, analyzing data from 16 European member states.

In the final chapter, Stephen Marshall from the Victoria University of Wellington presents a chapter on Future Higher Education in New Zealand: Creating a Universal Learning Community for Future Skills. While exploring the national context of New Zealand for Future Skills development and education, he looks beyond existing approaches by proposing the Universal Learning Community, linking individuals, institutions, employers, and communities for the common goal of creating a shared Future Skills vision.