Short bio

I'm 50 years old and have had many professional activities throughout my life. I have a degree in electrical engineering and automation. When I was 48 years old, after being unemployed for a certain period, I decided to set up my own business. Currently, I have a store that sells electronic components – www.lojapm.pt. It has been a daily learning journey. Despite all the skills I've acquired throughout my life, I had never been an entrepreneur before.

My story

<Being an entrepreneur means that, from one moment to the next, you have to accumulate many professions, such as manager, accountant, salesperson, designer, marketing director, etc.

It is based on this experience that I will present my vision for adult learning in the future, simulating what I hope to find when we reach the year 2050.

We are in the year 2050. There are fewer students in basic and upper-secondary education and many more senior students who have already made lifelong learning their daily routine.

In Portugal there are now almost 800,000 people over 85 years old, i.e. practically double of what we had in 2023. For this reason, there are fewer and fewer people of working age and more and more older people (for every 10 seniors, there are only 15 people of working age making contributions to social security. In 2023, there were 27). But these older people are not like the ones I knew when I was an adult, who were busy with photography, ceramics, music, English or computer classes, more for entertainment and socialising than for practical use. Now we have to work almost 15 years after the age of 65. Therefore, we cannot stop learning.

Fortunately, work today is much more digital than manual and almost everyone my age works and learns from home. This helps us to have a more restful life, with more quality, and also to pollute the environment less with unnecessary trips.

We learn to use new technologies via digital classes and with the robots we have at home. These robots learn with us and then support our learning. The initial classes are with real teachers, but then we continue learning with our robots. They are precious helpers: they cook, clean the house, teach us how to work with new technologies, repeat what was said in class (since we often forget what was said). They also remind us that we have to take medication and arrange the agenda for our days.

Today I have gym class at 9:30 am, an online work meeting later after lunch, grocery shopping at 5:00 pm and at 9:00 pm I will join my electronics club, online, where I meet several colleagues and friends. It's a discussion forum with people who like electronics to keep each other updated. In this forum, we teach and learn from each other.

I forgot to say that my business has grown and today I only manage the PM Store by using my computer. I've already managed to hire employees to open my shop and make sales without me. So I also have to manage HR and ensure that they get the necessary training to be constantly updated. One of these courses is related to robotics and programming, as employees also have to know how to programme computers for daily tasks. Most sales are online and half of my employees are robots that coexist peacefully with humans. When I have to physically go to the store, I travel in my car that drives itself. The profession of driver has disappeared and if I want to drive myself I have to have car insurance with a broader coverage.

Learning throughout my life is what has allowed me to succeed. And I've learned in different ways: with education and training professionals for human adults, in specific training that I wanted to do, through MOOCs, with internet searches and watching videos on YouTube, with teachings conveyed by the robot and the artificial intelligence present at home, with my employees, reading books, with family, friends and even strangers in the communities I have on the internet.

I've learned in different ways, and in many places, always because I needed to and motivated myself to do so. In addition, I had and still have many teachers who are different from the typical teacher profile I knew when I was 50 years old. We work together by sharing knowledge and helping each other.

Learning is available to anyone, but we need to be motivated to continue learning. We learn because we want to and because we need to. It is never for obligation.

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