Author
Ricardo Diaz
When we were kids, my friends and I wanted to be firefighters, athletes, police officers and teachers. These were the jobs that adults around us had. However, it is safe to say that many of the jobs in demand today did not exist 10 years ago and sometimes our college degrees do not necessarily dictate our careers.
Let me give you an example: when I received my degree in telecommunications, I received no training in structured cabling. That came from my employer, where I worked for 15 years.
There is a 65 percent chance that my daughters’ future job does not yet exist. So you might ask yourself, are we educating our kids properly even if we don’t know what kind of job they’ll have?
There are several interesting proposals about how teaching should evolve, but this is not the forum for an academic discussion. However, I think we will all agree that if we teach our children how to learn properly, then we win half of our battle.
The authors in this TED Talks video state that terminology and concepts are just the first step. The next step is to know how to organize information. In our day-to-day lives, we must teach our children, preferably through example, to think, to question every piece of information they get and to assimilate the difficult-to-swallow stream of data they can access in an intelligent way. Moreover, they need to learn to connect the dots. This is not just a job for schools and teachers, but us as parents.
There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.” Well, to teach anyone to learn enables him/her to do anything. A few days ago, I asked my nine-year-old daughter to help me to wash the car. Since this task was new for her, she Googled “How to wash a car?
Information is at our children’s fingertips; however, they’ll need our assistance to process it intelligently, filter content and avoid being swamped.
The concept of non-stop education is more commonplace for them than it was for us; however, today’s professionals also have a lot of resources to access digestible content. Coursera and other websites are a big help. If you’re looking for continuing education courses that focus on telecommunications, then there’s no better place than the CommScope Infrastructure Academy. Our own in-house experts created content covering topics such as: copper and fiber cabling, data centers, LTE and broadband systems. Also, if your company purchased a Training Passport, then you can access our courses for free.
Don’t miss this opportunity.
