Teaching the Skills Needed for the Future

Abstract

Technology is leading to massive changes in the economy, in the way we communicate and relate to each other, and increasingly in the way we learn. Teachers and instructors are faced with a massive challenge of change. There are many opportunities in even the most academic courses to develop intellectual and practical skills that will carry over into work and life activities in a digital age, without corrupting the values or standards of academia. Even in vocational courses, students need opportunities to practice intellectual or conceptual skills such as problem-solving, communication skills, and collaborative learning. The chapter explores the skills that will be needed, and ways in which such skills can be developed. It approaches questions such as how we can ensure that we are developing the kinds of graduates from our courses and programs that are fit for an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future as well as how we can teach or help students develop the skills they will need in the twenty-first century.

1 Introduction

In a digital age, we are surrounded, indeed, immersed, in technology. Furthermore, the rate of technological change shows no sign of slowing down. Technology is leading to massive changes in the economy, in the way we communicate and relate to each other, and increasingly in the way we learn.

Economically, competitive advantage goes increasingly to those companies and industries that can leverage gains in knowledge (OECD, 2013). Indeed, knowledge workers often create their own jobs, starting up companies to provide new services or products that did not exist before they graduated.

From a teaching perspective, the biggest impact is likely to be on technical and vocational instructors and students, where the knowledge component of formerly mainly manual skills is expanding rapidly. Particularly in the trades’ areas, plumbers, welders, electricians, car mechanics and other trade-related workers are needing to be problem-solvers, IT specialists and increasingly self-employed business people, as well as having the manual skills associated with their profession.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another development that is already affecting the workforce. Routine work, whether clerical or manual, is being increasingly replaced by automation. Although all kinds of jobs are likely to be affected by increased automation and applications of AI, those in the workforce with lower levels of education are likely to be the most impacted. Those with higher levels of education are likely to have a better chance of finding work that machines cannot do as well—or even creating new work for themselves.

Thus, teachers and instructors are faced with a massive challenge of change. How can we ensure that we are developing the kinds of graduates from our courses and programs that are fit for an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future? In particular, how can we teach or help students develop the skills they will need in the twenty-first century? This chapter explores the skills that will be needed, and ways in which such skills can be developed.

2 The Skills Needed in a Digital Age

Learning involves two strongly inter-linked but different components: content and skills. Content (often called knowledge) includes facts, ideas, principles, evidence, and descriptions of processes or procedures (‘knowing’). Skills include understanding, analyzing, evaluating, applying: ‘doing’ (Kassema, 2019). Both are essential components of learning. Skills can be both cognitive (for example, critical thinking) or emotional (for example, motivation).

I use the terms ‘skills’ and ‘competencies’ in somewhat different ways. Competencies are defined as a combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes applied appropriately to a context in order to achieve a desired outcome. Competencies (or competences in Europe) usually require a relative short course in duration and are specific to certain tasks (often but not necessarily defined by employers). Unlike competencies, many ‘high-level’ soft skills such as critical thinking are cumulative and do not have a clear endpoint. They are not necessarily tied to an immediate task.

My distinction between competence and skill is not hard and fast and there is in reality considerable overlap—a skill may require the building of several competencies—but in essence the difference is that competencies are specific and short-term whereas skills are more general and longer lasting. Individuals need these higher-level intellectual or soft skills to survive in a rapidly changing economic and technological environment, whereas a competency can easily become out of date as jobs change.

Soft skills need to be developed over a program (indeed a lifetime) rather than in a single course. Novak Djokovic kept winning at tennis not because he continued to get faster and stronger than younger players, but because he continued to hone his skills (including strategy and will-power) to a level that compensated for his diminishing strength and speed.

Most instructors and teachers are well trained in content and have a deep understanding of the subject areas in which they are teaching. Expertise in skills development though is another matter. The issue here is not so much that instructors do not help students develop skills—they do—but whether these intellectual skills match the needs of knowledge-based workers, and whether enough emphasis is given to skills development within the curriculum.

How do we then identify how to build critical thinking skills, for example from first year through to graduation in a particular discipline? How does the development of skills in later stages build on work done earlier in a program?

These are some of the questions I seek to address in this chapter.

2.1 The Needs of a Digital Society

Prediction is always risky, but usually the big trends in the future can already be seen in the present. The future will merely magnify these current conditions, or current conditions will result in a transformation that we can see coming but is not here yet. Examples are many:

• The Internet of Things where almost everything is digitally connected

• Autonomous vehicles and transportation

• Massive amounts of data about our personal lives being collected and analyzed to anticipate/predict/influence our future behavior

• Automation replacing and/or transforming human work and leisure

• State agencies and/or commercial oligopolies controlling access to and use of data

• Lack of transparency, corruption of messaging, and magnification of these distortions, in digital communications.

