Response - Abba on Tertiary Education

Transcription

Hi there guys, my name is Abba Bako and I'm based in Romford, Essex. Now the question was surrounding tertiary education and what solutions would we bring or what suggestions would we make to sort of improve the current system that we have in place and I think there's a number of things that we can do. Just generally looking at the system now what we do find out is a lot of people study degrees, they study subjects that they don't actually go on to use later down the line. I'm one of them myself in that regard. Even though I'm doing something that's closely linked to what I studied in business economics, I'm actually not directly using that which I have learnt in application of my current skills.

I believe more practical experiences that actually help to shape the actual workforce that we're trying to develop even now. But I'll say this as well, I would say also I'm finding that even with a number of other individuals also that are doing degrees and are learning, going to university and at the end of the day coming out not using those degrees, they're actually going into other jobs.

So what I would suggest is us to be able to use some analysis because we have that data available to us. Use that analysis and be able to draw out what degrees are people doing that at the end of the day are not benefiting them in society and benefiting the workforce that we have but also analysing what we do have in our society, analysing what the need is for the job market because now we know we are going into the fourth industrial revolution and where we see the use of digital AI, we see the use of technology growing in our communities and now we know that we need a workforce that understands not only how to use these technologies but how to implement and how to grow and develop it as well so that we are able to be competitive as a nation, as a people in driving forward.

So I think these areas need to be looked at, look at what we need in our workforce, look at what we can do to upskill and looking at even at college education, how can we develop the soft and hard skills. I think when we are able to focus in these areas then individuals are able to grow and able to then decide where they want to go to more organically and then this will allow space maybe later down the future for them to go into a postgraduate degree because I believe postgraduate studies actually bring more of a benefit than undergrad because with undergrad studies people go in not understanding what they're doing, not understanding you know fully what they want to do and just doing it maybe just to tick a box with postgraduate I think that's more of an informed decision.

I believe also there should be more opportunities for individuals to go abroad and study abroad and learn and broaden their horizon that should be offered as part of a you know a more robust system you know which you know we do have the placement year, we have the gap years that are available to individuals but I think that should be now provided or that should be now showcased as you know a benefit to individuals as well and there's a range of things we can go into but these are just some of my thoughts for now and I hope that is sufficient for what was required. Thank you.