How Can I Secure a Better Future for My Children?

Rogelio Valdes

Dec 1, 2022

Every day at Robin, we ask ourselves how we can give our students better tools so they can have even more opportunities than we had.

Personally, I had many opportunities my parents never had. I was able to learn English from a young age, I learned how to code, and I watched as the internet became more and more central until it turned into an essential work tool.

That leads us to ask: what will the next radical change be, the way the internet or mobile phones were? What can we do now to prepare children for that future?

One interesting thing the pandemic showed us is what an even more digital and connected world looks like. It forced us to work remotely and adapt to new ways of collaborating. Will every job look like this in 10 or 20 years? I do not think so. But it does suggest that the future workplace will look very different from the one we know today.

I want to share a project created by Fer and David, two students from our school. They do not take classes together, but they met through our Discord community. They decided on their own to collaborate, without anyone assigning deadlines or telling them what to do. Both had taken Robin’s video game programming courses, but this project was not part of class. At Robin, we work in a 2D virtual world, and they are building a 3D version in Roblox.

To me, that is incredibly valuable. Beyond memorizing the exact date of the French Revolution, they are learning how to collaborate in new ways, set goals, and complete projects.

We are already seeing companies hire people from all over the world and operate fully remotely. And I am not just talking about large multinational corporations. They have done that for years. I mean small, medium, and large companies with 5 employees, 50 employees, or 500 employees, all looking for the best talent in the world without being limited by geography.

Right now, most of us look for work near where we live. We compete with people in the same city, or with people willing to relocate. But today’s children will be competing with people from all over the world.

This is already happening in technology and software development. We compete with people from the United States, India, Europe, China, and elsewhere, with and without university degrees. Companies care most about talent, no matter where it comes from. And the same thing will increasingly happen in design, marketing, media, finance, and even fields like medicine and law.

Preparing children goes beyond hard skills, because that part will depend on the path each one chooses. What matters across the board is developing effective communication and teamwork. People have said this since before I was in elementary school, but now we need to add the remote factor. It is different to learn how to work toward goals inside a team, how to collaborate with people living in other cities or countries, and how to communicate clearly with them.

We need to open that opportunity for children so they do not grow up believing they can only build a future in the city where they live, but anywhere in the world.

If you want to learn more about our school and our elementary and middle school program, you can find all the information at robinacademy.com/escuela. You can also register there to schedule a questions-and-answers session with me, or write to me directly at rogelio@robinacademy.com.

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