Giving Compass' Take:

• As gig employment expands, individuals will need to embrace continued cycles of learning in order to succeed. Policymakers must regulate and facilitate this process to achieve desired results.

• How is the gig economy already impacting your community? What opportunities exist to maximize the potential benefits of the shift?

• There are already organizations at work to minimize the harmful impacts of the gig economy on workers.

Educators need to prepare for a coming “education revolution” that will see learners breaking from traditional models to embrace shorter spurts of education throughout their lives, according to technology expert Shankar Maruwada.

However, policymakers also need to make sure they are well equipped to manage the technology and are able to regulate and moderate this trend, he said.

Maruwada, former head of marketing for India’s biometric identification system, now runs EkStep — an open-source education platform designed to host digital tools and infrastructure to deliver primary education to 200 million children in India.

He predicted that learners will move toward shorter courses of education and lifelong learning in order to equip them for the growing “gig economy,” where more people are taking on freelance or short-term work rather than being hired for a long-term position with a regular wage.

He believes this employment shift will necessitate a similar transition in education, asking “if jobs go micro then can learning be far behind?”

As part of this change, “learning will be a lifelong journey as opposed to the current stage of learning being a rite of passage where you learn, then you earn and then you retire. The future will be about … lifelong cycles of learning and earning,” he suggested, and the next generation “may not have the luxury of retiring.”

The shift will also put greater emphasis on applied learning, Maruwadar said. The focus will no longer be on “what you learned or how you learned … but how you can apply what you’ve learned.”

Read the full article on the gig economy and education by Sophie Edwards at Devex International Development