This eight-minute video, entitled “Did you know?,” is licensed by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and XPLANE. It was developed to start a conversation to “come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century .”

Blogger and keen workplace trend watcher “Evil HR Lady” brings it to our attention and asks: “ I wonder if any of us HR types are truly prepared for a changing workforce.”

For those who don’t want to watch the whole video (after all, eight minutes is a long time in today's world), here are some of the key data points that may have caused the Evil HR Lady to ask that question:

• The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it’s the top 28%.
• China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world.
• If you took every single job in the U.S. today and shipped it to China, China would still have a labor surplus.
• During the 8 minute “Did You Know,” presentation:  60 babies will be born in the U.S.; 244 babies will be born in China; 351 babies will be born in India.
• The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38.
• According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 1 out of 4 workers today is working for a company they have been employed by for less than one year. More than 1 out of 2 are working for a company they have worked for for less than five years.
• According to former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.
• We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
• 1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.
• There are over 106 million registered users of MySpace.(September 2006).  If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th-largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico).  The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day.
• There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.
• The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet.
• It’s estimated that 40 exabytes (that’s 4.0 x 10¹⁹) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years.
• The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. It’s predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.