What do high schoolers today ...Part 2- Life and Career Skills
Abstract
To grow into well-functioning adults in the 21st century, it is critical that youth learn healthy lifestyles as well as career skills. It is the responsibility of every educator and school should enable children and adolescents at all levels to learn these critical skills. So how do you help young people develop the self-knowledge necessary to take ownership of their lives? By devoting a bit of time and some creativity to the process, educators will be able to prepare students for success in class and their careers.
Introduction
Recently researchers elevate the fact that there is a big gap between what students are learning in schools and the skills they need to be successful in life. As teachers, we do take some initiatives in bridging the gap and teach career readiness along with everything else in our curricula. By focusing on the 21st-century career and life skills that are essential to our student's future success we should enrich the pedagogy with opportunities to experience everything we do in the classroom.
This part (2) of the article (What do high schoolers today do to compete in tomorrow’s labor market success as an adult?) explains about the 21st Century Career and Life skills-- such as initiative and self-direction, flexibility and adaptability, social and cross-cultural, productivity and accountability, and leadership and responsibility, - and how and what the classroom teaching can do in developing these skills among the future workforce.
1. Initiative and Self-Direction
By devoting a bit of time and some creativity to the process, educators will be able to prepare students for success in class and their careers. PBL, IBL, Experiential learning can be initiated through service learning where the students are getting an opportunity to act, play, and do service to the community as the task in various levels of administration of the project in life. It helps them to utilize time and manage workload efficiently. This characteristic is the ability to take ownership of own future career and the decision-making skills necessary to reach goals.
Producers and service providers encourage employees who are able to manage their time well and more productive, more efficient, and more likely to meet deadlines. Self-directed lifelong learners improving their skills or contributing more to their ability to work.
Service-learning (PBL, IBL, Experiential Leading can be converted to Service-learning) bring ample opportunities to students’ active participation and contribution in a learning community. By designing their own learning path and selecting resources students to become self-directed learners by simply discovering new information and solving a problem. This characteristic again helps the students to take ownership of the decision-making skills necessary to reach a career in the new digital economy. The more students feel the pride of figuring it out on their own, the more they will feel empowered to keep initiative and self-directed.
2. Flexibility and Adaptability
Change, uncertainty, variability, transition, and novelty are a reality of life. With rapid changes in technology, diversity, and society, companies need employees who are open to new ideas, flexible enough to work through challenging issues, and generally able to cope with any situation that doesn’t go as planned. Demonstrating adaptability can gain the employee favor with coworkers and supervisors.
One of the most important things we can do to encourage students is to acclimatize themselves to new dynamic roles and situations like rotated club duties, students’ council positions, etc. Exercises like reading some literature, extemporary speech, and empower them to ‘self-regulated’ activities. Providing new opportunities like new initiatives, projects, subjects, friends, sports, jobs, etc., create learning, behavior modification, self-regulation, cognitive development, and positive thinking.
3. Social and Cross-Cultural Skills
Today’s world is diverse and global, so interactions across the world is a common experience. Modern industries have a significant amount of international collaboration, and careers in many fields increasingly entail working with people from different countries, both directly and indirectly. Cultural competence is the ability of the employee to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds, developing social skills and behaviors around diversity, and gaining the ability to advocate for others.
Generation Z is now responsible for shaping what is now known as our digital culture and is a big consumer of digital media. The teachers should keep up-to-date with the internet and allied areas to develop students’ skills to explore these areas safely and competently.
In the classroom situation what the teacher can do is enables students to connect with any part of the world and to create shared experiences, online content, and a sense of belonging. Young people are able to make friends with a much larger, culturally diverse set of people.
Service learning an incredible, life-changing educational experience for high school students which enables them to interact effectively with others and behave in a respectable and professional manner. Respect cultural differences and work effectively with people from a range of social and cultural backgrounds create new ideas and increase both innovation and quality of work.
4. Productivity and Accountability
Productivity and Accountability are two of the Life and Career Skills that require more than just thinking skills and content knowledge. They define how students being able to deliver a specified task in a given period and being responsible to own activity.
