Prioritization And The Future
Deciding the relative urgency of a thing or task
In our busy lives, we always have a list of things to do. Some involve more risks, learning, and grit while others involve little risks, effort, and determination. Deciding which ones to attend to first sometimes depends on scope and project time-frame — time on our hands. Others require knowledge, skills, and attitudes, which sometimes we do not have and may need to learn to acquire them. This sometimes forces us to shuffle our lists and sometimes do away with some important tasks completely.
In most companies and organizations, human resource (HR) managers usually address this by employing members who demonstrate the ability to perform and give results. They look for experiences such as years of service, capacity you have served in, companies where you have worked, the total amount of cash you handled for a specific period of time etc. This convinces them that an applicant with the most experience somehow has more knowledge and skills and stands a better chance to push the company forward over the least experienced.
Even after employing them, most companies face problems with prioritizing tasks in this gig economy era. The reasons are diverse. It is estimated that two-thirds of the worlds young people will do jobs that do not exist already. How can we position ourselves for the future having realized that these old ways of recruiting employees might be obsolete in the near future?
Train on Practical Hard Skills
The young generations need to learn hard skills. These are the skills taught in low-level and high-level institutions e.g. programming, web design, typing, finance handling, music production, agribusiness and more. These skills prepare people for performance. They impart knowledge about things and skills to do them. We need those! Don’t we? These are called foundational literacy skills.
Train on Competence Skills
How should we approach complex challenges? How do we express ourselves? How can we engage each other in solving these challenges? So many questions we can ask. Competence skills include problem-solving with critical thinking and open mind, teamwork and collaboration, communication and presentations, and creativity and innovation skills. These skills give learners the same practical experience that one would get in a work field.
Train Character Qualities
These soft skills. They include taking initiative, leadership, curiosity, self-awareness, resilience & adaptability, and grit. These skills prepare learners for the future of work. With quality training and practice, learners can become ‘aggressive’ with their roles and responsibilities which would foster an environment of doing things with urgency and continued learning, hence, good prioritization.
Growth Mindset
Lastly, we need to emphasize growth mindset at all levels of life and work. Humans are naturally explorative. Train the young generations that intelligence can be grown and improved. Everyone was born with abilities to do something and we should emphasize that effort, determination and resilience is what ignites that ability to produce results.
