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Chapter 3

NINE ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR THE MODERN WORLD

by Ted McCain

Today, even when they work exactly as designed, our high schools cannot teach our kids what they need to know.

—Bill Gates

The ease of access to any and all information (hyperinformation) that we wrote about in chapter 2 creates a major shift in the kinds of skills students need to succeed in the modern world. This shift points clearly to the need for students to develop higher-level-thinking skills (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Consider the task of finding information for personal, educational, or business research. In the past, such tasks involved the physical act of flipping through cards in a library’s card catalogue and then walking through stacks of books containing a limited selection of sources while using the Dewey decimal system to zero in on and locate the material you wanted to access. Modern digital tools make it easy to search a global collection of sources unimaginable in the 20th century. When the challenge is less about finding information than it is about extracting the most useful and valid information from a fire hose of sources, the essential skills students need to succeed in the wider world also change.

Consider what author and creative innovator Ken Robinson (2001) says on the topic of the new skills that people need for success in the modern world:

New technologies are transforming the nature of work. They are massively reducing the numbers of people in industries and professions that were once labor-intensive. New forms of work rely increasingly on high levels of specialist knowledge and on creativity and innovation particularly in the uses of new technologies. These require wholly different capacities from those required by the industrial economy. (p. 5)

Robinson (2001) goes on to comment on the mismatch between the skills workers need relative to the skills that schools too often focus on:

Employers are complaining that academic programs from schools to universities simply don’t teach what people now need to know and be able to do. They want people who can think intuitively, who are imaginative and innovative, who can communicate well, work in teams and are flexible, adaptable and self-confident. The traditional academic curriculum is simply not designed to produce such people. (p. 52)

Although it may seem clear and obvious from quotes like these why students in the digital generations need new skill sets to succeed in the 21st century, it is still common for us to have teachers ask us questions like: “Haven’t schools always been equipping students with skills for success in life?” And, “Isn’t a skill a skill? How can there be new skills?” Don’t dismiss questions like these out of hand. They are very good questions that deserve answers before we go further.

Consider what happens to skills over time.

• Some skills become obsolete: These are skills society values at some point but that become a victim of progress. Some obsolete skills include shoeing horses, sharpening swords, running a telephone switchboard, or typesetting. These are skills some may practice for highly specialized circumstances or out of nostalgia, but other skills have superseded them in mainstream life. There’s nothing wrong with these skills, but for all practical intents and purposes they are obsolete.

• Some skills that are on their way to becoming obsolete: These are traditional skills that are still useful to some degree but are not as important as they once were. Examples of these kinds of skills include hand accounting, using the Dewey decimal system, long division, handwriting, and even driving. Only time will tell whether these skills will fully lose their usefulness.

• Some skills never lose their usefulness: Traditional literacy skills, for example, remain as valuable as they ever were. These skills include reading, writing, numeracy, social and communication skills, and so on. The reason why these skills continue to be so important is that they are the fundamental building blocks of our society, and they are an essential part of interpersonal communications.

• Some skills become more important: These are not new skills. They are skills that have simply received a promotion due to the shifting needs of an ever-changing world. This set of skills includes information processing, critical thinking, problem solving, understanding graphic design, video and sound production, and imaginative communication skills like storytelling and art and music creation.

• Some new skills are unique to the 21st century: These are the skills that weren’t necessary prior to the 21st century. In fact, they may never have existed before. These skills include such things as social-networking skills, online communication skills, digital citizenship, and online collaboration.

Schools are absolutely the best places to equip students with the essential skills they need for their adult lives, but to effectively meet this goal, it is necessary to continually alter school instruction to match life changes outside of school. Because of the exponential increase in disruptive technologies, and the effects of this on the modern workplace, we see a critical need to shift our educational focus to keep skill instruction relevant for the modern world.

To that end, we have worked and researched with other educators in our industry to identify nine critical skill areas on which instruction must focus to keep schools relevant in the modern world. Ted refers to our specific skill set as the nine Is (McCain, in press):

1. Intrapersonal skills

2. Interpersonal skills

3. Independent problem-solving skills

4. Interdependent collaboration skills

5. Information investigation skills

6. Information presentation skills

7. Imagination creativity skills

8. Innovation creativity skills

9. Internet citizenship skills

As you read our perspective on these essential skills, it’s important to understand these are not just skills the digital generations require. Everyone needs these skills to function and succeed in the modern world.

