Just like companies re-tool to remain competitive in an ever-changing workplace, educational institutions must change out their out- of-date curricula and teach new methodologies that focus on a different set of skills. This includes both public education as well as higher education.
Public schools in the United States were developed to educate an agrarian-based workforce into a workforce that could make the transition and work in the Industrial-Age factories. The Three Rs that they instilled in everyone throughout the last century were not Reading, Writing and Arithmetic but Rote, Repetition and Routine.
The Three Rs (Rote, Repetition and Routine) were necessary skills to have for Industrial-Age jobs that were very regimented. Factories required memorization of certain functions that were both repetitive and routine. Once you learned your set of skills, you were “totally trained” and did not need to learn more skills.
These skill sets of the Three Rs are still emphasized in many schools but they need to be replaced or at least augmented by new skill sets that apply to the era that we are in today. We are far away from the industrial-age jobs of yesteryear.
F.A.C.T.-BASED EDUCATION
The four skill sets that are needed today in the post-Information Age are Flexibility, Adaptability, Creativity and Technology skills. These are the new skills that must be acquired and maintained in order to be effective in the dynamic global marketplace.
With FACT-based education there is a greater dependence on being flexible and adaptive because that’s what many jobs require today. I have promoted this new approach for several years because I realize that the Three Rs are not what is highly relevant for today’s job challenges.
Even in manufacturing, the skills of rote, repetition and routine have been replaced by the need for people who have technology skills as well as the other FACT-based skills due to working with much more sophisticated equipment, applications and computers.
A factory worker in the 1930s would have to learn a couple of repetitive skills and be able to accomplish them in a timely basis on the assembly line. He or she was not required to think out any creative ideas or change approaches. Everything was more or less very regimented as to what they needed to do on their eight-hour shift.
Today, a factory worker might need to know a lot about running a computer application. He or she might have to have some creative skills in developing the product.
CURRICULA IN UNIVERSITIES MUST CHANGE AS WELL
Some of the curricula for business schools must change to reflect the new issues faced in a global economy. A course on multi-cultural skills and what amounts to diplomacy for international teams should be a required course. Understanding basic communication differences within different cultures is more important today than it was ten or fifteen years ago.
A typical international team within a multi-national corporation may consist of a person from Paris, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Chicago and New York City. The cultural differences between all these people can be an impediment to getting a job done. There needs to be a better understanding of everyone’s culture and the way it affects their job performance.
Something as minor as handing off your business card with both hands to a client may not seem to be a big thing in some countries, but it is customary to perform it in places like Japan and China. If you fail to execute that, you could have damaged the whole relationship even before you make your presentation.
CREATIVITY IS A CRITICAL SKILL
In a
recent Business Week article, the most desired leadership competency was “creativity” according to a study made by the IBM Institute for Business Value of over 1,500 executives.
Within this study, many executives responded that they wanted to see “creativity” as a skill set in order to address today’s global marketplace and lead an organization. It is an essential skill for enterprise leadership, and not just for creating new products and processes.
This is more proof of what I have been preaching for the last several years. You cannot succeed with regimented skills that were designed for an Industrial Age work environment, when today’s work environment is so tied to intelligent infrastructure, global connections, and global markets with best practices that are a moving target.
* CARLINI-ISM: The organization that has the best-trained workforce is the toughest competitor.
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