21st Century Professional Skills:
I keep hearing and reading that companies are looking for professionals with 21stCentury Skills, but when I ask managers, CEOs, and the like, about this skills, I get a blank stare. “What do you mean 21st Century Skills?!” OK, maybe most people don’t know them by this moniker, but that’s the term most commonly used (some people know it by 21st Century Learning, but that has to do with school curricula to develop these skills in students). 21st Century Skills are the skills that professionals, people, even companies, will need in this new century to prevail and make it in the new Global Market. Consider this: In 1991, the total money spent on Industrial Age goods in the United States —things like engines and machines for agriculture, manufacturing, mining, construction, transportation, energy production, and so on— was exceeded for the first time in history by the amount spent on information and communications technologies: computers, servers, printers, software, phones, networking devices and systems, and the like. In 1991, “Knowledge Age” expenditures exceeded Industrial Age spending by $5 billion ($112 billion versus $107 billion). This made 1991 the first year of a new Age of information, knowledge, and innovation. Countries around the globe have increasingly been spending more on making, manipulating, managing, and moving bits and bytes of information than on handling physical goods. This monumental shift from Industrial Age production to that of the knowledge age economy—information-driven, globally networked—is as world-changing and life-altering as the shift from the Agrarian to the Industrial Age three hundred and fifty years ago.1
Because of the ever changing technology, and the way companies are doing business in the Information Era, people are not just competing locally, not even nationally; they are competing with the whole world. 20th Century skills will not suffice anymore; they are completely and utterly obsolete. So, what are 21stCentury skills?, they are, according to Lawrence K. Jones, Ph.D., NCC, author of The Foundation Skills, the skills to effectively deal with the New Contents of the 21st Century. There are four main skills: Basic, Thinking, People and Personal Skills; each one composed of several core skills.
I keep hearing and reading that companies are looking for professionals with 21stCentury Skills, but when I ask managers, CEOs, and the like, about this skills, I get a blank stare. “What do you mean 21st Century Skills?!” OK, maybe most people don’t know them by this moniker, but that’s the term most commonly used (some people know it by 21st Century Learning, but that has to do with school curricula to develop these skills in students). 21st Century Skills are the skills that professionals, people, even companies, will need in this new century to prevail and make it in the new Global Market. Consider this: In 1991, the total money spent on Industrial Age goods in the United States —things like engines and machines for agriculture, manufacturing, mining, construction, transportation, energy production, and so on— was exceeded for the first time in history by the amount spent on information and communications technologies: computers, servers, printers, software, phones, networking devices and systems, and the like. In 1991, “Knowledge Age” expenditures exceeded Industrial Age spending by $5 billion ($112 billion versus $107 billion). This made 1991 the first year of a new Age of information, knowledge, and innovation. Countries around the globe have increasingly been spending more on making, manipulating, managing, and moving bits and bytes of information than on handling physical goods. This monumental shift from Industrial Age production to that of the knowledge age economy—information-driven, globally networked—is as world-changing and life-altering as the shift from the Agrarian to the Industrial Age three hundred and fifty years ago.1
Because of the ever changing technology, and the way companies are doing business in the Information Era, people are not just competing locally, not even nationally; they are competing with the whole world. 20th Century skills will not suffice anymore; they are completely and utterly obsolete. So, what are 21stCentury skills?, they are, according to Lawrence K. Jones, Ph.D., NCC, author of The Foundation Skills, the skills to effectively deal with the New Contents of the 21st Century. There are four main skills: Basic, Thinking, People and Personal Skills; each one composed of several core skills.