iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

We’ve heard it before. The world of work is changing and at a rapid rate. So whether you’re an educator or parent, preparing young people for the world of work comes with a myriad of challenges. 

Researchers, futurists and those in the human resource profession agree that the future world of work will be influenced by things like technology, globalisation and population ageing. But it is soft skills – also known as human, life or employability skills – that are deemed by professionals to be as important, if not more so, than hard or technical skills in the modern day workplace.

The irony is, soft skills are actually really hard to develop. To get good at them takes time and lots and lots of practice. It’s the development of these soft skills in a schools context that I will talk about in this blog.

Could we be over-promoting the importance of soft skills to young people at the expense of helping them understand the relevance of other, "harder" skills? According to a recent survey, just over half of teens (52 percent) said they believe have a good understanding of the skills they need to be successful after high school. Yet, what they ranked at the top of the list were all soft skills: self-confidence, communication, leadership and teamwork. The skills that ranked least important were computer expertise, writing, typing and math. However, most teens also said that based on their personal experiences, they'd advise younger kids to learn more about science, technology, engineering and math.

With the rise of automation, organizations worldwide have made soft skills like communication, collaboration, and critical thinking a top priority. To work successfully alongside machines, recent grads and the current workforce must rely on what makes them uniquely human.

According to the ManpowerGroup’s 2016-2017 Talent Shortage Survey, “the most important skill you can nurture is learnability” to stay employable for the long-term. Ironically, the term “learnability” often refers to how easy a software product or interface is to use. However, in the case of employability, it means professionals must become lifelong learners to remain usable themselves.

There is a glaring need for soft skills in the workforce, but a significant gap remains between what skills recent grads think they have and what organizations believe they’re proficient in. Two recent surveys—one that polled students and one that gathered the employer perspective—revealed some startling discrepancies.

"As important as technical skills and knowledge may be in your industry, team leaders and teammates soon realize that the soft stuff is really the hard stuff.

Workplace performance is the result of developing your people beyond the normal range of technical skills.

Emphasizing soft skills is not just important – it is vital to creating a culture of consistent improvement and results.

Like many leaders, as a young coach I focused primarily on strategy and the requisite skills that I thought were important – but neglected the interpersonal dynamics that would have had a tremendous positive impact on our team success.

As Peter Drucker says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

And if you are serious about improving your results, you need to invest time and resources in developing the soft skills that impact your culture."

If we collectively want to keep our jobs we must change the way we look at hard and soft skills. We have to find a way to redefine what they are, what is intensely human and what will remain our competitive advantage over the year in the advent of AI and job-threatening-robots. 

With research showing that less and less importance is placed on conventional intelligence and with studies indicating that it can actually be counterproductive at work to employ too much of one's IQ while at the same time having organizations move away from formal education, what role does knowledge still play in this brave new world of soft skills and humanity?

Professionals who attach a lot of their self-esteem to their intelligence will get bored easily, will get frustrated repeatedly and will feel less inclined to be truly engaged with their colleagues. What's the answer to that? Should they all aim lower to fit in? Is playing dumb a success condition?


We have enough trouble getting passion and courage into ourselves and our people - if we now decide knowledge is superfluous what are we left with?

As the labor market tightens, businesses are on the hunt, looking to fill jobs with young people coming out of schools and colleges. While there’s been a lot of talk about the demand for technical capabilities among this burgeoning pool of labor, employers complain that students lack fundamental skills: things like being able to collaborate, communicate, think critically and interact effectively with coworkers.

In response, some states have added requirements that schools teach these skills, sometimes referred to as “soft skills” or “employability skills.” States are adopting online curricula, or in some cases, developing their own programs from the ground up. But some education experts argue that too much of the burden for training people on the professional skills they need is falling on educators. For this training to be truly effective, they say, schools also need help from local industries to provide rigorous real-life workplace learning experiences. Programs like Prepare Rhode Island can offer an ideal way to get kids into the workplace, while sharing the responsibility for their training with employers, experts say.