Careers Education – What Skills Do Students Need To Thrive In This Rapidly Changing Employment Landscape
Hybrid skillsets and multiple job changes – 5 things your students can expect in adult life
- by Naomi Ward
There are so many questions when it comes to the relationship between education and work. What jobs are we preparing young people for? Are academic qualifications enough? If not, what do employers really want? And perhaps an overlooked question: what does each student truly want from their life, and how does work fit in?
It can feel as if our schools are in a soup of shifting assessment requirements and depending on your location, staffing issues and/or funding challenges. Leading-edge careers education just isn’t available to most students. Meanwhile the world of work rushes past like whitewater.
For the purpose of this article, I’d like to take a step back from the frontline of careers education to ask, ‘What’s really going on out there?’ The world of work is truly fascinating and there are opportunities for young people to grasp. What follows is some context, mostly relating to the business sector. However, I’d say that other careers will be impacted somehow by this context:
1. Pace of change
Organisations are changing with greater speed than ever before. Research by Deloitte reveals that the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company is just 15 years. Against this backdrop, 50% of millennials are predicted to live until they’re 100 so the idea of ‘job security’ is a fantasy. Indeed, 44% of companies say that jobs will last less than five years, so expect 10-12 jobs in a lifetime.
What does this mean for our students? They’ll have to be resilient. In terms of human behaviour, resilience means ‘the capacity to remain flexible in our thoughts, feelings and behaviours when faced with a life disruption so that we emerge from difficulty stronger, wiser and more able.’
Careers will be ‘disrupted’ again and again. But maybe we can reframe this by rethinking the language. Careers will be dynamic, and those who thrive will see change on the horizon and be ready to adapt, step up (or sideways), always learning and becoming ‘more able’ as they go.
2. A hybrid skillset
We live in a digital world, which is changing business models as well as how we learn and interact. However, this doesn’t mean that people are obsolete and robots will be running the show. In fact, it means that our jobs will rely more than ever on essentially human skills.
While machines and robots can complete sophisticated tasks and handle unimaginable quantities of data, they are rubbish at empathy, interpretation, questioning and management of teams.
Yes, of course it is right to acquire STEAM skills to underpin that understanding of technology, but the most successful and wealthy employees will have ‘hybrid skills:’ a blend of confidence with technology coupled with interpersonal or ‘soft’ skills.
And just in case you get too comfortable with your technical knowledge, know that it will be out of date every two years.
Which leads me to point number 3!
3. Self-reflection and Growth – ‘the learning curve is the earning curve’
We’ve seen this shift a little in the education world. We are less reliant on top-down CPD to deliver our learning and will readily dip into Twitter, blogs and pedagogical libraries in order to grow our interests and strengths. Our students must do this too.
They will thrive if they are proactive and seek opportunities to grow in different directions acquiring skills which might be unrelated to their original role, respecting boundaries within organisations less and less.
‘Wise Amigo’, a recently launched app, aims to encourage college and university students to develop this skill of reflection. It includes an ‘Elements Framework’ of 36 skills based around four central competencies: Thinking/Reasoning, Relating/Interacting, Adapting/Accommodating, Executing/Doing.
The idea is that students acknowledge the areas where they need to develop, find opportunities to develop their learning around these four broad areas, then reflect on their strengths and where to go next. This process is iterative and the cycle just keeps going.
So, instead of thinking ‘career ladder’ think ‘career lattice’ – moving across, up, sideways and down in order to fill out your skills profile. Instead of a ‘structured career’ think ‘open career’ where you may move across company functions as you grow.
4. Networking
Amongst my peer group in early middle age, we are all aware that our next job is probably going to come from our network. If you want more visibility as a potential employee, that means connecting with more (selectively curated) people. Other benefits are that you will:
- Connect with like-minded people virtually
- Find your tribe
- Develop critical friendships
- Find a mentor / become a mentor
- Share experiences and expertise
- Create opportunities
- Accept invitations
- Open doors
This is not an easy skill for a young person. It’s hard enough to make eye contact with another human at the age of 16 – I remember! Which is why we can scaffold the process at school and help young people to build their networks through people they meet on work experience and connections within their family and social circle.
5. Wellbeing and purpose
It’s heartening to note a trend towards young people valuing learning, development opportunities and a sense of meaning from their work. In fact, in recent research these factors were considered up to four times more important for millennials in their job searches than financial rewards.
This raises the question – what meaning do young people want from their work? I certainly didn’t know this as a school leaver – but what if I had done? What if I’d known my strengths and purpose instead of basing decisions on questionable advice from careers educators and the narrow lens of my three A-Levels?
As an educator and a parent, more than anything, I’d invite young people to explore a variety of options and develop the discipline of reflection as they go. There’s no defined career path anymore, so just dive into something which feels right for you and only you. And just be prepared to keep learning.
Naomi Ward is a former English and media teacher, and is a #womenED coordinator in SE. She blogs at educationconnected.wordpress.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @Naomi7444.
