How universities can prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist

In this technology-driven world, innovation-led disruptions are a common thing. Technology evolves more rapidly than our imagination. Economies, markets, industries, and overall life are getting reshaped. Reports say that over the next 20 years, two-thirds of the Fortune 500 might not exist. It means organizations that steer with capital, talent, vision, and resource might get replaced by the evolving world, making the most established knowledge structures irrelevant in no time.

In this kind of world, universities have the responsibility for equipping young professionals with the ability not just to perform today's jobs but to solve problems, seize opportunities and engage with industries that have not yet been created. The future belongs to learners who can think systemically, adapt at speed and design intelligently for emergent realities.

At the heart of this transition is a shift from job readiness to problem readiness. We need our higher education to evolve into a framework that goes beyond preparing students for fixed roles and existing industries and trains them to identify, define and solve new challenges across various domains. This will involve developing systems thinking, contextual sensitivity, interdisciplinary exploration, and design-led inquiry to work across sectors, including but not limited to climate technology, AI, and social innovation.

Anand Mahindra warns of 'far bigger crisis' than AI wiping out white-collar jobs. One of the best ways to build this adaptability involves integrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems with modern innovation. A repository of timeless wisdom, from centuries ago, IKS enables learners to use time-tested knowledge on sustainable living, resource management, and community resilience that has evolved in local contexts. India's traditional

Knowledge, in water conservation, agriculture, materials, craft, or community governance, provides some of the most sophisticated frameworks for sustainability and resilience.

These, combined with modern technologies like AI, sensor technologies, advanced data analytics, and new materials, can unlock solutions that are both futuristic and deeply contextual. A traditional step well augmented with a modern monitoring system, or vernacular construction combined with energy-efficient design, is representative of innovation that

It respects place and people. Such an integration builds contextually intelligent professionals, those who understand that innovation doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch.

Also, universities should shift from instructional learning to immersive learning. Higher education institutions should help students unlearn conventional rote-learning habits that give precedence to memorization over creativity. On-ground and experiential learning must be encouraged, as working with communities and industries enables the student to build a much deeper understanding of how systems really work on the ground. Immersive education builds empathy, curiosity, and adaptability by helping students link classroom learning to lived experiences. This model will foster creativity-what continues to remain the fundamentally distinctive human advantage over AI: to imagine, question, understand, and reframe the unknown when it emerges.

Immersive learning should go hand in hand with nurturing innovation as a habit through embedding innovation in every process of learning. This calls for encouragement of students to prototype ideas, test hypotheses, and co-create with peers across disciplines. This will help them move from being knowledge consumers to knowledge creators capable of shaping emergent industries.

And it is evolving technology that will continue to disrupt established learning frameworks and require new ways of learning. Universities should develop technological curiosity and agility to set students up to learn and adapt. However, of importance would be building a learning environment that provides the student with skills to adapt and shape AI, automation, and data-driven systems in an ethical manner, rather than being replaced by those very systems. In 2047, once super-intelligence becomes the norm, emotional intelligence and ethical judgment will be the differentiators for humans. Universities must start developing those dimensions now to ensure students stay intensely human in an automated world.

Building such learning capabilities would call for a flexible curriculum that allows students to explore, combine, and design their pathways themselves. In short, future-ready universities need to break away from rigid course structures to adopt modular, flexible curricula. Allowing students to curate their learning across subjects will only help them evolve into multi-skilled professionals. This flexibility will nurture self-directed learners who are not bound by predefined roles but are ready to adapt and design their own careers in a changing world. As the traditional learning frameworks continue to evolve, so must our way of defining 'success'. Placement statistics as a measure of success must be replaced with the impact that a student brings about to that area of work. It is this re-orientation of purpose that will ensure education contributes to a resilient and regenerative future economy. If universities can produce problem-ready, ethically anchored, technologically agile and creatively confident graduates, India will not only be a participant in the future, but a shaper of it.