One thing is clear. We can either as individuals throw up our hands and leave all these developments to either state or commercial entities to manage in their own interests, or we can try to prepare ourselves so that we can influence or even control how these developments are managed, for the greater good.

This is what is meant when talking about developing twenty-first century or Future Skills, or preparing for a digital society, although in many ways the future has already arrived. We have a responsibility for ensuring our students are educated sufficiently so that they understand these issues and have the means by which to address them. This is a responsibility of every educator because it affects all areas of knowledge.

For instance, the science professor needs to instill in her students an ability to identify reliable and unreliable sources of scientific data, and an ability to apply that knowledge in ethical ways that benefit mankind. This is a particularly important responsibility for those teaching computer sciences. We need to teach about the dangers of unintended or unknown consequences of artificial intelligence applications and of automated analyses of mass data, potential biases in algorithms, and the need to audit and adjust automated procedures to avoid unforeseen but harmful consequences before they do damage.

Digital (rather than purely online) learning has a critical role to play, because in order to develop these skills our students’ learning itself needs to be digitally embedded. Only by mastering technology can we control it.

2.2 What Skills?

The skills required in a knowledge society include the following (The Conference Board of Canada, 2014):

• Communications skills: as well as the traditional communication skills of reading, speaking and writing coherently and clearly, we need to add social media communication skills. These might include the ability to create a short YouTube video to capture the demonstration of a process or to make a sales pitch, the ability to reach out through the Internet to a wide community of people with one’s ideas, to receive and incorporate feedback, to share information appropriately, to identify trends and ideas from elsewhere.

• The ability to learn independently: this means taking responsibility for working out what you need to know, and where to find that knowledge. This is an ongoing process in knowledge-based work because the knowledge base is constantly changing. Incidentally, this not necessarily academic knowledge, although that too is changing; it could be learning about new equipment, new ways of doing things, or learning who are the people you need to know to get the job done.

• Ethics and Responsibility: these are required to build trust (particularly important in informal social networks), but also because generally ethical and responsible behavior is in the long run more effective in a world where there are many different players, and a greater degree of reliance on others to accomplish one’s own goals.

• Teamwork and flexibility: although many knowledge workers work independently or in very small companies, they depend heavily on collaboration and the sharing of knowledge with others in related but independent organizations. In small companies, it is essential that all employees work closely together, share the same vision for a company and help each other out. In particular, knowledge workers need to know how to work collaboratively, virtually and at a distance, with colleagues, clients and partners. The ‘pooling’ of collective knowledge, problem-solving and implementation requires good teamwork and flexibility in taking on tasks or solving problems that may be outside a narrow job definition but necessary for success.

• Thinking skills (critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, originality, strategizing, for example): of all the skills needed in a knowledge-based society, these are the most important. Businesses increasingly depend on the creation of new products, new services, and new processes to keep down costs and increase competitiveness. Also, it is not just in the higher management positions that these skills are required. Trades people in particular are increasingly having to be problem-solvers rather than following standard processes, which tend to become automated. Anyone dealing with the public in a service function must identify needs and find appropriate solutions. Universities in particular have always prided themselves on teaching such intellectual skills, but the move to larger classes and more information transmission, especially at the undergraduate level, undermines this assumption.

• Digital skills: most knowledge-based activities depend heavily on the use of technology. However, the key issue is that these skills need to be embedded within the knowledge domain in which the activity takes place. This means, for instance, real estate agents knowing how to use geographical information systems to identify sales trends and prices in different geographical locations, welders knowing how to use computers to control robots examining and repairing pipes, radiologists knowing how to use new technologies that ‘read’ and analyze MRI scans. Thus, the use of digital technology needs to be integrated with and evaluated through the knowledge-base of the subject area.

• Knowledge management: this is perhaps the most over-arching of all the skills. Knowledge is not only rapidly changing with new research, new developments, and rapid dissemination of ideas and practices over the Internet, but the sources of information are increasing, with a great deal of variability in the reliability or validity of the information. Thus, the knowledge that an engineer learns at university can quickly become obsolete. There is so much information now in the health area that it is impossible for a medical student to master all drug treatments, medical procedures, and emerging science such as genetic engineering, even within an eight-year program. Thus, knowledge management is the key skill in a knowledge-based society: how to find, evaluate, analyze, apply, and disseminate information, within a particular context. Above all students need to know how to validate or challenge sources of information. Effective knowledge management is a skill that all graduates will need to employ long after graduation.