Every employer expects that their employees need to be well aware that they are accountable for their actions and decisions.
Here are ideas that utilize productivity and accountability in the classroom. In research-based learning (PBL, IBL, etc.) students’ are receiving the opportunity to experience their idea in a real-life situation. Discussion and data collection help them to manage how they will achieve their goals. The use of information technology makes the project easier and helps them to create the report and most probably create web-published documents.
As a 21st century teacher, your demonstrated productivity and accountability create quality results in a fast-changing environment. This helps the students in managing their projects in the face of any obstacles and competing pressures. This requires the time and attention of teachers in addition to usual routine work.
The setting goal of high quality with optimum use of available resources marks quality and excellence in learning outcomes. Demonstrate additional attributes associated with producing quality results includes, including positive and ethical work, managing time, accepting multi-task, active participation as well as reliable and punctual, collaborate and cooperate effectively with the team, and being accountable for results.
5. Leadership and Responsibility
In the modern gig economy, a career represents the profession of the youth and their expertise, and ultimately their identity. The changing world of work has disrupted all three elements, they need leadership skills to accept challenges, solve problems, and analyses career direction. As students need all types of skills, a businessman needs all types of leaders who can provide leadership and holds responsibility for the fulfillment of the business goal.
Positive student leadership opportunities and experiences at school through teamwork they learn how to confront their ideas and solve conflicts. The practices that move to learn toward that kind of cooperative mindset fall under the term social and emotional learning (SEL). The greatest leadership challenge is presenting a project the entire team has worked on.
In school the opportunities for leadership and responsibility role include: governing students’ body, group project, volunteering in the community program, starting student newspaper, heading sports team, students exchange program in and out of state/country, etc.
6. Entrepreneurship and organization skill
The world has never been more before in need of students who are trying new and make a difference to find the real needs and problems of people and solve them.
An entrepreneurial spirit is increasingly important in the 21st-century knowledge economy where employment is not always permanent. Most young workers no longer work at the same company for decades, but carve out their own unique career paths.
Entrepreneurship education isn’t about starting companies, it’s about developing skills and a mindset that will help students to utilize their creativity and innovation skills in their work if they want to be independent of all pressure of employment.
Through independent and group projects the teachers are speaking succinctly about a very specific task or skill, so students receive. Students work in teams in designing a plan, conducting customer interviews, create an explainer video, etc. help them to understand the value of their entrepreneurship skill.
Some activities that can be constituted in school are: Innovators meet, customer interview, small entrepreneurs meet from the locality, talk of big entrepreneurs, seminar, etc.
The economy of a nation rises and falls on the growth of entrepreneurship. New businesses create more jobs, and they introduce new ideas that solve problems in better ways. Moreover, it creates opportunity, instills confidence, ensures social justice, and stimulates the economy.
Conclusion
Life and career skill training invites the urgent attention of educators of the 21st-century technical economy where the future is uncertain, and it belongs to creators and innovators. By devoting a bit of time sometimes in addition to the usual working hours the educators will be able to prepare the students to find their way to the future with confidence.
Reference
1. Anealka Aziz Hussin, Education 4.0 Made Simple: Ideas For Teaching, International Journal of Education & Literacy Studies ISSN: 2202-9478 , July 31, 2018 Volume: 6 Issue: 3
2. Elizabeth Mulvahill, November 15, 2017, 12 Skills Students Can Work on Now to Help Them in Careers Later, https://www.weareteachers.com/career-skills-students-can-work-on/
3. Maria Rosario T. et al , 2016, Cultural Competence. An Important Skill Set for the 21st Century, The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska on behalf of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln Extension.
4. Training Module on entrepreneurship education, Published January 2017, Albania (https://www.salto-youth.net/downloads/toolbox_tool_download-file-1646/Training%20Module%20on%20Entrepreneurship%20-%20RAISE%20Project.pdf)
V R JAYAPRASAD