Bridging the Gap Between School and the Future of Work - A Conversation with Abdul Matheen Yousuf

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

And so we said, what is the root cause of youth unemployment? For us, it was number one, students not getting real-world relevance in education. And number two, they have no foresight into what pathways they can choose for themselves. People want to hire young people, but it's just they don't have the time to train them or they don't have the time to vet them. And a lot of good talent is being lost in the gaps.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast. In this episode, I'm extremely happy to be speaking with Abdul Mateen Yousuf, who is an amazing and inspiring young person doing incredible work as a social entrepreneur based in Dubai. Abdul Mateen is the executive director and co-founder of Project U. He's an award-winning social entrepreneur with a focus on youth issues and education. He co-founded Project U with Hind Al Raees in 2017 with support from Expo Live during the first cycle of its University Innovation Program. Project U is a collaborative platform to facilitate self-discovery, capacity building of skill and talent, and mentorship and guidance to align each individual's skill to achieve their best. They do this through a robust program involving schools, national and international strategic organizations, passionate psychologists, and industry leaders to uncover and harness the best in youth potential. Abdul Mateen has a bachelor's in aeronautical engineering and an LLM in International Business Leadership. Do get in touch with Abdul Mateen on LinkedIn or on Twitter @AbdulMateen or @ProjectUX. Hello, Abdul Mateen, how are you?

Very, very good, Tim. Thank you so much for having me and taking the efforts to come out.

Brilliant. Well, it's great to be here in person.

Long overdue as well.

Yeah, that's good, right? You're doing so many exciting things with Project U, and I just would love to hear a bit more about that. But firstly, just as a context, I think from speaking to you before, some of this arose out of your own experience at university. So yeah, I'd love if you could just tell me a bit about how that gave rise to these thoughts about the fact that we need to, we need a better bridge between school and higher education and the workplace.

The story, if you want to put a beginning point to it, the story really begins with my last semester of university. And there was a poster from the World Expo and it said, if you had the power of Expo behind you, what would you solve? So a couple of friends from university, they came around and said, hey, you know, this sounds pretty cool, what would you solve? And we all came to the same conclusion, we'd want to solve for education. The reason is we saw that a lot of us were in our positions at university because of our grades or because of a recommendation, not because that was our passion. So my background is in aeronautical engineering, I was super passionate about aviation, so I knew what I was getting into, but 90% of everyone else at that university it was an aviation university, did not know why they were in aviation. So that was a bit worrying that I saw that through my second and third year. But more important than that, I think another aha moment was one of the fairs here in Dubai called GITEX, which is an electronics fair. Usually in the past, it would have been salespeople, full-time jobs, salespeople doing their jobs. Now it's unemployed young people getting paid peanuts to try and sell you the latest gadgets. What shook me was I saw one of my seniors who graduated a year a year before, standing at one of those exhibitions, holding a flag, saying, hey, this is the entrance. Now, I'm not against part-time jobs, but I do know that he's in that position because they can't find work. And if he was the odd one out, I wouldn't, you know, bat an eye. But that's the majority of young people, and we saw so much of that and so much suffering because of that. I think the last kind of trigger for me was I was listening to a masterclass by Paul Krugman, The Economist. And he was mentioning that generally there's a study that young people who are unable to find or unable to start on their career path during the early years of their work life usually don't make up for those years and they have a stunted growth throughout their entire life, which means people start families later, which means people become financially stable later, which means people find meaning later, which has led to, I think, the massive assault on mental well-being as well. COVID didn't help any of that, but that was the trigger, those 3 trigger points.

So that triggered you to give up on your dreams of aeronautical engineering?

It wasn't giving up. So back to the Expo story, we were one of the teams that got funded. I thought we were special, but we were not. 17 other teams got funded. But when that happened, we had a choice. I could either go into a job or I could do Project U. And I asked myself, where am I needed the most? Am I needed here or am I needed in aviation? In aviation, I'm a junior engineer. I need a place like this. But over here, I can I can do something more meaningful that most other people in my position couldn't do. And that was what was inspiring to me.

Amazing and inspiring to other people, definitely. So then if we dig in specifically, what was it about your educational experience up to that point that you think led you, or as you're talking about these other people, into those challenges, whether it's managing mental health or career readiness and skills, developing their career, etc.? What did you not get in school or university that you would have liked?

