When you sit with someone being told they are going die, how the diagnosis is delivered is as important as what it actually says.
And yet the bedside manner of our medical specialists is largely seen as irrelevant next to their ability to diagnose and treat.
As Christmas approaches, a whole cohort of school leavers are anxiously awaiting a single score; a mark that will dictate whether they gain entry into the university and the course of their futures.
But judging our future doctors — and teachers and psychologists and lawyers — on a single score ignores the importance of all those other skills that are so desperately needed as they graduate university and climb the career ladder.
The National Skills Commission yesterday flagged the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on the national jobs market, where employment remains 223,100 below the level recorded nine months ago.
That means jobs will be harder to find. But the commission has also released a list of the “top 20 resilient occupations”, with 12 of those in the health sector. They range from GPs to occupational therapists, registered nurses to midwives and speech pathologists.
Educators also fall into the category of those professions considered resilient to the times, as do aged care workers, agriculture workers and delivery drivers.
But what an opportunity for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to change the narrative around the skills we need post COVID-19.
Skills like resilience and leadership, teamwork and empathy, inclusion and inquiry, communication and adaptability, worth ethic and problem-solving. Skills that don’t appear on any ATAR score, or in the entrance exam into most university courses.
The National Skills Commission provides advice to the Morrison government on “current, emerging and future workforce skills needs’’, as well as several other areas.
But those current, emerging, future and much-needed skills have yet to include an evaluation of what is routinely, and ill-advisedly referred to as “soft skills”. We can’t test for them, so we routinely ignore them.
Just take communication as an example. Whether someone trains as a doctor or a journalist, a teacher or an air-conditioning mechanic, the ability to convey complex information is essential.
Teamwork is equally important. Consider the vital role of a good team player in any business or hospital or school — and the hindrance of someone who isn’t.
Adaptability is not taught in the school curriculum, nor measured on any university entrance score, but it’s crucial to be successful at work. This year’s pandemic has shown that again. Those businesses that are able to reinvent themselves and find new markets survive, where those that cannot do not.
This is as much an issue for schools as it is for policymakers plotting a workforce-led recovery. What’s the use of teaching the digital skills our students need but not the skills needed to exploit and lead the digital revolution?
What’s the use of being able to ace a chemistry paper without the ability to explain the answer?
Former teacher Jack Ma founded Alibaba in his one-bedroom Hangzhou apartment; in July this year, he was listed as having a net worth in the tens of billions of dollars.
Speaking at Davos a couple of years ago, Ma pleaded with the world’s policymakers to change the way we teach children. “If we do not change the way we teach, in 30 years we’ll be in trouble … we cannot teach our kids to compete with machines who’ll be smarter,” he said.
“We have to teach our kids something unique, so that a machine can never catch up with us: values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others — the soft skills — sports, music, painting, arts, to make sure humans are different from machines.”
National skills commissioner Adam Boyton yesterday said Australia’s recovery would depend on many factors including accessing a COVID-19 vaccine and “avoiding additional waves of infection, as well as how the rest of the world responds to the pandemic’’.
He’s right. But what a wonderful opportunity it affords us to look at what we are teaching and how that might add value to those resilient jobs that will lead Australia’s recovery.
It would also mean the nation’s universities do more than fill their spots with the highest academic achievers. There’d be spots, too, for tomorrow’s leaders.
Does the narrative around skills need to change? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column.
It is very depressing to hear people, who have only a tenuous connection with education and teaching, banging on endlessly about soft skills, 21st century skills, job ready skills etc. For such people – like your reporter – these curriculum priorities all come at the expense of students learning actual (and challenging) subject content: history, science, maths, languages. It’s well-established in the literature however, that the development of any of these skills – communication, inquiry, teamwork whatever – only makes sense if learned within the context of actual discipline-based knowledge. As outgoing chief scientist Finkel squarely puts it: “What’s the use of learning to collaborate and communicate, if you actually don’t have anything distinctive to contribute?”
The corporatists who now run our universities – and whose best educational ideas now come unprocessed from the pap that spews forth from the management consultancy industry – are obsessed with the skills agenda. The consequences for the new generation of graduates are frightening. Finkel again: Why do these people somehow associate being a 21st century worker with “talking more and knowing less”.
Check out Finkel’s very useful piece here:
Master the foundations, and rule a universe | Chief Scientist
Though beware Finkel’s panegyrics to the the Amazon oligarch!
Without name dropping, i do concur with that certain famous bloke, who said something along the lines of, doing your best imaginative thinking in a straight jacket.