In 2018, the Royal Bank of Canada issued a report, called ‘Humans Wanted’. This was based on an analysis of big data derived from job postings over a 12-month period on LinkedIn, in which the actual skills being requested by employers were identified and analyzed, and from which an analysis of the demand for different types of labor was conducted.

The report argued that there will be plenty of jobs in the future, but they will require different skills from those generally required at the present. In particular, many of the new skills needed will be what are perhaps confusingly called soft skills, such as attentive listening, critical thinking, digital fluency, active learning, etc. (confusing, because these ‘soft skills’ are often as difficult to cultivate as ‘hard skills’, and many of these skills, such as critical thinking, are not new but will become increasingly important). These are future skills that automation and AI cannot easily replicate or replace but which will be needed in the new digital economy.

Two of the main conclusions from the Royal Bank report were as follows:

• Canada’s education system, training programs and labor market initiatives are inadequately designed to help Canadian youth navigate this new skills economy.

• Canadian employers are generally not prepared, through hiring, training, or retraining, to recruit and develop the skills needed to make their organizations more competitive in a digital economy.

2.3 Skills and Learning Outcomes

The Royal Bank of Canada and other studies highlight that it is becoming increasingly important to define learning outcomes in terms of skills acquisition. Such studies identify some of the issues around developing the knowledge and skills that students will need to succeed, not just in the workforce, but in life generally in the last three quarters of this century. However, such reports have barely touched the tip of this particular iceberg. Few studies have attempted to suggest how students can develop these skills or what instructors need to do to help students develop such skills.

When developing curricula, in terms of deciding not only what but also how to teach, we need to ask the following questions:

• (a) Are programs clearly identifying the learning outcomes expected from a program of study?

• (b) Do these learning outcomes sufficiently take into account skills as well as content/topics?

• (c) Are these learning outcomes relevant for a digital society?

In other words, we have a major pedagogical challenge in several parts:

• Identifying the most important soft skills that students will need

• Identifying the best way to teach such soft skills

• Assessing students’ ability in soft skills

• Identifying the extent to which soft skills are generalizable.

The key point here is that content and skills are tightly related but as much attention needs to be given to skills development as to content acquisition to ensure that learners graduate with the necessary knowledge and skills for a digital age.

2.4 Education and the Labor Market

However, there is a real danger in tying university, college, and school programs too closely to immediate labor market needs. Labor market demand can shift very rapidly and, in particular, in a knowledge-based society, it is impossible to judge what kinds of work, business or trades will emerge in the future.

The focus on the skills needed in a digital age raises questions about the purpose of universities in particular, but also schools and vocational colleges to some extent. Is their purpose to provide ready-skilled employees for the workforce? Is it really the job of historians or physicists to teach skills such as attentive listening, time management or social perceptiveness?

Certainly, the rapid expansion in higher education is largely driven by government, employers and parents wanting a workforce that is employable, competitive and if possible affluent. Indeed, preparing professional workers has always been one role for universities, which have a long tradition of training for the church, law, and much later, government administration. The goal for education now should be to ensure that as well as a deep understanding of the content and core values of a subject discipline, students can also develop skills that enable them to apply such knowledge in appropriate contexts.

Secondly, focusing on the skills required for a knowledge-based society (often referred to as twenty-first century skills) merely reinforces the kind of learning, especially the development of intellectual skills, for which universities have taken great pride in the past. Indeed, in this kind of labor market, it is critical to serve the learning needs of the individual rather than specific companies or employment sectors. To survive in the current labor market, learners need to be flexible and adaptable, and should be able to work just as much for themselves as for corporations that increasingly have a very short operational life. The challenge then is not re-purposing education but making sure it meets that purpose more effectively.

Thirdly, enabling students to live well and to feel some measure of control in a technology-rich society is surely the responsibility of every educator. For instance, all students, whatever their discipline, need to know how to find, evaluate, analyze, and apply information within their specific subject discipline. With so much content of varying quality now available at one’s fingertips, such skills are essential for a healthy society.

Thus, in some cases it is a language issue: instructors may be achieving some of these ʻtwenty-first century skills’ such as critical thinking within the requirements of a specific discipline without using this terminology (for example, ‘compare and contrast…’ is a critical thinking activity).

However, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) published a report in 2018 that claimed to be one of the first major attempts to measure employment-related skills in university and college students on a large scale (Weingarten et al., 2018). HEQCO used a test designed to evaluate students’ ability to analyze evidence, understand implications and consequences, and develop valid arguments.

