New Year, New Skills? Make 2024 Your Year of Learning
What are your 2024 New Year’s resolutions? With a new year already upon us, millions are ready to start making headway on their resolutions. As common practice as resolutions are, some are more common than others.
Unsurprisingly, the most common resolutions are centred around health. According to a Forbes Health/OnePoll survey, 45% of people wanted to improve their mental health, 39% wanted to improve their fitness levels, 37% wanted to lose weight and 33% wanted to improve their diet.
According to a study on skills in the workforce, 61% of employers say they currently have a skills shortage in their workplace, meaning that there aren’t enough employees or job candidates with the right skill sets to keep up with demand. However, with employer training budgets on the decline, coupled with the rapid growth of tech and artificial intelligence and an increased focus on sustainability and ESG efforts, there’s never been a better time to take upskilling into your own hands.
By 2030, 90% of workers will need some form of reskilling. In an effort to bridge the ever-widening skills gap, it’s essential for employees to start taking stock of current skills, and assessing where the industry skills gaps lie.
The best resolutions are the ones you stick to. So, with 365 days left in the calendar year, perhaps it’s time to add one more resolution to the roster, and consider making 2024 your year of learning.
FutureLearn offers curated course collections from top universities, organisations and brands. Spanning industries including tech, AI, business, teaching and psychology, learners are able to flexibly study online in their own time and at their own pace, guided by leading industry experts. Upon successful course completion, learners will receive a CV-ready digital certificate.
From short courses and microcredentials to degrees, learners can continuously upskill or reskill in their chosen industries, wherever they are on their chosen career path.
Dr Martin Compton, Programme, Module and Assessment Design Lead at King’s College, London, said:
“There’s nothing like a significant change or a big crisis to remind us all of the need to take opportunities where we can to upskill.
AI broadly and generative AI in particular, especially since the release of tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT in 2022, present significant challenges and opportunities but we are very much in a situation where the details of those challenges and opportunities are unfolding in front of our eyes.”
He continued “This is why we at King’s developed a short course on generative AI in higher education for our own staff and students but also wanted it to be available to the wider world. FutureLearn was the perfect platform to achieve that.
This is a real opportunity to learn with our students which is one of the reasons why we produced materials both with and for staff and students. It reminds us we are all lifelong learners, and the communities of discussion in our course—approaching 4,000 participants from 124 countries—are so rich and rewarding.”
For more information on FutureLearn, please visit www.futurelearn.com.
