The last Reacti-VET event was informative and motivating

On 18 February 2021, we held the last national event of the Reacti-VET (Teachers for Reactive and Responsive VET) project online via Zoom. The event was mainly attended by VET leaders, teachers, students, education experts and consultants — around 70 participants.

Our guest speaker, Tamás Jankó, Head of the Digital Vocational and Adult Education Methodology Centre, gave a presentation entitled The Future of Work — 2030, in which he presented the work patterns of the near future through startling data.

He said, for example, that

• 43% of companies plan to reduce the number of workers due to technological improvements, 41% plan to use subcontracting or temporary agency work, and 34% of companies plan to hire new workers due to the adoption of advanced technologies.
• By 2025, machines will have taken 85 million jobs and 97 million new jobs will be created to perform new types of tasks that can be done in collaboration between machines, people and algorithms.
• The shortage of competences expected in the labour market — critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, active learning, mental resilience, stress tolerance, flexibility — will remain high over the next five years.
• 84% of managers want to achieve further digitisation of work processes, including digitally-enabled teleworking, which could have a lasting impact on 44% of employees.

The event featured video and live presentations of the 7 experiments carried out in the final phase of the project. In these experiments, employers set a project task and then, together with teachers, developed the mini-course needed to provide the students with the knowledge and skills they lacked to complete the task.

The presentations of the project teams included not only teachers, but also students and company representatives, who talked about the project task, the cancer mini-course and their experiences in the experiment.

It was an informative and motivating event: the participating vocational schools demonstrated that the Reacti-VET methodology is in line with the VET 4.0 strategy and that the methodology developed by the consortium can be successfully applied in a wider context.