The HEQCO study found that high-level soft skills are hard to measure and probably need to be defined and communicated more clearly and purposefully by instructors. In particular, development of such skills needs to be considered at a program level so instructors can define what level of skill they expect of students when they arrive, and to what level that skill has been increased or improved by the end of a course or program.

A good example of this is from the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University in Canada. The department developed a chart (Fig. 6.1 below) showing the inter-relatedness between specific learning outcomes, course content, and course and learning outcome sequencing, so that each instructor understood what level of skills and outcomes students would have from previous courses, and could identify what levels of skills they were passing on when students left their course (Fig. 6.2 below). One result of this was to move the theory courses from the fourth year to the first year, as this helped students in the later stages of the program.

Fig. 6.1

Required sequence of courses for Bachelor of Computer Sciences, Dalhousie University, Canada

Fig. 6.2

Examples of the learning outcomes/skills required before beginning a course, and on completion of a course

Focusing on twenty-first century or future skills does not challenge, in any way, core disciplinary values or make universities or colleges merely preparatory schools for business, but they do ensure that students leave with skills that prepare them well for living in a very challenging age.

2.5 Rethinking Teaching and Learning

These are essentially curriculum and pedagogical issues. It means rethinking not only the curriculum and how we teach it, but also the role that technology can play in developing such skills. How can technology increase empathy and understanding (for example, through creating virtual environments or simulations where students play the role of others)? How can technology be used to provide scenarios that enable skills development and testing in a safe environment? How can technology be used to enable students to solve real world problems?

There are a million possible answers to such questions, and they need to be answered by instructors and teachers—and by learners—with deep understanding of their subject matter. But subject knowledge alone is not enough if we are to make the last three quarters of the twenty-first century a time when all people can thrive and feel free.

3 Teaching Future Skills in a Digital Age

Although skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving and creative thinking have always been valued in higher education, the identification and development of such skills is often implicit and almost accidental, as if students will somehow pick up these skills from observing faculty themselves demonstrating such skills or through some form of osmosis resulting from the study of content.

It is of course somewhat artificial to separate content from skills because content is the fuel that drives the development of intellectual skills. The aim here is not to downplay the importance of content, but to ensure that skills development receives as much focus and attention from instructors, and that we approach intellectual skills development in the same rigorous and explicit way as apprentices are trained in manual skills.

3.1 Developing Skills

What methods of teaching are most likely to develop soft skills? In fact, we can learn a lot from research about skills and skill development (Fallows & Steven, 2000; Fischer, 1980):

• Skills development is relatively context-specific. In other words, skills need to be embedded within a knowledge domain. For example, problem-solving in medicine is different from problem-solving in business. First of all, of course, the content base used to solve problems is different. Less well understood, though, is that somewhat different processes and approaches are used to solve problems in these domains (for instance, decision-making in medicine tends to be more deductive, business more intuitive; medicine is more risk averse, business is more likely to accept a solution that will contain a higher element of risk or uncertainty). Embedding skills within a particular context such as a subject discipline is perhaps the biggest challenge for educational institutions in a digital age. How well does an ability to think critically about English literature transfer to other areas of critical thinking, such as political analysis or assessing the behavior of a workplace colleague? In many cases, some elements of these soft skills do transfer well but other parts are more context specific. More attention needs to be paid to what is known about the transfer of skills, based on research, and to ensuring this evidence affects the way we teach.

• Learners need practice—often a good deal of practice—to reach mastery and consistency in a particular skill.

• Skills are often best learned in relatively small steps, with ‘jumps’ increasing as mastery is approached.

• Learners need feedback on a regular basis to learn skills quickly and effectively; immediate feedback is usually better than late feedback;

• Although skills can be learned by trial and error without the intervention of a teacher, coach, or technology, skills development can be greatly enhanced or speeded up with appropriate interventions, which means adopting appropriate teaching methods and technologies for skills development.

• Although content can be transmitted equally effectively through a wide range of media, skills development is much more tied to specific teaching approaches and technologies (discussed in more detail in Sect. 6.3. below, and Bates, 2022).

What are the implications of this for not only teaching methods, but also curriculum design? It is worth remembering that unlike competencies, many ‘high-level’ soft skills such as critical thinking are cumulative and do not have a clear endpoint.

3.2 Setting Goals for Skills Development

Thus, a critical step is to be explicit about what skills a particular course or program is trying to develop, and to define these goals in such a way that they can be implemented and assessed. In other words, it is not enough to say that a course aims to develop critical thinking, but to state clearly what this would look like in the context of the particular course or content area, in ways that are clear to students. In particular, skills should be defined in such a way that they can be assessed, and students should be aware of the criteria or rubrics that will be used for assessment.

