WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A 21ST CENTURY TALENT?

Tonight I had the great privilege of representing Abundant Water at the ANU College of Business and Economics Momentum speed mentoring event.

Over the course of an hour, I had an opportunity to talk with 4 groups of students. They were filled with thought-provoking questions:

What’s motivated your decisions in your career?

How did you find changing between sectors? What skills or experiences have been important across government, public sector and NGO work you have done?

How do you know what skills to focus on developing? What skills are really the most important?

How do you decide whether to work in the public or private sector?

But also insightful questions that show that they are really thinking about how their education will apply to the areas they may work in:

How do you navigate financial stability in the NGO sector?

How do you find opportunities for value creation as a social enterprise?

How do you build a successful organisation and teams across continents, time zones, perspectives, cultures, and value systems?

Their motivation, ambition, drive, and professionalism energised me.

In front of me were students deeply commitment to making an impact with their lives whether it be in business, government, or not-for-profit and at the local, national or international level. But their uncertainty about what the future would hold for them took me back to nearly two years ago when I sat in front of a very similar group of students in Malaysia at the Asia Leadership Conference. The challenges for these young leaders is not unique, it’s the challenge being faced by our young leaders everywhere: in a century that presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities, how do we equip our young leaders to face them?

I wrote my reflection on the Asia Leadership Conference nearly 2 years ago, the World Economic Forum report I’ve referenced is looking ahead to 2020 – which is now only 3 months away – and it strikes me that we still have a long way to go in pushing ourselves and our education models to a place to best support these promising young leaders on their journeys. Thank you to the ANU College of Business & Economics for investing in putting these kinds of experiences on the table for our students to engage and develop as part of their educational experiences.  Thank you to the mentees in the room tonight, to the young leaders in Malaysia who inspired and challenged me two years ago, and to the hundreds of students I've had the privilege of working with in my career:

Thank you for inspiring me to re-commit myself to being the best leader I can be, to not accept the status quo as good enough, to push my own skills and knowledge so that I can be a part of influencing the systems you will step into as you enter your careers, to doing what I can to make sure our 21st century leaders are given everything they need to meet the challenges and opportunities of the decades ahead face on.  

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A 21ST CENTURY TALENT?

First published January 26, 2018

This is the question we’re asked to address as we open the Asia Leadership Conference at Sunway University delivered by the Center for Asia Leadership. As I sit down on stage with my fellow panellists and look out at the crowd of 500 eager young faces, I’m filled with excitement about what lies ahead of the students in that room.

The challenges for this generation are great, but so too are the opportunities. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks hearing from leaders in countries across the region who have a deep commitment and insatiable drive to reach the regions potential – for their economies, well-being, and social fabric, they see a future that is almost impossibly bright.

The challenges to reach it though, are immense. The sheer scale of India. The middle income trap in Malaysia. The reunification of South Korea. The aging population in Japan. These challenges represent mountainous and complex problems to solve on their own, but if you throw in the global context, the tasks seem impossibly daunting.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is changing our world faster than ever before. We see disruption and change at a faster pace, to a larger scale, and with a further reach than ever before. The lines between spheres of being – biological, physical, digital – are blurring. One of the predictions that goes with the 4IR from the World Economic Forum is that the skills required to be successful are changing – and quickly. By 2020, critical thinking rises to the number two most important skill, and creativity rises to number 3. Emotional Intelligence gets added to the list at number 6 and cognitive flexibility gets added at number 10. Things like active listening, service orientation, and quality control disappear off the list all together.

At the same time, as leaders, the environment in which we are making decisions is more and more challenging. One way this has been described is that we are living in the VUCA world – a world where the context we’re navigating as leaders is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).

This is stage for the 21st century.

How do you train for a job that doesn’t exist yet?

How do you find answers to problems that haven’t happened yet?

How do you find stability in the VUCA world?

With all of this ahead of them, what advice could I possibly offer to these young eager faces?

I, and the other trekkers, share many of our insights on these questions – from personal experiences, skills workshop, and career mentoring, the day is woven around how to prepare for a sustainable future.

