In the morning of 5 September, before the official start of the Dare to Learn event, a group of trade union representatives, politicians and people interested in developing education gathered to hear the release of SYL’s lifelong learning toolkit. During the past year, SYL has developed its own know-how regarding lifelong learning and taken its expert profile further. Through the development of expertise, a set of tools for lifelong learning was created, called “Oppia ikä kaikki” (“Learning Through Life”). Everyone can read the toolkit on SYL’s website.
The concept of lifelong learning is a challenging one. In SYL’s toolkit, lifelong learning is given two meanings: On one hand, it refers to metacognitive skills and the skill of learning how to learn, which are a prerequisite for lifelong learning. On the other hand, we use it to refer to the process of lifelong learning – the constant updating of one’s know-how and the skills, structures and measures that support it. We try to take both aspects of lifelong learning into account in different sections of the toolkit and provide suggestions for solutions so that they would support lifelong learning as a whole.
The changing nature of work and the reduction of physical work also place skill needs under scrutiny. Various international players, such as the World Economic Forum and the OECD, have listed skills needed in the future. In Finland, ETLA and Demos Helsinki are some of the parties that participate in this discussion. In this toolkit, we link the need for lifelong learning to the competence needs of the future by utilizing surveys conducted by the aforementioned parties.
With the lifelong learning toolkit, SYL wants to highlight the challenges of implementing lifelong learning found in different levels of education, stages of life and sectors of the society. For each subsection, we will present the current state of each theme and our solutions used to support lifelong learning. The end result is this toolkit that examines the educational path from early childhood education to continuing education and the supplementation of skills in working life.
