There is no one size fits all. Requirements change depending on the job. Job does not mean interacting with people or machines at all times. An engineering job does not mean the person will be always with the machines. Marketing job does not mean he will be talking to people all the time. An engineer must interact with people and work together in the team. Marketing person must know the product details in depth. Everyone must know financial management. The list goes on.
The key word is flexibility!
One must have the necessary skills and use them correctly as and when needed. This is like an automobile mechanic having multiple tools in his box and knowing how to use the correct tool at the right time. The skills are like tools, you must have the necessary skills and must also know how to use them properly.
There are many studies done over the period of time to identify the skill sets.
Studies by Stanford Research Institute and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation among Fortune 500 CEOs reported that 75% of long-term job success resulted from soft skills. More than hundred years back the Joint Committee of the National Engineering Societies of America made a detailed study and came out the requirement of the soft skills to be included in the engineering and applied science curriculum.
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These studies highlighted the importance of the soft skills or people skills along with the technical skills. This is all the more important in today’s environment where many children grow in isolation. Earlier children lived in joint family environments along with other children and elders and developed many soft skills from elders of the family as they grew up.
When family became small units and the requirements that both the parents need to work, left the children to wander in their own way. Parents must understand that these are essential qualities that remain with their children throughout their life and determine how they perform in their future life. Studies have shown the importance of starting the soft skills at very young ages. Parents have to be very careful during these years and be with their children as much as possible and guiding them. The new Education Policy (NEP 2020) emphasises this and changed the school system from 10+2 to 5+3+3+4 with the first 5 years in the foundation stage from Anganwadi/pre-school to class 2 with emphasis on early childhood care and education.
There are abundant discussions about the type of soft skills that are needed. Hence, I am not going into that.
Enough flexibility is now brought into the new education system for students to pick up the necessary skills during their school and higher education.
These personal qualities are needed not just in the work place but also in the family and society as a whole. Many problems that are faced in many organisations or societies are due to the lack of these soft skills. There were cases where organisations got stuck because of the lack of these soft skills of their employees.
How do one learn skills?
To answer this question, let us look at how our mother nature taught us the skills. Getting up, walking, running are, not at all a big deal now. We can do this at any time. But we never had these skills when we were born. We never went to any school to learn these skills nor anyone taught these to us. But we did it. Nature made us to practice step by step. We fell down many times, even cried, but nature made us to persevere. Nobody called the falling down a failure. Everyone around enjoyed each step taken by the child, even the fallings.
Allow the students to learn by doing things. There are no failures in learning. Failures, what we call, are, not achieving the target in a given time. But who set the targets? Children learn at different paces. Allow the student to persevere. Enjoy their learning. Let them achieve the skills, step by step.
Let me borrow an old saying from the Chinese. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Teach the students how to learn.
— The author, Dr. V. Premachandran, is a member of the working group in the Kerala State Planning Board, and was a Senior Fellow at the Solar Energy Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
(This is the third part of a four-part series titled 'Enabling Education' on the vital changes that we need in our education for the future)
(Edited by : C H Unnikrishnan)
First Published: Mar 8, 2023 7:49 AM IST
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