Your People Have to Grow. And You Have to Help.
Yesterday we looked at some Signals that point to the far wider range of skills that our future (and present) are demanding from all of us, from the most modest frontine worker to department heads. It’s a whiplash kind of turn about from the Industrial Era paradigm that most of us imbibed from our earliest days of doing what you’re told, following instructions, using the blue crayon (NOT the red one!). It’s as though we learned how to do paint by numbers and now we have to invent paper.
In decades to come, I expect that our education systems at all levels will adapt to build these new skills, and to support lifelong learning for everyone. A skilled workforce is, after all, a Public Good, and making sure that we all can do the work that’s needed should be a basic element of a Future-Ready infrastructure, as necessary for the emerging economy as highways and railroads were in decades past.
But institutionally, we’re still stuck in a 19th century education model that is fundamentally not designed to deliver what I just described.
So, for the foreseeable future, that responsibility is going to fall on You. The business owner, department head, executive director…and manager of Yourself. Because even if you’re the CEO, you will have to do this, too.
A few years ago I was working on designing an innovation infrastructure for a small community, and one of the biggest employers started telling me about the high level skills that they expected from their staff, and how difficult it was to find people who already had those skills. I proposed a couple of ideas for innovative experiential training, and the employer said, in bewilderment, “but to do that they would have to leave the assembly line!”
Sorry.
Leading to viable pathways
TL:DR Employers have an important leadership role to play in providing viable pathways into the workforce, particularly amid uncertainty about exactly what the future of work will look like. This leadership can take many different forms, from partnering with local high schools, to creating internal skills development programs, to identifying the skills they need and communicating these skills to local education and community partners.
Internal skills development sounds like it should be part of every organization, but only the largest actually do this. And while economic development and workforce professionals in some regions have gotten pretty good at the incoming education side, especially when it comes to technical skills, ongoing education is usually still catch as catch can for most employees — and particularly, caught when they’ve lost their job.
What are “Soft” skills anyways?
What do employers look for in new employees? According to business leaders, while the three “R’s” (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are still fundamental to every employee’s ability to do the job, employers view “soft” skills as even more important to work readiness. These skills include:
A good primer, not just for youth or disabled workers. Worth reading — and checking yourself against.
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