I think that the question that we have to ask, and that was the question that I was asking myself for years, what is the purpose of education, right? Is it— is the purpose to get a job? Is the purpose to better understand the world around you? Is the purpose to be more informed and educated? Another trigger point, because I like trigger points. I was in year 10, grade 10, and our English teacher was being very, uh, matter of fact, and he said, listen, you guys, if you want to study— we're doing the IGS and A-levels— if you want to study you study IGCSE and A-levels, understand this is— you're not doing this for money, you're doing this to be more educated. Because if you want to do it for money, drop out now when you're 15, open a tea shop, and by the time the rest of these idiots graduate at 18, you're going to have half a million dirhams. And that's right. I mean, if you want to make money, business is the way to go, right? Everyone who's made money has made it largely through business. So understand that you're not doing this for money. And that was like a thing for us because, you know, we normally thought, hey, the more educated you are, the higher paying job that you get. But it's not linear. And And I think that was my biggest problem with the system that we have. It's young people get lied to. They get put into a phase that they believe that if they work hard and they get the grades and they don't, you know, deviate too much from the systemic path, that they're going to find success. But at least for the last 4 or 5 years, that hasn't been the case, if not longer. People are entering master's degrees because they don't know why they're doing the master's degrees. So it goes back to the first question. Why are you getting educated? And so I think what, what we wanted to solve was how do you better help people find that, that why. Simon Sinek's book, Start With Why, it really goes back down to that. Once you cross middle school, you have a lot of choices in your hand. Why are you picking those subjects? Why are you making those choices in terms of co-curricular and extracurricular activities? Goes back down to the why.

Brilliant to create a space for, you know, young people to be able to reflect on that and have some support, mentoring, guidance. To help them with those questions at that age, which maybe doesn't quite happen enough in school or even in higher education as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think one other thing that kind of was astonishing for me— this is just observations, right? You know, a lot of students, for example, in the final year of engineering, don't know what an engineer does. They cannot tell you what is the day-to-day life of an engineer. And that was what was shocking for me. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars into universities, into education, unless they're lucky to be one of the 10% of students that go into core appropriate where they spend half a year or a whole year at work.

There's so much focus on the theory of engineering rather than the practice of actually going.

Not just practice, but what is next. We're happy to invest time in theory if we know, if we're clear on what's next.

So bridges and pathways, that's what you're all about, right? So there's lots of really interesting projects and programs that you've already been running. So maybe if you could give a little bit of an overview of some. I mean, this Build and Guild is a big one that's starting with the high school students, right?

So yeah, the problem that Project 2 started off by solving was for youth unemployment. And so we said, what is the root cause of youth unemployment? For us, it was number one, citizens not getting real-world relevance in education, and number two, they have no foresight into what pathways they can choose for themselves. So Build and Guild was supposed to be a university project that we were done with 6 months and then move on with your lives, right? So we actually did a pilot for 4 weeks in a school with 37 kids across 4 themes. You versus you, how do you better understand self-awareness? You versus others, how do you communicate? How do you work with families? How do you deal with, you know, peers? You versus the future, how do you create pathways for yourself for the future? And you versus the world, how do you put global issues into local context, into context for yourself? Especially our generation and the generation that's coming after us seems more woke. So, so we want to use that. The problem is that a lot of people don't know how to contextualize that, and so we're just sharing some frameworks that help you better understand that. That was a pilot. It went very well, and then we got put in front of a couple of undersecretaries from the Ministry of Education, and they said, okay, you're a bunch of 21-year-olds, what are you trying to do with education? We said, look, this is the thing that we got, and this is the data that we got. They said, oh, it's pretty cool data, but it's only 37 kids. Yeah, so then Expo came out and said, this would be really exciting, why don't you test more? So over 2018 and '19, we tested in 10 different schools, over 1,000 kids with across 6 different curriculums, all the way from the Philippine curriculum to the Indian to the IB to IGCSEs and SATs and, and the local Ministry of Education curriculum here. So that gave us incredible amounts of proof that, that such a program is needed across the board. And so we said, what is a systemic way of of bridging that, and that's where Build and Guild came into play. So the Build program focuses on the life skills across the 4 things that I spoke about earlier, and the Guild was, uh, 6-month-long industry projects. Especially in the UAE, over the past, I would say, 8 years or so, there's been a lot of impact and competitions. So people come up with presentations and prototypes, but that's it. They can't come beyond that. And even when you go into the young workforce under 30, they're great at making presentations, not so great at executing them. So we wanted to create a program where they get to experience different industries in partnership with some of our industry partners. So you get to work 6 months with Arup, for example, which was one of our architecture and design partner to design entire buildings, do the cost frameworks, do the wireframing, blueprints, all of that. We worked with UAE Water Aid and Nur Dubai on building humanitarian infrastructures. You know, that you have careers in the humanitarian sector, young people just don't know. And we have in finance similarly, as well as in arts and culture and the creative industries. So the idea is every year of high school, you get to work on a different guild so that you make an informed decision when you come out of year 12 or year 13.

