1/3/2019 10 Skills All Students Need to Be Successful

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10 Skills All Students Need to Be Successful

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Oliver Schinkten January 12, 2017

This is the first of three posts that I am writing in an attempt to inspire more
discussion around the following question: How do we prepare students to be
successful in their futures?

Determining an answer to this question, is a discussion that I believe needs to include

students, instructors, parents, businesses and community members. In other words,
this is a discussion that needs to include everyone!

In order to tackle this issue from the stance of an educator, I want to take a look at
three different questions:

LinkedIn Learning 1. What are

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2. In order to help students develop these skills, what type of projects and
assessments can we engage them in?

3. What are some tools and practices that we can use to implement these skills into
the classroom?

The goal of this post is to address the first of these three questions.

The Issue

In the United States alone, there are approximately 55.6 million students attending
elementary and secondary schools and 20.5 million students attending colleges and
universities. In the majority of schools and classrooms that I have worked with,
students are mainly being assessed on lower-level thinking skills such as
memorization and recall. The multiple choice, short-answer and matching questions,
along with the academic research paper, are still depended on as the main modes of
assessment.

This needs to change.

My goal was to discover the most important skills that students need to be successful.
After speaking with hundreds of business leaders and reading hundreds of articles, it
became clear that it is time for education to change. The same skills continued to be
mentioned. There is less demand for obedient workers who can simply show up on
time and follow directions. There is an increased demand for self-directed workers
who can adapt and learn quickly, think critically, communicate and innovate.

Approximately 65% of our students will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet. So,
how do we prepare them for this? I believe that we do so by helping student develop
the skills that they will need to succeed in a future filled with uncertainty.

The Skills

I decided to compile the notes I took while doing my research. My goal was to identify
the skills that were brought up the most in an attempt to determine which skills our
students will need to be successful in their futures. The following are the 10 skills
mentioned the most often:

1. Adaptive Thinking: In the digital age, things are changing at exponential rates. By
the time employees learn the newest software or program, a better version is coming
about. Future employers will need to continuously adapt to changing conditions as
well as be able to learn new things quickly and efficiently. We need our students to
learn how to learn.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Learning Agility

2. Communication Skills: There continues to be an emphasis on the ability to

communicate. In the digital age, however, we have access to a wide variety of new
ways to communicate from video-conferencing to social media. Future employers
need to be able to communicate with people within their team, as well as people
outside of the team and organization.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Communication Tips Weekly

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3. Collaboration Skills: Most classrooms foster a culture of competition and

independence rather than one of teamwork and collaboration. Future employers will
need to quickly adapt to a culture of collaboration. They will need to collaborate with
others within and outside of the organization, often using a number of new
technologies.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Teamwork Foundations

4. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills: There is a decreased emphasis

on employers following directions and an increased emphasis on employers thinking
critically and solving problems. In a rapidly changing world, employers need
employees who can solve problems, provide ideas and help improve the organization.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Critical Thinking

5. Personal Management: This includes the ability for employers to independently

plan, organize, create and execute, rather than wait for someone to do this for them.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Leading Yourself

6. Inquiry Skills: The large majority of academic assessments ask students for
answers. Rarely do we assess students on how well they can ask questions. The
ability to ask great questions, however, is a critical skill that is desperately needed in a
culture which requires constant innovations.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Asking Great Questions

7. Technology Skills: Almost every business that I talked to said that employers will
need to be skilled at using technology. In the digital age, technology is everywhere.
Schools, however, have been slow to adapt to this change. Rarely are students
required or taught to learn technology efficiently. This needs to be emphasized.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Building Your Technology Skills

8. Creativity and Innovation: This skill is mentioned often. I believe that it correlates
with the ability to ask good questions and the ability to problem solve. Employers will
be looking to employees more and more for creative and innovative solutions to
issues that exist.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Creative Thinking

9. Soft Skills: Schools rarely spend time teaching students soft skills, including skills
such as time management skills, organizational skills, the ability to look someone in
the eyes when talking to them, or using a firm handshake. I have heard a number of
times, by different business leaders, that these skills seem to be disappearing.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Personal Effectiveness Tips

10. Empathy and Perspective: Although this skill has always been important, it
seems to be another one that is slowly disappearing. The ability for our students to
put themselves in someone else’s shoes, to understand their feelings, and to help
solve their problems.

Recommended LinkedIn Learning Course: Communicating With Empathy

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The Action

Although it is important for our students to learn a core set of knowledge, we are not
helping them develop these 10 skills by simply requiring them to regurgitate facts in
an attempt to earn grades for a course. We need to have students apply what they
are learning by engaging them in projects. We need to engage them in higher-order
thinking skills in order for them to develop the skills that will be critical to their future
success. Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a great illustration of the different levels of
thinking. As educators, we need to stop depending on the lower level skills, such as
memorization and recall, and help students develop higher-order thinking skills such
as applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

Then, and only then, will we be helping students to develop these skills. Most
educators that I have spoken with agree with this analysis. There is one question that
seems to always arise, however: In order to help students develop these skills, what
type of projects and assessments can we engage them in?

That question will be the focus of my next post on this topic.

Oliver Schinkten, a former teacher himself, has taught more than 20 courses on
LinkedIn Learning. See them all here.

They include:

Teaching Techniques: Classroom Cloud Strategy

Teaching Techniques: Developing Curriculum

Office 365 for Educators

Internet Safety for Students

OneNote Class Notebooks for Educators

Topics
Education

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