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Will the 21st Century Employees Be Ready?
by Bashir Ali
As we examine our capacity as a nation and community to compete and thrive in a highly competitive and changing twenty-first century global economy, workers will need enhanced skills and talents. Nationally and locally, the twenty-first century economy is shifting away from manufacturing towards the services sector. The growth jobs of “tomorrow” will require higher skills and knowledge than “yesterday’s jobs.”
Drs. Richard Judy and Jane Lommel of Workforce Associates have cited the following comments in their recent research for the Central Illinois Workforce Development Board:
“To thrive – or even to survive – in the 21st century workplace, every worker in Central Illinois will need a set of personal qualities and attitudes, basic tools, and thinking skills of the following kind:
Personal qualities and attitudes:
- Integrity and honesty
- Personal responsibility and self discipline;
- Sociability, including understanding of others, friendliness, empathy, and teamwork skills;
- Curiosity – the desire to understand and learn;
- Flexibility and adaptability – a positive attitude toward change;
- Self-motivation, initiative, and self-management
Basic Tools:
- Communication skills, including language proficiency (at least in English and, desirably, in Spanish or another foreign language), reading, writing, and speaking;
- Quantitative skills – mastery of arithmetic and a sufficiently solid foundation in high school mathematics to learn more mathematics as may be required by work and additional study.
Thinking Skills:
- Knowing how to learn – the ability to apply what one already knows to the task of learning what one does not;
- Information search skills – the ability to determine what information is required for a particular task, to locate that information, and to use it appropriately;
- Problem solving skills – the ability to diagnose a problem, determine causal linkages, and break big problems down into smaller, solvable parts;
- Decision making skills – the ability to conceptualize objectives, identify constraints, elaborate alternative courses of action, and choose well from the set of available options;
- Pattern recognition skills – the ability to discern commonalties, difference, and connections among seemingly disparate phenomena, and to build coherent mental models of their interrelationships;
- Critical skills – the ability to see possibilities for improvement;
- Creative skills – the ability to thing “outside the box,” to find new and better ways to approach problems and situations.
These attitudes, tools, and skills comprise the foundation upon which Central Illinois’ 21st century workforce must be built.”
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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