Intrapersonal Skills

Intrapersonal skills constitute the mental habits that enable people to work through real-world situations and respond to challenges using awareness and well-thought-out strategy within their own mind. They are habits that students can learn, develop, and enhance at school. It’s easy to skip these skills because we often don’t explicitly focus on them in the classroom, but these are the most important skills that students get from their school experience because they empower students for long-term satisfaction and success in their personal and professional lives.

We break intrapersonal skills into two categories: personal character skills and personal productivity skills. Personal character skills include self-confidence, patience, honesty, open-mindedness, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. Personal productivity skills include knowing how to learn, taking initiative, overcoming boredom and self-motivating, persevering when things are difficult, managing time, evaluating one’s own work, and setting long-term goals.

Each of these intrapersonal skills makes for good personal character and productivity. Although most schools go to great lengths to ensure student productivity, some schools go to great lengths to ensure they don’t teach character because many view teaching these skills as a parent’s responsibility. In our view, all schools should teach character because developing these intrapersonal skills is a natural byproduct of giving students work to do to learn the material in the curriculum and then holding them accountable for doing that work. Indirectly, teachers have always been helping students acquire these skills ever since formal instruction began.

In an age when employers are contracting more and more work out to individual entrepreneurs, these metacognitive and introspection skills are essential not only for personal growth but for finding and maintaining steady employment (Torpey & Hogan, 2016). The key point here is that it is critical that we state these intrapersonal skills explicitly and make acquiring them a targeted goal in instruction.

Interpersonal Skills

Face-to-face communication skills remain the most important communication skills for people to develop for success in the professional world. Interestingly, technology is making them more important than ever. As we write in chapter 2 (see Technology Transforms Lives, page 18), the rapid growth in the power of smart machines and autonomous robots threatens to replace jobs that humans traditionally do. Many of the higher-paying jobs that will survive the coming expansion of automation will require strong interpersonal skills (Mahdawi, 2017).

Interpersonal skills are outward-focused life skills that we use every day to communicate, interact, and comprehend with other people and groups. Developing these skills is essential to effectively function in a family, in relationships, and in the workplace. Interpersonal skills include conducting a conversation, listening, understanding nonverbal communication, persuading or defending in a debate, selling, asking questions, showing respect, accepting and giving constructive criticism, and asserting oneself. Interpersonal communication skills are a significant aspect of many jobs in the modern workplace, and many companies are specifically looking for these skills when they interview potential employees (Graduate Management Admission Council, 2014). The importance of acquiring these skills means we can’t just expect students to develop them on their own.

Independent Problem-Solving Skills

As automation and artificial intelligence (AI) increase in sophistication in modern workplaces, employers decreasingly hire for positions that demand physical skills and low-level-thinking skills (McIntosh, 2002). High-paying jobs in the 21st century increasingly require higher-level-thinking skills, including independent problem solving. This means workers must be able to develop solutions without overreliance on external guidance.

In the 20th century, employers predominantly required high-level, independent problem-solving skills only from their management personnel, but this is changing rapidly in the modern workplace. As digital tools become more powerful and ubiquitous, management is giving frontline workers more and more decision-making authority to solve the problems that occur daily in a broad range of jobs. This means employers need fewer workers, but those they do require must be more productive and able to work independently without waiting for someone in management to learn about an issue and develop a solution. Teaching students effective thinking strategies for solving problems equips them with powerful tools for the modern workplace.

What many teachers don’t realize is that there is a structured process anyone can use to solve problems, just like there is a structured process to follow when you sit down to write a paper. Ted learned about structured thinking and problem solving in his systems-analysis studies and in the computer science curriculum at Simon Fraser University. In fact, there are extensive research and resources available to you on structured problem solving (Cameron, 2015; Rasiel & Friga, 2002; VanGundy, 1988). What Ted has done is reduce the problem-solving process down to its four essential steps, the four Ds (McCain, 2005).

1. Define the problem.

2. Design the solution.

3. Do the work.

4. Debrief the process.

By following these four steps, anyone can develop an effective solution to any problem. It is critical that teachers familiarize themselves with this process to teach it to their students.