That's so good. And it's beyond the kind of work experience where you go into the office and make the tea, right? It's like real work.

Yeah, precisely. You can, the problem, and this is a conversation that we had with some of the senior leaders from government, The challenge that we have on the ground is you cannot scale internships. We have 300,000 high school students here in the UAE. We don't have 300,000 internships, right? So, and the maximum high school students do is one week, right? And that too, if your school allows you to do it and facilitates, definitely not during COVID times. So we have to create a new system that caters to that, and what worked in the past is not working for us now. Amazing.

So you, you take the role of a catalyst and a partner bringing together the schools and the industry.

Yeah, the idea behind the industry is you work with them on creating that program so that we get to implement it as well, and they just need to come to give their subject matter expertise. The problem is we don't want them to babysit the kids, and that's what organizations are hesitant on.

Definitely. You then have run some projects as you go up the age range into higher education and, and even afterwards, right?

Precisely. So simultaneously, we started something called the Future Leaders Impact Program, which is just a summer program with some of the more kids who are, who want to get more hands-on. What programs you can do in schools and what programs you can do in out-of-schools is obviously there's a, there's a difference to it, and that's what the Futurities Impact Program allowed us to do. That was just a summer program, but over the last couple of weeks and months, we've been able to create an entire framework of incubating young leadership talent. What really convinced me was one of my mentors, Dr. Syed, where he mentioned that the biggest way to solve the world's problems is by creating more leaders. Right, because they can solve those problems for themselves. You can't empathize with forest fires, for example, because I live in a desert and we don't have forests. So I do think that's a problem. I do wish we could solve it, but you empower those communities to solve it for themselves and support in whatever ways that's necessary. That's how important leadership is. And then the final thing is, it's been in development for a year, but we just launched the pilot in January called Leap. Leap is a talent incubator, just like how we have incubators for startups. Not everyone be an entrepreneur. And so the Leap Talent Incubators allows graduates to better understand what skills the industry needs and shape them for hard-to-hire roles within industries. We do have jobs. GE released a report that says 61% of companies cannot grow because they say that they don't have talent. But we have, you know, millions in unemployment. So what— where's the gap? The gap is they don't have the right skills. So the Talent Incubator is based on very successful models in the US and in Europe for technology incubators, but they mainly teach them digital skills and they get hired by Google or Microsoft or the like. But over here, it's across industries, across the creative industry. And that's the thing, right? People want to hire young people, but it's just that they don't have the time to train them or they don't have the time to vet them. And a lot of good talent is being lost in the gaps because of that. And that's where the Talent Incubator comes into play.

And so you structuring their skill development yourselves as well as with the industry partners, or is it— do you create a forum for the industry partners to do the skill?

So LEAP is a framework. There are 3 phases of the framework. The first is micro projects. Micro projects is 72 hours and you get to explore different sectors within an industry. The second is master skills. So once you do the micro projects, you have a bit of more inclination and a bit of more curiosity on which sector to choose within an industry. And so you start building skill sets deeper into that. And then the final thing is you graduate the program by creating an impact. Impact can be created by, you know, going and starting your own organization, one initiative, or solving for an industry problem that the organization actually has. It could be simplifying work processes, creating new products, creating new markets and the like. So everything tied back to the dollar value, which is what creates jobs, right? And so, so that's the, that's the LEAP framework. What we do is we partner with industry partners to then they apply the Leap framework for their own industry. So the first one we started off was, it was in the creative industries. And so it was looking at art galleries and curation. It's the second largest market in the US, but it's very, very still far behind here in the UAE. So we obviously want to invest in that and want to get more talented young people into that. And that's where we want to go.

Very nice. And you've had good responses from people.

