6 key 21st century skills in Higher Education

Very often when reading social network articles or online blog posts or magazine papers, I came across words such “21st century skills”, or “employability skills” or again “the skills required to our future workforce”. While this created a bit of initial confusion in my mind, this also helped me afterwards to understand a bit better what was happening in the Higher Education and professional marketplace around me and to see how these skills became central for everyone today.

As happens any time when new terms are introduced and discussed publicly, I noticed that there was not a clear definition of what these skills were and about what did they mean: some people talked about resiliency, creativity, emotional learning and so on, while some others talked about critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills etc..

So basically with this short paper I would like to clarify the meaning of 21st century skills and to describe what are they for me and why they are important for the higher education sector. Picking up the Glossary of Educational Reform, they define 21st century skills as:

“a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits that are believed — by educators, school reformers, college professors, employers, and others — to be critically important to success in today’s world, particularly in collegiate programs and contemporary careers and workplaces.”

Hence whatever we may want to call them as “employability skills” or “skills required to the future workforce” their definition just refers to a mix of knowledge, skills, habits considered as important for today professional success. If you have checked the list presented in the article, it appears to be quite a long and comprehensive one. However from this list I have identified just 6 key skills I found very often repeated in different documents, blog posts and conference presentations, related to the academic and higher education world. I have also found them as important skills for some of my online university students since missing any of these skills, means for students missing an important component of their identity as professionals. I have summarized and defined them in the following ways for you:

Critical thinking as the capacity to synthesize existing ideas in original ways and the experience of thinking, reacting, and working using a high degree of innovation divergent thinking, and risk taking.

Collaboration as the ability to work within a team, while respecting deadline, sharing duties, manage conflict and building relationship with colleagues respecting differences of ideas, culture, race, gender, religion.

Communication involves being able to clearly articulate thoughts both verbally and in writing, while exhibiting public speaking skills and writing messages, documents and reports.

Problem solving refers to a process where it is possible to design, evaluate and implement strategy to solve a specific problem or issue.

Leadership relates to leveraging the strenghts of others in order to achieve common goals, while coaching, assessing and managing emotions of those same others. This comprises also using empathy, organize, prioritize and delegate work.

Interculturalism as being able to respect the value and learn from diverse culture, races, genders, religions. In addition it refers to demonstrating openess and sensitivity to interact with all people while understanding differences.

Additional key skills to the above are also“Digital technology”, “Resiliency”, “Empathy”, since new key skills emerge everyday in the conversation around employability. However:

It is very interesting to note that researches (Tobbell and O’ Donnell 2013, Jackson and Wilton, 2017) have shown that university students are both not always fully aware of these skills and overvalue themselves in relation to the above same skills and attitudes. Hence very often they think to have mastered key employability skills that when applied in workplace settings appear to be absent.

Universities and key stakeholders are already fully aware of this important gap but there is not always an action taken by key institutions in order to fullfil this important problem with which employers have to deal with on a daily basis. If this is really true on the other side, we have to honestly say that these are not really “new problems” but actually “old problems” that have challenged universities since decades. Then we have to wonder why only now they have become the focus of everyone attention and why they have attracted the interest of so many educators, researchers, Edtech companies and investors?

Although lots still need to be done especially from universities side, where still old educational, teaching and assessment models apply in practice, I am wondering, at the same time, how can institutions help their students develop those skills so important for the marketplace today and to prove in front of employers that they have really mastered them? Will universities be able to accomplish this need in the near future and to still survive and to remain “change agents” in society while creating true critical thinkers and skilled innovators?

Finding answers to these questions is key but not easy. It is important to note that some kind of anxiety and of interest around those 21st century skills increased only in the recent years with the development of technology in education and we have to acknowledge this. In the same way, we have to be aware that any change requires times, awareness, together with the development of models and of tools that can support the development itself. Hence the game already began but probably lots of changes and innovations will be visible to us and to our children only in the years to come…