Danie de Klerk, Ashwini Jadhav
A recent World Economic Forum report (WEF, 2016) outlines the vast changes the fourth industrial revolution will bring and explores the impact these changes will have on the world of work as we know it. The advent of this revolution (also known as Industry 4.0) is here and higher education, like most other sectors of society, will not go unaffected. Yet the higher education landscape remains a complex space, in a continuous state of change (Andrews & Osman, 2015; Hornsby & Osman, 2014; Maree, 2015; McGhie & du Prees, 2015). The future of present-day universities is being questioned (Arvanitakis & Hornsby, 2016) and calls for responsible citizen scholars abound (Duncan, 2016; Nichols, 2016) and the South African higher education sector is not immune to these realities. The graduates leaving institutions of higher learning are expected to have acquired particular skills and abilities (graduate attributes). These are the disciplinary, ethical, critical, and life-long learning skills and abilities (Jones, 2002). In this paper, the authors explore graduate attributes for an unknown future by drawing on the projected skills necessities outlined in the aforementioned WEF report (2016). They review the graduate attribute policies of six South African higher education institutions to determine the extent to which they may or may not align with the needs identified by the WEF (2016). Preliminary findings indicate that although some attributes may already be encapsulated in students’ tertiary experiences, others may not be. A case is argued for South African higher education institutions to be responsive (Moll, 2004; Ogude, Nel, & Oosthuizen, 2005) to the realities of the fourth industrial revolution, and for the importance of preparing current and future graduates for the unknown future they will live and work in. Recommendations are made for the review of current university policies and the implementation of co-curricular transcripts to track attribute development.
