Lifelong learning is easier said than done

Of course, everyone agrees on the importance of lifelong learning. Politicians agree, employers agree, universities agree, think tanks agree, Colleges agree, and I agree.

The trouble is that often lifelong learning is sometimes discussed in the same way New Year's resolutions are discussed - everyone supports the concept, but the follow-through can be variable.

The reality is that continuing to learn throughout life is hard. People have jobs, mortgages, children, ageing parents, and inboxes that appear to be breeding at alarming rates. Telling a forty-five-year-old working parent that they should be continuously reskilling can feel a bit like telling someone running a marathon that it would also be an excellent moment to learn the violin.

In the age of AI, adaptability is perhaps becoming the most important skill. Perhaps that is why I have always been fascinated by the idea of rewiring.

When my son was born, he suffered a stroke, but I remember a doctor explaining something extraordinary about a child's brain. He described it as being a bit like plasticine; a young brain, he explained, is hugely malleable, if one pathway is damaged it can often find another. It adapts. It rewires itself. It doesn't sit around mourning that Plan A has failed, it gets busy creating Plan B. That’s what my son did; over time, his brain built new connections and found different routes to achieve the same outcomes. It was a powerful lesson for me in human adaptability, so my mind always goes back to that when I consider education and skills policy.

We often treat learning as something that happens at the beginning of life and then gradually winds down, as if education is a vaccine administered at eighteen, after which immunity to economic change is guaranteed. Sadly this is not the case, and AI didn't get that memo.

Today's workers may need to reinvent themselves two, three, or even four times over during their careers. The challenge is no longer simply learning a skill. It is learning how to keep learning.

One of my friends recently lost her job. After twenty-five years in the same organisation her role has gone. She is understandably devastated, but being a solution led person, I suggested she could retrain; advice which was not well received.

In my head, "reskill" sounds positive, full of opportunity; but in her head, she'd just lost the job that had defined much of her adult life, and her confidence had gone. She wasn't thinking about stackable qualifications, or digital bootcamps, or exciting opportunities in the AI economy; what she wanted was a very large glass of wine and for the problem to disappear. 

So we had that glass of wine, and we sat down like little witches cooking up a plan for her and the conversation we had that night well into the early hours taught me something important. Policymakers often talk about reskilling as though it is a rational choice made by a perfectly functioning economic actor. In reality, it is often a really frightened, exhausted person at his or her wits end, whose entire sense of identity has just taken a major blow. What my friend needed first wasn't a course; it was for her confidence to be rebuilt. After that, some good careers advice, and only then new skills and learning. We have some fantastic colleges in this country and they are doing all they can with limited funding to support people through these challenges. They remain vital engines of opportunity, skills, and second chances. 

My friends experience is far from unique. We rightly worry about young people who are not in education, employment, or training. It's tragic that young lives are put on hold before they've really begun; but we can't ignore another challenge growing quietly in the background, people in their fifties losing work and struggling to find their place in a rapidly changing economy.

Women are often disproportionately affected; many have taken career breaks to raise children or are balancing work with caring responsibilities. Some are supporting elderly parents while still helping adult children, and rising pension ages mean many women are expected to remain in work for longer, just as technology is transforming the labour market around them - a perfect storm.

Being told to "just reskill" can sound a lot like being told to climb a mountain while carrying everyone else's luggage. If lifelong learning is genuinely important, policy has to make it both possible and desirable; flexible courses that fit around real life, qualifications that can be built up over time, and strong careers advice at 52 as well as 22. We need to see more support from employers too, and more financial support for learners. There needs to be an understanding that people arrive with different experiences and responsibilities and recognise that learning is not just about skills, it's about human development too.

I have four children, and they amaze me as they just understand this instinctively. They are perfectly happy to be beginners; they fall off bikes and get back on, they ask silly questions simply to learn more, and they get things wrong repeatedly without deciding they are failures. As adults we often lose our confidence, and that's where the strong leadership of our employers comes in.