“Students are one of the most important pillars of Malta’s development and prosperity and the government wants to encourage students to have a much more proactive role in shaping the future of further and higher education by sharing and voicing their thoughts and experiences,” Education Minister Louis Galea said yesterday.

He was speaking at a foresight seminar for student representatives of all further and higher education organised jointly by the National Commission for Higher Education and the Malta Council for Science and Technology.

The seminar is part of a series of meetings being held with the main stakeholders in the sector. The commission has already met with the heads of institute in Malta and Gozo and is now meeting the student representatives. Today the commission will be meeting with MCAST senior staff. The student foresight seminar is being attended by 60 student representatives of 11 student organisations.

The theme of the seminar entitled “Gearing Education Towards Future Work: The Students’ Perspective” gives students and their representative councils the opportunity to reflect, think critically and share ideas on what future education systems should look like and more importantly what do future labour markets require from education systems today.

The future labour market will hold new challenges:

• The need for new skills and competences;

• The creation of innovative and competitive forms of work organisations;

• Shorter career lifecycles as a result of shorter technology and product life-cycles, which will see workers returning to education as adults possibly a number of times during their life;

• A balance between the learning skills and abilities of students and their stock of knowledge; and finally

• More shifts between different types of occupational status, from employed, to self employed to partnering in cross border networks and teams, so on and so forth.

Dr Galea said that all this and more, required that “we stop and reflect on whether education systems today need to develop a different set of skills which the future workplace seems to keep demanding ever more forcefully. We need to gear education systems towards helping students acquire the ability to identify opportunities for innovation, developing and creating new goods and services, technologies, or solutions, and having the soft skills which accompany knowledge to make such new ventures possible – such as adaptability, confidence, honesty, discipline, perseverance and a risk-taking attitude towards life.