In this brief look at opportunities to innovate high school education, Forbes contributor Tom Vander Ark highlights ways in which high school can become a hotbed for engaged and community-minded learning. By creating the opportunity for learning to be about contributing something to one's community, Vander Ark posits that students will:

• become better prepared for an uncertain future,
• be more motivated through authentic learning,
• take ownership of global problems facing society today while tackling them in their own communities,
• better recognize opportunities through learning about and leveraging the vast array of tools available to them,
• develop skills necessary for a more social economy.

This article from the Harvard Business Review deconstructs the ways in which Haier, the largest appliance manufacturer in the world, has dismantled traditional bureaucratic management models in favor of an innovative and engaged workforce. By creating a company of "users, innovators, and partners," Haier has divided itself into autonomous microenterprises that thrive on "a tight coupling of the value created for customers with the value received by employees." 

Co-written by one of the authors of the previous article, Humanocracy dives deeper into the harm that bureaucracy causes our society, from disengaged workforces to lost economic output. 

[The authors] lay out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are fully human and free from the shackles of bureaucracy...[with] the ultimate goal: organizations that are infused with the spirit of entrepreneurship, where everyone thinks like an owner, and game-changing innovation is the rule rather than the exception.

"Representing the views of more than 2,000 college graduates, 600 hiring managers and 1,000 parents of students who are college bound, in college or who recently graduated from college, this study measures the extent to which college graduates seek and find purpose in their work." 

As the landscape and future of work changes, the need for purpose or meaning in work has never been more significant than now.

In this fascinating and extensive report co-published by Pearson, we see hope for the future of work. While automation and the ever-growing skills gap remain topics of great concern for the global workforce, the authors of this report have found other pressing questions complicating the landscape, as well as concrete actions "that educators, businesses and governments can use for strategic and policy-making purposes."