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Aligning skills and lifelong learning for human-centred sustainable development

In response to changing forms of work, and to a world impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of national and intergovernmental policy papers have focused on skills and lifelong learning. The International Labour Organisation Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work (International Labour Organisation [ILO], 2019) and global call to action for a human-centred recovery from the COVID-19 crisis (ILO, 2021a) have highlighted the renewed importance of skills development and lifelong learning as the key enablers of human development to ensure full, productive and freely chosen employment and decent work, productive employment and sustainable development. Why has a skills agenda once again become conjoined with lifelong learning policy making? Technological changes, demographic shifts, globalisation of production and consumption, environmental and climate change are all impacting and disrupting the world of work. Increasing unemployment, underemployment and skill mismatches are resulting in labour market gaps and inequalities. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these disruptions in many places, and driven the need for new ways of working. This time, however, the links between skills and lifelong learning are being conceived through the lens of ‘human-centredness’. The UNESCO report ‘Reimagining Our Futures Together, a new social contract for education’ (UNESCO, 2021) conceptualises the alignment of skills and lifelong learning in ways that challenge previous instrumental notions of education for the economy. It suggests that the right to education needs to be broadened to encompass lifelong learning and the right to information, culture, science and connectivity. In this way, the report acknowledges that whilst education cannot solve structural problems in economies and the proliferation of poor insecure and precarious jobs, a human-centred approach to learning that is lifelong, inclusive and emancipatory will ensure that people can be creative and innovate to improve their lives in these uncertain times. But what would a human-centred approach to skills and lifelong learning be, and how might this develop? Although the UNESCO and the ILO call for human-centred approaches to skills and learning ‘which puts workers’ rights and the needs, aspirations and rights of all people at the heart of economic, social and environmental policies’ (ILO, 2019, p. 3), their policy statements are notable for the absence of any definition of such forms of pedagogy. Instead, the ILO makes claims about the outcomes expected from such learning: