Focus on Skill Mastery, not Knowledge Acquisition

What organizations and individuals need is competence, which requires the abilities and skills to apply knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems.

Thank history for why our schools stubbornly try to teach us various bits of information. Learners are not interested in knowledge, they want new skills and competences to develop themselves and to reach their own goals. Reorienting education from knowledge acquisition to skill mastery makes education more relevant and increases learners’ motivation. Mastery of both practical and cognitive skills is the new interesting frontier that every individual should pursue in their communities of like minded people, and in formal educational settings.

According to a survey by the World Economic Forum, the latest generation of workers (Millennials) will prefer jobs where learning is possible and supported. They will spend their own money and time to learn new skills:[1]

How to get the most out of Millennial workers? Teach them new skills

Many employers are also starting to ignore academic qualifications and test scores, and focusing on other aspects of employees. See examples here:

Learning Matters More Than Education

Education on the other hand has been very obsessed with the acquisition of knowledge. Most primary and higher education focuses on academic attainment, which is often structured into subject areas and courses, defined in terms of information chunks. What students are expected to do is to internalise the knowledge they are exposed to. Mastery of skills is often left to lesser attention. Why is that? Let’s wind back the centuries to find out…

Training Carpenters and Scholars

Looking back in history, most essential survival skills (local wisdom) was obtained through social encounters within the family, tribe or village. You learned the customs, what plants were edible, how to take care of animals or farm land, or how to create useful items from wood. All these skills were directly useful to survival and prosperity, and thus were part of every child’s upbringing.

Literacy, or the ability to read and write, was reserved for the ruling class. Only a few begat education and learned these skills. In most cultures, writing was purposefully made very difficult so that it was not possible for commoners to learn to read.

And thus was built the division of the useful crafts and skills and the theoretical literacy-based competences. As monasteries and universities started to appear, they very much focused on literacy and the transmission of knowledge and theory.

In China, from 618 to 1905, the Imperial Examinations measured only the knowledge of the classics and literary style. Meanwhile in Europe, the curricula of monasteries and early universities were likewise quite limited to theoretical knowledge acquisition.

This historical division of practical skills and theoretical knowledge is still present in the core of modern education.

Even Scholars should be Skillful

I should point out that skills are both practical and cognitive, as some readers may think of skills as just physical feats. The skill of reading effectively or researching information on a topic and summarizing it are examples of cognitive skills that can be learned and improved upon.

Concept map explaining the relations between essential concepts. Individuals can learn skills, knowledge, and competences. Skills can be both practical and cognitive and they are the ability to apply knowledge to tasks. Competences are the proven uses of skills, knowledge, and abilities. Based on [3].

For instance, in the United States, a classification scheme known as SKA (Skills, Knowledge Abilities) was used until 2009 to determine work applicants’ qualifications[2]. In this scheme, skills were defined as “observable competence to perform a learned psychomotor act” and clearly considered skills as physical. This scheme is no longer in use, but may still influence people’s perception of the word “skill”.

In the EU, on the other hand

“ ‘skills’ means the ability to apply knowledge and use know-how to complete tasks and solve problems. In the context of the European Qualifications Framework, skills are described as cognitive (involving the use of logical, intuitive and creative thinking) or practical (involving manual dexterity and the use of methods, materials, tools and instruments)” ~ [3]

This definition also points out that knowledge is subservient to skills.

Are you Motivated to Learn New Skills, or New Knowledge?

The million dollar question for any educator is how to get learners motivated to learn. The easy but inefficient answer is to use extrinsic motivators, such as rewards and punishments, to achieve obedience. The more difficult answer, but much more powerful, is to harness the learners’ intrinsic motivation.

You may have heard of flow experiences and the balancing of challenges and existing skills. But to generate intrinsic motivation, there are two even more important factors. One is self-determination, meaning that learners have themselves chosen what they learn. The other is self-realization values, meaning that the learner perceives learning as contributing towards their own future development, potential, and their goals.[4]

To get learners motivated, they need to be able to select avenues of learning that help them in their path to whatever goals they’ve selected for themselves[4]. The learning tasks themselves should provide a suitable level of challenge so learners are helped into a flow state, instead of apathy, boredom, or anxiety[5].

Moving from Knowledge to Skills

Motivation is becoming the largest problem for educational institutions, so it behooves them to reformulate their study programs in terms of skills and abilities, not of chunks of knowledge. Primary education curricula around the world are focusing more on skills and values, as well as individualized learning paths.

Any knowledge an individual has only manifests in the world through the skills that individual has. It is therefore useful for any educational institute to think of learning primarily as the acquisition of skills. Guiding learners towards relevant sources of knowledge is of course also needed, but it should serve the goal of skill mastery.

Competence is the Proof

Competence is the proven use of knowledge, skills, and abilities to accomplish something[3]. To be competent at something, you need the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities and they need to mesh together just right.

Acquisition of knowledge is something we’ve done for centuries in our formal educational systems, so it’s not very interesting. We can do that relatively effectively. As information is readily available, new knowledge can be easily acquired to support new skills.

Abilities are partly outside the control of the individual. The physical attributes, social networks, financial markets, and political systems all either afford the individual some abilities, or deny them. New abilities are gained gradually through sustained work in self-improvement, career advancement, and networking.

What is interesting is the mastery of skills. How do individuals learn new skills? Do skills transfer from domain to another? What is effective practice? Deliberate practice? We’ll delve deeper into the anatomy of skills in later articles.

Summary

For historical reasons, theoretical knowledge has been seen as more prestigious than mere learning of skills and craftsmanship. It is becoming clear, though, that pure knowledge is not enough. What organizations and individuals need is competence, which requires the abilities and skills to apply knowledge to accomplish tasks and solve problems. As availability of knowledge has dramatically improved, acquisition of knowledge should be a secondary objective, and education and learning should focus on the mastery of skills.

References

1. How to get the most out of Millennial workers? Teach them new skills. https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-millennial-workers-teach-them-new-skills-d4d8faa43d8f
2. Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities. (2015, November 3). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:24, July 1, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Knowledge,_Skills,_and_Abilities&oldid=688795945
3. Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2008 on the establishment of the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning
4. Waterman, A. S., Schwartz, S. J., Goldbacher, E., Green, H., Miller, C., & Philip, S. (2003). Predicting the subjective experience of intrinsic motivation: the roles of self-determination, the balance of challenges and skills, and self-realization values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(11), 1447–1458. http://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203256907
5. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). The flow experience and its significance for human psychology. In M. Csikszentmihalyi & I. S. Csikszentmihalyi (Eds.), Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness (pp. 15–35). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

About the Author

Tarmo Toikkanen is Chief Learning Scientist at LifeLearn Platform. He has over a decade of research experience in the fields of learning environments, participatory design, and educational psychology. His passion is to save the world by helping people learn and teach in better ways. This article is part of a series to explain LifeLearn Platform’s ideas on learning.