It was fantastic. Yeah, it's, it's a pilot still, but we've seen incredible traction and the kids that the the young people, in our case, the 20 to 25-year-olds for the Leap. They've been, they've been very engaged and hands-on. And we realize as well, especially during COVID and even pre-COVID, unemployed people just sit at home, right? We need a better way of engaging to them. I do want to mention one thing, this hypothetical. I have— we haven't reached there yet, but this is where my mind is going with Leap, right? You've always wanted to have a framework that allows people to be reskilled and retrained. As people go forward in lives, you know, industries are going to change. What job that you were specialized in for the past 10 years may not be required anymore. Absolutely. What we wanted to do with the LEAP framework is also allow mid-career professionals to use LEAP to switch industries using the same framework, micro projects. Maybe, maybe you're into agriculture and you want to go into marketing, so a micro project could be digital marketing, my project could be ad creation, my project could be creativity. Then you say, hey, I'm really interested in creativity, let me go into the creative side of marketing. Then you build your master skills through that on, on those things with a personalized learning pathway as well as online resources, graduate by creating impact, and you're far more attractive to the market, or whether you want to go and do it on your own rather than you trying to figure out everything by yourself. Which, that's my problem with online learning alone. If it had one time to shine, it was COVID, and it still hasn't stuck on, at least in this part of the world.

No, I think, I think you're right. And generally across the world, I think you're right in the sense that it's nice to have a bit of structure and community around learning. And actually, with with the MOOCs and the, you know, the very individualized— of course, all the resources are there, you can go and find them, but then you're on your own quite often. I mean, some of the better ones you engage with a community, but I think that's what people are lacking, is that connection around discussion and dialogue and collaboration to support them and motivate them in their learning, because, you know, it's not just the subject matter that motivates us, right? It's also the process and the collaboration. No, it's interesting. Way to provide a framework for that.

Yeah, at the end of the day, for us, it's always been about systems thinking. How do we ensure that we don't just— not ad hoc creating programs and running around putting people in those programs, but we are actually making sure that it's sustainable and at the same time it's highly impactful.

So here's a question: where did you first come across that idea of systems thinking? Because one of my feelings is that, as you said earlier, education is so linear and divided up into pieces, right, that it doesn't always provide young people with the opportunity to be exposed to that concept of networks and systems interacting together. So I'm just, I was just curious for you, to be very honest, did that come out of any kind of formal education experience, or is that just you and your curiosity?

To be very honest, Tim, it's actually the latter, because I only realized that this was systems thinking, I wouldn't say a year into the Project 2 journey, but definitely later than when I was already started thinking about it in that way. And then someone said, hey, it's systems thinking, why don't you read a couple of books on systems thinking? Then I was able to contextualize it. But generally, I think that's where my intuition lies. That's the only thing I'm good at. I'm horrible at everything else, but that's, that's, that's the one thing that I'm good at. Because I was also interested in macroeconomics when I was in high school, and I closely follow, like I said, like I really like Paul Krugman's books and stuff. So macro, the macro side of things was always interesting to me. So that was just where my inclination Brilliant.

And then that leads quite nicely on to the final question I would just love to ask you, because you have been developing these ideas around the report card of the future.

Yeah.

If we connect those two things, if we're working with ideas like systems thinking in schools, which some are for sure, but it's not a common thing, we then come back to this idea of the transcript and the report card and metrics, measures, numbers, grades, etc. So in order to shift that, many people are thinking about how we could provide alternative qualification frameworks or credentials to pull them together into some kind of a report card. And you've been talking about this report card of the future. So firstly, what might that look like? But then also, how does that then connect back to your, your work and perhaps the work of schools if we support them to innovate and move towards that?

So I like to think in principle The first principle is we want to incentivize students to go beyond academics. Someone who's good at football, for example, will leave their football because I need to focus on academics. You have 2,000 work hours in a year. You have time to do everything as long as you manage it properly. If you need support, you need support in managing, not needing support in discrediting something else. So, so that's one. I think it's about incentivizing holistic development. Development of young people and not just academics, because we've seen horrible consequences when people only focus on academics. Thing is, this lie is still being said in schools today, right? Just focus on academics and your future is going to be great. The number of young people have literally cried to me saying, I did everything that, you know, our teachers and parents told us to do, and we're not— and I'm sitting here 24, 25, 26 unemployed is unbelievable. That's what, you know, adds fuel to the fire for us to push on, you know. So the first thing is, you know, incentivizing other holistic development. Second thing is, again, going back to the why of education, why report card of the future. As an employer or as someone who wants to go into a further level of education and credentialing, or as someone who wants to go into starting their own organization or whatever, you need a more holistic representation of a person rather than just, hey, he got A in math and B in English. There was a joke, a skit that was on YouTube about Indian universities and, you know, companies hiring from Indian universities, they say that we don't trust your grades because we know that you just memorized everything and that's what you put on the paper. So we're going to make you do aptitude tests to figure out if you're actually intelligent. So if your hiring process is done by aptitude tests, you're discrediting what the 4, 5, 6 years that you spent in university. And I think— I'm not saying that that's completely useless, but is that the best use of your time, right? I'm great at math because I'm an aeronautical engineer. But was that 4 years the best use of my time? That's the question that we want to answer.

