Do you have the right skills?

A fascinating report by the BC Premier’s Technology Council outlines the new skills needed for our knowledge-based society. Among them, creativity, communications, teamwork, personal organization and self-regulation stand out as key skills that can have a profound impact on performance at individual, team and organizational levels.

We’ve been delivering workshops on creativity and innovation for many years now. It’s sometimes the most fun we have at work. We’re finding people are naturally attracted to creativity and innovation but our educational institutions and formal workplaces have somehow subdued a natural talent that is often just waiting to burst out. Check out Ken Robinson’s 2006 ted.com talk if you want to know more.

“Communications is the ability to relate concepts and ideas to others either in person, on the page or through technology” … so says the report. Unfortunately, I fear the PTC has fallen in to the trap of considering communication a one-way street. In our work we’ve found an ability to listen is often the most obvious communication skill that many need to develop. Communication needs to be about sharing ideas and building common understanding, not simply pitching your own thoughts effectively.

We’re so glad to see teamwork on the list. Most of us now work in sufficiently complicated jobs that no one person can achieve anything of real value without the mutual support of others. Once again I worry that our educational institutions are partially to blame for encouraging individual achievement over good team skills.

Adding EQ to the IQ is something we discuss a lot at Calliope. All of our clients are smart, but IQ alone does not guarantee success. Research has shown clearly that Emotional Intelligence (or EQ) has a profound impact on an individual’s capacity to be successful both at work and personally. The most popular framework for understanding EQ, developed by Dan Goleman, divides EQ into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. We see clear overlap between the domains of self-awareness/self-management and the critical skills of personal organization and self-regulation.

You can get the full report from:

http://www.gov.bc.ca/premier/attachments/PTC_vision for_education.pdf

We’d love to know what you think?

Dave Whittington, Calliope Learning, 2011