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Education lags in preparing students for Globalization and Sustainability - IBM Study |
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A new study by IBM has found that today's university students are very concerned with issues of globalization and sustainability, though only 40% believe that their education has prepared them to address these issues. The study was commissioned by IBM to gauge the attitudes and opinions of the next-generation global workforce and business leaders. It asked university students the same questions posed to global business leaders in IBM's 2010 Global CEO Study, and importantly, found that both students and CEOs believe creativity is the most important emerging competency of future leaders. The study also reveals clear confidence about the ability of information technologies to address looming issues in business or society.  Conducted through IBM's Institute for Business Value, the Study, "Inheriting a Complex World: Future Leaders Envision Sharing the Planet," reflects the consolidated view of more than 3,600 students in more than 40 countries. It reveals a discerning and decidedly optimistic new ethos based on an integrated view of globalization, sustainability and belief in technology as a path to solutions to emerging and existing problems. Almost half the students said that organizations should optimize their operations by globalizing, rather than localizing, to meet their strategic objectives. In the same breath, however, these students describe a gap in this generation's training to cope with issues that will arise in an increasingly interconnected and complex world, but a strong belief that information technologies can bridge the gap. IBM said that within four years, this "Millennial generation" would comprise half the global workforce, and despite the prevailing economic environment and the consequent challenges students may face entering the current job market, findings from the study indicate an unmistakably optimistic outlook. Students surveyed indicated that they will rely heavily on data analysis -- over gut instinct or existing "best practices" -- to reach their strategic and operational goals as business leaders in their own right. And as fact-based decisions begin to prevail, they may need to pioneer an entirely new management style -- one that continually enriches personal experience and educaon with new sources of insight based on a new ability deal with the explosion of real-time information. IBM's study revealed broad-based confidence that increased access to information, analysis, and the resulting insight can reduce uncertainty about the future. IBM's survey was conducted as an extension of the 2010 IBM CEO Study, "Capitalizing on Complexity," which revealed today's chief executives to be charting new responses and courses of actionto the increasing complexity of the world's business and competitive environment. Compared to all other regions, the views of students and CEOs on sustainability diverged most sharply in North America, where students were almost three times as likely as CEOs to expect scarcity of natural resources to have a significant impact. They were more than twice as likely to select environmental issues as a top external force, and 60 percent more students than CEOs in this region anticipated that customer expectations for social responsibility will increase significantly. The Digital Deluge Given that today's students grew up in a digital age, intuitively understanding that economies, societies, governments and organizations are made up of interconnecting networks, IBM says it may not be surprising that seven in 10 students experienced the new economic environment as significantly more complex today, compared to six in 10 CEOs. But they saw far less volatility and uncertainty, in part because they were confident that access to more information could be put to better use, analyzed for patterns and predictive insights to solve the hardest problems in business or society. Students who saw significantly more complexity, or interconnectedness in the environment, were 50 percent more likely to expect significant impact from the information explosion and 22 percent more likely to believe that a focus on analyzing information for insight would be key to organizations' success in the future. Views about the impact of the information explosion were fairly uniform across regions, except in China where students were 67 percent more likely to see a large impact than CEOs in China. Students in China were also far more likely to approach decision-making analytically, relying on facts more than instinct, or even experience, the survey said. Global Thinking, Local Views  IBM's study showed that students' attitudes toward globalization were reflected in their expectations of leadership as well. Like CEOs, students selected creativity as the top emerging leadership quality for the successful enterprise of the future. But among the nine leadership traits CEOs and students were asked to select, students placed a higher emphasis on only two qualities -– global thinking and a focus on sustainability. Given their concerns about globalization and sustainability, the Study found a gap in educational experiences, as well as business expectations. Asked how well their education has prepared them in a number of areas, only four out of 10 students believe their education has prepared them well to address these issues.In China, 76 percent of students value global thinking as a top leadership quality, more than students anywhere else. Yet, only 38 percent of students in China believe their education has prepared them for global citizenship, which is lower than students in any other region. Only 17 percent of students in Japan, less than any other region, believe their education has prepared them well to benefit from the growth of emerging markets.
(Image courtesy: iStockPhoto, Creative Commons) |
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