The Norwegian newspaper Fædrelandsvennen published the article “What is relevant education in 2075?” about the work of our team from MyMachine Norway, led by Idunn Sem at the University of Agder.

This article honours MyMachine Norway for elevating essential skills for students. Recently, Norway ended up at the bottom of the Nordic countries in a global ranking of innovation capacity. The surrounding discourse talks about a gap between what business needs and what universities deliver and about practice as a way of creating links between education and business.

On Friday, 22 April, MyMachine Norway gathered representatives from the business community, vocational education, the University, the County Municipality, and Kristiansand Municipality at the workshop for Technology and Industry at Kvadraturen upper secondary school to discuss these issues and how MyMachine and its partnering schools are contributing.

“Innovation and interdisciplinarity are demanding. At the same time, we need these competencies to think more thoughtfully about green solutions and utilize our resources more sustainably than what we do today – even those we do not know yet. MyMachine Norway tries to give both children, vocational students and university students joy and competence in creating new and leading interdisciplinary innovation projects.
When the vocational students and engineering and art students involved today in MyMachine Norway retire in 2075, we will be in a pretty different society, with probably a different technology available. However, competence in thinking new, being creative and leading interdisciplinary innovation projects is relatively safe to assume will be relevant until 2075.

‘Project management can be considered a random profession because a person is often put in charge of a project without having done so before or having any formal education or training in the subject. The fact that the students here get the opportunity to learn to perform as project managers with real issues such as security, planning and budget, and not least interdisciplinary management across competencies and prerequisites, I think is advantageous for them to take further. Both for the remaining educational race and when they later go into working life‘, says project manager Stein A. Frostad at Glencore Nikkelverk.”

Thank you so much to all students and educators involved in MyMachine Norway, as well as to the supporting stakeholders of MyMachine Norway and our MyMachine Norway team!

Here’s the link to the article (Norwegian).