The Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum has predicted 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that do not even exist yet. The world is changing at such a fast pace that the high paying jobs of today did not even exist five years ago – and it’s hard to predict what kind of jobs we will be doing in another five years’ time. The reason for this big change? Software.

Now the question is how we prepare our kids for the future, there is only one answer to that question: Coding. Both parents and educators believe that in a country like India, where the education system grapples with lack of innovation, infrastructure, and archaic curriculum, coding is a well-structured way to introduce children to logical thinking and problem-solving. This also prepares them for a job market dominated by data science and computer science.

Before the Industrial Revolution, fewer than 10% of schools taught mathematics, After the tipping point, every school introduced mathematics because that was the center of the revolution. Coding skills are to us now what mathematics was to the Industrial Revolution: underrated at the time, but invaluable decades later. Now we are in the middle of the computer revolution, and it’s the same phenomenon: Schools need to realize the importance of coding as a skill.

In the next 5-10 years, it would not matter which school children attend schooling rather how digitally literate these children are, especially with the introduction of 5G technology which would be paradigm-shifting and would upend the traditional methods of Education. Economists estimate the global economic impact of 5G in new goods and services will reach $12 trillion by 2035 as 5G moves mobile technology from connecting people to people and information, towards connecting people to everything. Today’s hi-tech kids learn from the same books I used during my time at school 10 years ago. Our education system promotes rote learning, and this promotes conformism rather than curiosity in children. There is a rote learning raj that governs our schools.

If we do not introduce Coding in schools, then our children will be at a huge disadvantage and the future would be precarious. In 2017, Eupheus Learning, an ed-tech startup from Delhi, launched Cubetto which has been introduced in about 300 primary schools across India. Cubetto’s innovation is the block-based coding language designed for children in pre-literate years. It is a coding solution without screens that teaches the basics of programming to toddlers.

Coding is about much more than teaching technology. It incorporates logic, problem-solving, and creativity in an engaging way for children of all ages. The non-cognitive skills that children develop through coding lessons are even more beneficial to young learners than the technical skills they acquire. Coding allows students to be creative without being wrong. If something doesn’t work, students must figure out why and determine how to fix it. Coding is the process of continually making mistakes, learning from them and correcting them. Coding requires creativity and critical thinking – future-ready skills, that, along with collaboration and communication, are essential. Best of all, coding allows students to create content, rather than simply consume it – and that’s a must-have skill for functioning in today’s tech-driven world.

The new Annual Employability report by Aspiring Minds reveals that 80% of Indian engineers are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy and only 2.5% of them possess tech skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that industry requires. Skills gaps have become an issue to both employers and the unemployed. This trend is exacerbated by technological advancements which are rapidly replacing manual jobs, leaving millions of young people unprepared to participate in the 21st-century knowledge economy.

According to a report submitted by Mckinsey at the Leadership Forum, there would be job cuts between 1.75 lakh and 2 lakh per year in next three years, due to under-preparedness in adapting to newer technologies. The report also mentions that nearly half of the workforce in the IT services firms will be “irrelevant” over the next 3-4 years.

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