This week, the Siemens article “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”, really stood out to me. I must owe the “wow” factor I experienced to an unfamiliar term I read referred to as the “half-life of knowledge”. To my discovery, I learned it refers to a particular time span from where the knowledge was first learned to it becoming obsolete. According to the American Society of Training and Documentation, within the last 10 years, our knowledge has doubled, and is continuously doubling every 18 months! One of the learning trends showed that “many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated work fields over the course of their lifetime”. This truly made me wonder, why is it that now more than ever, individuals are changing their careers? I wonder if one of the significant reasons that individuals are more likely to change their work-fields multiple times throughout their life span is due to technological advancement. For example, companies are being more enticed to replace human workers with robots, for the reason they are cheaper, can work 24/7, and make fewer errors. The transportation industry (taxi & bus drivers) is currently one of the most vulnerable professions, owing to the new technology of self-driving vehicles. For that reason, millions of vehicle operators will be left jobless in the foreseeable future and forced to retrain and search for a new occupation. In relating back to the article, this example is proof of the importance of continual education, especially when job security is becoming far more uncertain.
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