There is a lot of talk about skills at the moment. The pandemic has forced many of us in the children's and youth services sector to change our working patterns and that means we have drawn more heavily on so called “soft skills” like collaboration, communication, self-management and creative problem-solving. At the same time, continued technological progress and automation emphasise that it is these human soft skills that set us apart. That's why at Skills Builder Partnership – a global group of businesses, education institutions and other organisations – we prefer to call them essential skills.
Essential Skills Tracker research from Skills Builder Partnership, the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development, Edge Foundation and KPMG suggests your teams probably already value these skills. Our research found 92 per cent of workers believe these essential skills are important for success within their careers while more than half would consider getting a new job for improved skills-building opportunities.
But how to go about building these skills and providing those opportunities for your workforce? Here are five suggestions.
1. Champion essential skills.
Before anything else, it is critical to bring your team up to speed with why essential skills matter for them as individuals. The evidence is clear: the Essential Skills Tracker showed higher levels of essential skills support higher levels of purpose and life satisfaction, more chances for progression and higher earnings.
You could talk about how building essential skills has supported you in your career and model your continued efforts to improve your own skills. In our sector, our responsibility for modelling these skills goes beyond colleagues and extends to children and young people too. The evidence shows a near-halving of the likelihood of being out of employment, education or training if you go from a low to a high essential skills score.
2. Think in steps.
Of course, it is not enough just to talk about why essential skills are helpful to have – it is also critical to get into the detail. Our Universal Framework for Essential Skills breaks down those skills into steps which can be built and measured. For example, teamwork includes steps like being able to encourage others’ contributions, to recognise and manage conflict, and to support and motivate others.
By thinking in terms of steps of progress, we can move beyond the idea that these skills are innate, like personality traits. Instead, they are practical tools that can be mastered in the same way as learning to swim or drive.
The framework helps to facilitate those conversations too – by being specific about exactly what underpins success in these skills. It avoids managers giving their team broad, unhelpful feedback such as simply telling people to improve their collaboration, communication or creative skills.
3. Track progress.
We all want to see progress and we all know that what gets measured gets done. When essential skills like communication feel broad and undefined, finding the motivation to work at improving them can be hard.
We need to understand our starting point. Tools like our Skills Builder Benchmark can help individuals to reflect on where they are against the universal framework and to celebrate existing strengths.
Crucially though, it can also identify the next steps for development whether that is learning how to adapt your speaking to the audience's prior knowledge, using creative mind-mapping tools, or solving problems through creating and testing hypotheses. As progress is made, these skill steps become tangible and motivating.
4. Keep practising.
The Essential Skills Tracker found that all too often individuals’ essential skills peak at around the age of 40 and then decline. However, that does not have to be the case. Where individuals have regular opportunities to deliberately practice and apply their essential skills they continue to develop those skills over their whole working lives.
Deliberate practice is important. It is not enough for individuals simply to be using essential skills – the reality is that we all use our essential skills every day, but that doesn’t mean we are getting better. Deliberate practice means an ongoing cycle of identifying gaps or priorities, applying and using new skill steps, and then reflecting on practice for future improvement.
Managers and mentors play a critical role in ensuring that this practice is deliberate and effective.
5. Celebrate and reward success.
Finally, it is critical to recognise success. In a growing number of organisations, we see that essential skills have become a key discussion area in the development and review cycle for employees. Progress is recognised and celebrated – whether that is a growing ability to generate new ideas, an improved ability to listen and capture key information, or the ability to evaluate and adapt plans. These are all important steps towards the mastery of essential skills.
Once progress is tangible, recognised and rewarded, you can create a virtuous cycle of commitment and improvement in your teams – with all the benefits of improved job satisfaction, productivity and engagement that accrue.
