How do you teach a skill today that may change tomorrow?

Last week thousands of people registered for the Digital 2015 festival at the Celtic Manor Resort to hear hundreds of speakers outline the digital present and future across a variety of areas.

As ever, skills, or the lack of them, were high on the agenda and the desire for the new skills, along with innovative ways of learning them were exceptionally popular themes.

Ian Livingstone argued in his keynote (now available to watch online via the Digital 2015 website) that the pace of change meant that in schools it was almost impossible for teachers to follow the traditional model and be the font of all knowledge in a subject.

Often children who are keen on the subject matter will be enthused and forge ahead with the internet, obviously used with caution, and their peers being sources to take their knowledge to the next level – often beyond that of their teachers.

So shouldn’t we embrace their desire for knowledge and allow teachers to use their skills to be facilitators and mentors in this scenario recognising that they may well learn from the pupil?

Our desire for qualifications, as opposed to a skill itself, adds to the problem.

The speed of change in the digital arena suggests that in some areas of expertise a qualification could well be out of date by the time it is scoped, written and approved making it almost worthless.

For the first time we experimented at Digital 2015 by giving children and adults some free skills workshops, to deliver a practical take away.

The reaction of the children said it all 'amazing' and 'unbelievable' were some of the comments after working through the sessions with Newport’s National Software Academy, the BBC and Dr Sangeet Bhullar giving them exposure to programming skills, writing apps and social reporting which attracted a lot of media attention.

Equally the adult sessions were packed with Roger Govier showing how to manipulate big data for your business, Chris Moore showing the power of social media and Steve Jones illustrating using Linked In as a sales generation tool – all practical uses of digital skills which could be used the minute you left the festival.

Three, sometimes heated, skills debates followed, with panels, including Ian Livingstone, emphasising that practical exposure to skills seemed to be what was required. We heard about practical solutions including the BBC’s digital give away of one million devices to children, Alacrity’s programme to skill teams of young people and support them in start up companies, Acorn’s apprenticeship and coding bootcamp schemes and The National Software Academy’s intention to deliver one hundred software developers per year to the economy.

In the evening over sixty teachers joined industry in a “teachmeet” to not only share best practice in using technology to deliver the best education, including a Welsh launch for EdTechUK by their CEO Ian Fordham, but to share knowledge about the careers available and the skills needed in those jobs.

So did Digital 2015 deliver all the answers to the skills crisis?

No, but it certainly accelerated the debate, delivered some new knowledge and hopefully brought people together to facilitate the change that is needed,