Kids need to be global citizens, not mastering 23 CXCs – IDB official

With technology rapidly advancing around the world, the future of work is expected to change and as such, young people should be similarly prepared for a digitalised environment.
This is according to General Manager of the Country Department Caribbean Group (CCB) in the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Therese Turner-Jones, whose purview spans IDB operations in Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas – her home country.

Turner-Jones, who is also IDB’s Country Representative for Jamaica and a trained economist, recently pointed out that countries in the region should focus more on training students early about the different ways to understand the world and be educated – not just on academia.
“It’s not about mastering 15 or 23 CXCs as they do in Guyana, that’s not really a good way of educating our kids for the future. Kids for the future need to be global citizens, knowing how to be multilingual, digitally literate, and able to collaborate and work with each other in teams,” she was quoted in an article by the Jamaica Observer on Sunday.
The IDB official was at the time speaking at the launch of the National Business Model Competition (NBMC) in Jamaica – an initiative that seeks to expose participants to the international stage by helping to bridge the gap between academia, research and business so that they can come up with the right solutions for issues affecting the country, the Jamaican newspaper stated.
“This competition offers an opportunity for our students to put this into practice,” the IDB official was quoted saying.
According to the Jamaica Observer, Turner-Jones said initiatives such as the NBMC provides appropriate opportunities for young entrepreneurs to take advantage of global technological advances, especially ones that address national issues, such as agriculture and climate change.
Moreover, the newspaper reported that the IDB official stressed that businesses in Latin America and the Caribbean generally have poor performances when it comes to using technology to attain greater levels of growth and development as well as to create ecosystems in which they can thrive.
“Most firms in the Caribbean region, about some 19 per cent or less than one in five, rely on any kind of research and development to grow their businesses — that’s an appalling number!”
Turner-Jones explained that this means we are stuck in doing things in a very old way, and it means we are not using technology and new information, the Jamaica Observer reported.
“However, it’s coming — artificial intelligence or over the internet — we are not applying new and innovative ways of doing things to the ways businesses are operating in the Caribbean,” she was quoted. a