3.3 Thinking Activities

These include activities that enable students to practice a range of skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making. A skill is not binary, in the sense that you either have it or you don’t. There is a tendency to talk about skills and competencies in terms of novice, intermediate, expert, and master but, in reality, skills require constant practice and application and there is, at least with regard to intellectual skills, no final destination. With practice and experience, for instance, our critical thinking skills should be much better at 65 than at 25 (although some might call that ‘wisdom’).

A major challenge over a full program is to ensure a steady progression in the level of a skill, so, for instance, a student’s critical thinking skills are better when they graduate than when they started the program. This means identifying what level of skill they have before entering a course, as well as measuring it when they leave. So, it is critically important when designing a course or program to design activities that require students to develop, practice and apply thinking skills on a continuous basis, preferably in a way that starts with small steps and leads eventually to larger ones.

There are many ways in which intellectual skills can be developed and assessed, such as written assignments, project work, and focused discussion, but these thinking activities need to be designed, then implemented, on a consistent basis by the instructor.

3.4 Practical Activities

It is a given in vocational programs that students need lots of practical activities to develop their manual skills. This, though, is equally true for intellectual skills. Students need to be able to demonstrate where they are along the road to mastery, get feedback on it, and retry as a result. This means doing work that enables them to practice specific skills.

There are many ways that this can be done. To give just one example, students would be asked to cover and understand the essential content in the first three weeks, do research in a group, develop an agreed project report, in the form of an e-portfolio, share it with other students and the instructor for comments, feedback and assessment, and present their report orally and online. Ideally, they will have the opportunity to carry over many of these skills into other courses where the skills can be further refined and developed. Thus, with skills development, a longer-term horizon than a single course will be necessary, so integrated program as well as course planning is important.

3.5 Discussion as a Tool for Developing Intellectual Skills

Discussion is a very important tool for developing thinking skills. However, not any kind of discussion. Academic knowledge requires a different kind of thinking to everyday thinking. It usually requires students to see the world differently, in terms of underlying principles, abstractions and ideas (Laurillard, 2002).

Thus, discussion needs to be carefully managed by the instructor, so that it focuses on the development of skills in thinking that are integral to the area of study. This requires the instructor to plan, structure and support discussion within the class, keeping the discussions in focus, and providing opportunities to demonstrate how experts in the field approach topics under discussion, and comparing students’ efforts.

3.6 Measuring Skills

Another challenge is measuring skills. I was once questioned by a colleague when I said my students were learning to think critically.

‘How do you know?’ he said.

My answer was: ‘I know it when I see it in their assessments.’

‘But how will your students know what you are looking for if you can’t describe it in advance?’.

The HEQCO study mentioned earlier found that final-year students had somewhat higher scores in literacy and numeracy than their first-year counterparts, although there was considerable variation among programs, but little difference between the test scores of incoming and graduating students in critical-thinking abilities, although critical thinking ability too showed considerable variation among programs.

There are a number of possible criticisms of this study. One of the challenges that the HEQCO study faced was finding valid and reliable ways to assess soft skills. The first study measured literacy, numeracy and problem-solving abilities of adults using everyday scenarios. But why assess these skills outside the knowledge domains in which they were taught, given the importance of context? Were the measurements sensitive enough to really discriminate differences in skill development over time?

Nevertheless, it is worrying that HEQCO found that after four years of post-secondary study there was no noticeable difference in critical thinking skills. Is this because this is not being well taught, or because the tests used were not valid? Any attempt to identify learning outcomes involving skills requires consideration from the beginning of how these skills can validly be assessed. Instructors should not complain about HEQCO’s assessment methods if they cannot justify their own methods of identifying and assessing skills.

4 In Conclusion

There are many opportunities in even the most academic courses to develop intellectual and practical skills that will carry over into work and life activities in a digital age, without corrupting the values or standards of academia. Even in vocational courses, students need opportunities to practice intellectual or conceptual skills such as problem-solving, communication skills, and collaborative learning. However, this will not happen merely through the delivery of content. Instructors need to think carefully about:

• exactly what skills their students need to develop;

• how these skills fit with the nature of the subject matter;

• the kind of activities that will allow students to develop and improve their intellectual skills;

• how to give feedback and to assess those skills, within the time and resources available.

This is a very brief discussion of how and why skills development should be an integral part of any learning environment. However, effectively developing the skills needed in a digital age is critically important, not only for the economy, but also for the quality of life of our students.