As part of the panel, I share that for the people in that room, they have a unique advantage. Asia is where all the action is happening. While the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to work with Asia, how to be ‘Asia-capable’ as we would say in Australia – they’re living it. They have the possibilities at their finger tips and are uniquely placed to capitalise on it. I encourage them to understand their country, their region, and the world – to see it for themselves and explore. I encourage them to cultivate empathy and understanding – for themselves and for others. If, as a generation, we are going to reach the possibilities we know we’re capable of – we need to do it together. Some say we’re the first generation who could end world hunger, we have the task of defining the course of climate change, we have a refugee crisis with people around the world needing to feel that they are safe and belong. In 50 years, when people look back at what this generation has achieved, if we want those to be among the list of our accomplishments the only way to do it is to adopt a mentality of collectivity.

What I share over the course of the day can be grouped into 3 main areas to develop for students preparing to be a 21st century talent:

1) Self Awareness:

Get to know yourself. Get to know yourself WELL. Learn how to be honest with yourself. Know your strengths, your weaknesses. It’s not easy. It’s messy and it’s hard, but self-awareness is the foundation on which you can build almost all other leadership skills – like emotional intelligence, communication, and interpersonal skills.

 2) Develop Depth and Breadth:

Aspire to be well-rounded. Don’t use your self-discovery as a way of excusing your strengths and weaknesses as nature. It’s also important to “develop your T” – that is, develop depth of skills, but also breadth. Over specialising is a major risk – it’s not enough to know one thing. We need to be multi-skilled, to be able to look at things from diverse perspectives, and to be able to exercise cognitive flexibility in our day to day work. It’s no longer the case that your job means you do one thing. More and more, we’re required to be generalists, to take on tasks that used to be reserved for technical experts (think finance, computer skills, and even management consulting). This also means being flexibile, adaptable, and agile to respond to a changing environment around us.

3) Figure out who you want to be, not what you want to be:

We will have an average of 6 careers in our lifetime (and it’s going up!). For most of us, we are not going to walk one path from education to employment, the end. Our roads are increasingly diverse and rarely follow any kind of linear path. You might not know what you want to be, but if you figure out who you want to be, and work towards that, you’ll be better prepared for any of the “whats” that come your way. 

In one of my sessions, one of my students asks me a big question:

“Ok Ms Jennah, but with all of that happening, how can we know that the skills we’re working on today, will be relevant tomorrow?”

My response? You don’t.

It’s simple and not the answer he wants to hear, but it’s the truth. We don’t know what the future holds. We’re moving so quickly, we can try to guess, we can analyse, we can try to inform ourselves about what might be coming next, but there are no guarantees. I speak with Professors who talk about how they prepare a lecture at the beginning of a semester, and by the time it comes around to teaching it they have to do it from scratch because so much has changed already. I speak with people working in industry who talk about disruption that is beyond their wildest dreams. I speak with community leaders who see social progress for the benefit of their communities in a way they didn’t think they’d see in their lifetimes. Change is all around us, and it’s not all bad, but it’s a challenging environment to prepare our students for.

So what does this mean for us educators? I think the challenge for us, is to reflect as well, on how we push ourselves to prepare these students. The status quo is easy, but it’s not good enough. We owe them more. We owe it to them, and to our future selves, to look at the world around us, to push our own skill sets to meet the changing environment even if we don’t HAVE to in the way they do, to try new ways of doing things.

We know the predictions for the top 10 skills in 2020, but how many of us are looking at how we incorporate that into the way we’re promoting skills development? Or are we sticking with what we know, what we’re hearing from industry NOW (knowing our first year students won’t hit the job market for at least 3-5 years)? Even those predictions are becoming outdated, but it’s a starting point. Complex problem solving. Creative Thinking. Cognitive Flexibility. Where do those feature into our thinking?

We see trends of this in some countries – in the start up movement in India, in the design thinking school funded by the government in Malaysia, in the support of some student-led initiatives in Japan. But we can do more, we need to do more for these students if we are truly committed to seeing them thrive, if we want to prepare them to take the lead on the challenges we know are coming. Having met with so many of them, I have no doubt that they have the spark, energy, enthusiasm, and brilliance to tackle the challenges of the 21st century. We have many 21st century talents waiting to be thrust into leadership, the question is how many of us are willing to push ourselves to become 21st century talents to support them?