Good question.

So, so again, what is something that's meaningful and representative to employers and future education pathways and whatever you want to do by yourself? And the third one is how can you make sure that it's evidence-based and not just, you know, hypothetical? So that those were the 3 like northern lights for us when it comes into developing Report Card of the Future.

So where are you at in that process?

I mean, so we've done 2 pilots. What we're trying to figure out now is how do you simplify some of the internal aspects. So the Pokka of the future takes into consideration 5 things. So it's not replacing school, it's just adding the other parts to it. And that's what Build and Guild is also, it's school plus. I support you if you're into deschooling and homeschooling and all of that, you do you. But I mean, I want to solve for my younger self, that's, that's how I always look at it, right? So academics, social network, marks, well-being, mindset, and initiatives. So that covers physical and mental well-being, that covers your growth mindset, benefit mindset, and initiatives. Maybe you built a robot, right? That, well, that's the example that I always give. If your math marks went down this term because you built a robot, you shouldn't have to suffer, all right? It should— you should be taken into consideration that, hey, I was also able to build this. So that's number one. Number two, I think what we loved learning from Badger and Credly and some of the tools like that is that we're able to issue badges for learning that are based on an evidence. So that evidence can be a photo, a video, a testimonial from someone that you were able to achieve it at this level. That's part of the Opokara the Future process. And then I think the final thing is also about perspective. So part of the Opokara the Future is also devised by the 360 Evaluation Framework that GE made famous 20 years ago. And part of that is self-evaluation. What do you see as yourself? How do your peers see you? How does your supervisor, your line see you, how your customers, stakeholders, partners see you. In the same way, how do you see yourself as a student? How does your teacher see you? How do your parents or guardians see you? And how do your friends and peers see you? That was, that's again, part of the report card future. So we've been able to test it. We've been able to implement it. We just want to make sure that the process is simpler to capture that data. That's when we realized, you know, Build and Guild was a powerful tool in helping us capture that data. And we did test groups where we did it without Build and Guild students and with Build and Guild students and obviously data capturing. And frankly recognizing some of these terminologies. Mental health shouldn't be taught on TikTok. That's where, you know, young people are getting taught mental health or self-care or self-awareness or anything to do with their lives. Even financial literacy is being taught on TikTok. No, that cannot be our case. What are we spending so much resources on, on school? So that's, so that's Report Card Future.

Interesting.

And it's interesting to see how, you know, the schools, the universities, the employers respond to that in the future, because I think you're absolutely right. There is so much more to everybody than just, you know, the main event of academics, and it'd be just brilliant to represent that in a three-dimensional and rich and qualitative way that people really recognize. So I mean, obviously you've got Mastery Transcript, and so we're definitely movement in that direction, but it's just brilliant to have people like you giving more fuel to the fire, pushing it forward. Yeah, absolutely amazing.

Thank you very much.

I always think the change in education is going to be like the change in renewable energy. Energy. Before, we had coal plants and coal plants only, nuclear plants and nuclear plants only, gas-fired plants and gas-fired plants only. Now it's a decentralized version of wind power and solar power and other forms of renewable energy, hydrogen power coming in to replace one big coal power plant. I think education is going to be the same way. It used to be centralized in, in major hubs of learning, but I think now it's, it's more people striving towards the same goal in their own way.

I think you're right in the sense that there's a network aspect to the direction of travel in everywhere, in every industry in a way, right? Becoming more networked, loosely connected, you know, leveraging skills and expertise from over here in order to achieve this project and then moving on to a different thing. As you were saying about career change, you know, all these things are much more network-based now. And I think I totally agree, we have to prepare young people for how we thrive in those Absolutely. Brilliant. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. It's really inspiring to talk to you, and I wish you best of luck with the future of the project.

Thank you very much, Tim. Thank you very much. Hope we can do this again. Brilliant.

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