Interdependent Collaboration Skills

Being just as productive working within groups as when working individually has always been an important skill, and the importance of having strong collaboration skills is only increasing. Interdependent collaboration skills include such things as being able to organize functional teams with members who complement one another, criticize ideas without criticizing individuals, negotiate and brainstorm within a team, solve problems in a group setting, elicit and listen to feedback, and take responsibility for tasks.

To consider collaboration’s increasing role in modern workplaces, note that many companies use collaborative workgroups with members from offices located in different time zones across a country or around the world (Flynn, 2014; Seiter, 2015). When workers on the U.S. East Coast go home at the end of their working day, workers operating on the West Coast pick up and carry that work forward. Work then begins the next morning when the workers on the East Coast start their working day, several hours before the West Coast staff start their working day. By doing work in this way, a given project progresses more rapidly and efficiently. International companies use the same strategy, but they create workgroups with members in branch offices around the globe, ensuring that project progress continues twenty-four hours a day.

Consider what it’s like to work in this kind of work group. In addition to traditional teamwork skills, working effectively in this type of virtual group also requires a fundamentally different set of collaboration skills than those people use in traditional face-to-face environments because collaboration can now be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous collaboration is real-time. Collaborative partners or groups simultaneously work and communicate using online digital tools. However, collaborating with virtual partners who are not physically in the same place and not in the same time zone often means workers work asynchronously by doing their collaborative work at different times. Learning the skills to function effectively in these kinds of virtual work groups has already become an essential skill for the modern world, and its role is only going to increase.

Fostering this kind of collaboration goes way beyond having students work with a partner. We must encourage teachers to think beyond the classroom and develop projects that involve partners and groups across the school, across the city, across the state or province, across the country, and across the world.

Information Investigation Skills

An ever-increasing amount of information—hyperinformation—arrives daily due to the number of people in the world producing new material combined with the global reach of information technology. This avalanche of data is already far more than anyone can process. Consequently, all this material provides little, if any, real value. In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman (1989) states, “We are like a thirsty man who has been condemned to use a thimble to drink from a fire hydrant. The sheer volume of available information and the manner in which it is often delivered render most of it useless to us” (p. 36). Consider that Wurman wrote those words in 1989 and how access to information has exploded since then. When you consider the ever-growing power of digital tools’ advanced-search capabilities to access this incredible breadth and depth of material, it is clear that high-level-information-investigation skills are becoming much more important in workplaces than rote-memorization skills.

Students and workers alike need to be able to investigate a specific topic, find data that are pertinent to their investigation, and then determine the data’s meaning. In other words, the world needs people who can figure out the relative significance of the information they find. Having the skills to determine what is significant and meaningful gives a person great power in the new information landscape. Therefore, we must move beyond the traditional focus on low-level recall when we teach young people how to find and process information. We want students to comprehend and be able to apply in new ways what they find, not just regurgitate theoretical knowledge.

This means encouraging and empowering teachers to teach beyond the test. Schools must shift toward more complex project-based coursework that requires students to investigate a topic and evaluate the information they retrieve to form fact-based opinions, decisions, and ideas.

Information Presentation Skills

Those of us born to an analog world predominantly gained information from printed text in newspapers, magazines, and books. However, the ability to economically print images and text in color and with greater clarity created a graphic-design revolution in communication that we often take for granted. But something even bigger has occurred in communication in the modern world—communicating with full-color, audiovisual movies.

Consequently, for most daily communications, written words are not enough. We are not saying that writing and the logical thought development behind it are not relevant anymore, and we are not saying that we shouldn’t teach the writing process to students. But we are saying that the vehicle for presenting those thoughts for most daily communication moves well beyond just words.

To be clear, information presentation relates to how one presents a message, not the content’s creation. Modern information-communication skills include an understanding of graphic design, typography, effective use of color, photo composition, video composition and production, and sound recording and editing. These are basic communication skills that all students need to function effectively.

This means superseding the focus on words as the primary means for communication with a larger focus that encompasses the audiovisual communication of the modern world. This is something for which we must train teachers so they can impart the necessary information presentation skills necessary to convey ideas in this world.

Imagination Creativity Skills