The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of the shift to a knowledge society, where information and communication technology (ICT) and the widening spread of internationally distributed information are creating a “skill revolution”, as O'Hara suggests, there is a widening culture mismatch between what members of the knowledge society need to succeed and what current systems of higher education are geared to offer and to adequately prepare people and communities to thrive in the global knowledge society.
For universities, as the scope and complexity of the actual business environment grows, the changing landscape of business education needs to come to terms with a developing global environment that has impacted on business, demographics and culture which demands a change in managerial skills to lead sustainable enterprise.
Students need to master higher‐order cognitive, affective, and social skills not central to mature industrial societies, but vital in a knowledge based economy that include “thriving on chaos” (making rapid decisions based on incomplete information to resolve novel situations); the ability to collaborate with a diverse team – face‐to‐face or across distance – to accomplish a task; creating, sharing, and mastering knowledge through filtering a sea of quasi‐accurate information.
These skills, according to Galerneau and Zibit, are “the skills for the twenty‐first century”, as they are “the skills that are necessary to succeed in an ever changing global society where communications is ubiquitous and instantaneous, and where software tools allow for a range of creative and collaborative options that yield new patterns and results that we are only beginning to see”.