Agree totally but I wouldn’t be using wine-fan Finkel as a champion!
“Skills like resilience and leadership, teamwork and empathy, inclusion and inquiry, communication and adaptability, worth ethic and problem-solving. Skills that don’t appear on any ATAR score, or in the entrance exam into most university courses.”
The ability to pass, let alone excel in an ATAR course already shows resilience (especially in a COVID year), inquiry, communication, adaptability, work ethic and problem-solving.
The other skills are involved in some courses, though not all. Certainly, in the courses I teach, teamwork, inclusivity, inquiry, communication, adaptability, work ethic and problem-solving are all explicit parts of the course.
Maybe education has moved on. Maybe its not the same as when you went to school.
What precludes learning and applying essential soft skills both overtly and implicitly via subject matter or hard skills?
One good reason is that job interviews often require one to explain thier soft skills overtly and/or they match selection criteria.
“communication, inquiry, teamwork”
Alas, skills most usefully absorbed in team sports in the formative years. I can’t think of any confected uni courses that confer such attributes. Though they are great at performing simulacrum of these qualities.
Madonna King’s bio indicates that in her whole career, she has never undertaken any substantive work outside media and communications (https://madonnaking.com.au/about/). Of course, communications are generally useful, but I wonder whether she understands what critical skills modern manufacturing, logistics, engineering and a knowledge economy actually require?
Meanwhile, her sole experience is in the one professional sector that has so failed the modern need for knowledge, truth and constructive, evidence-based discourse that it gave up and called the world ‘post truth’ when the more brutal problem was the deficiency in its own intellect: traditional humanities education was so ill-equipped to keep up with the information it was trying to weigh and explain that its graduates gave up and said it’s all relative.
And residing as she does in a sector that cannot employ its own graduates in a knowledge economy screaming for better intelligence, the best vision she can offer for a smarter world is not one with professionals better educated and more astute than she is, but one where they precisely resemble herself, only much more of them.
And if that vanity weren’t bad enough, here in a nutshell is why Madonna’s opinion is not only wrong; it’s not even a valid construction for accountable advice:
If a scientist says that what society needs is more scientific knowledge, then on request, that scientist can be relied on to nominate what knowledge, learned how deeply by how many, and used for what purpose, against real-world problems already scoped and sized, because those opinions are based on models.
In other words, a scientific opinion can tell you how much more science education is too much, what confidence there is in its estimates and how it would know if its estimates are wrong.
Yet Ms King cannot nominate how many graduates of ‘talking and being agreeable’ she thinks are too many for society, or what on earth they’d constructively do in a chattering, attention-hungry world that already has too many ignorant voices agreeing with too many inadequately contested ideas.
So Madonna’s own argument shows why we don’t need vastly more people trained exactly as she was: they are so good at putting the best face on whatever they think, they have become incapable at recognising how little they actually know.
So the article is a somewhat wandering overview of a difficult area – not unusual in journalism. Treat it as an introduction to the area. However it would be useful if people engaged with the issues and not attacking the author because of her history. There are lots of people out there who have worked for dodgy employers at times. Sometimes they are the only opportunity in town (eg Courier Mail in Brisbane).
The issue of generic skills – called variously key/employabiity/social skills – has been around as a serious factor in skills composition since at least the 1990s. ‘Soft skills’ is used more by critics who think ‘hard skills’ are the only real things. The reality is that people need both. The problem with a lot of traditional content areas – in particular in science – is that the leading edge keeps changing rapidly and goes out of date.
Social/employability skills are particularly important for people in finding and keeping work. This can be as simple as the social environment of a workplace (timekeeping. pay, following instructions) or as complex as teamwork and problem solving. But they need to be learnt in a context, not as an abstract standalone.
A good model seems to be to embed these social skills into the learning process around a functional subject area – so it could be electronics, or medical skills, or info tech. The subject area may need to spread its focus across fundamentals of the subject area as well as on ‘state of the art’ given the rate of change.
This is very much in line with what Alan Finkel was saying. The problem with it is that it is hard to teach and even harder to get teachers to accept that they are responsible for more than just a subject area silo. It can be assessed, but it has to be in the context of the subject.
I could go on (30 years in the area) but I hope this gives a flavour. I mean – the next topic that follows this is ‘learning to learn’.
Agree, soft and hard skills are not mutually exclusive but complementary; many employers and others seem to view soft skills as empowering for individuals and society therefore to be avoided.
Peter wrote: Social/employability skills are particularly important for people in finding and keeping work. This can be as simple as the social environment of a workplace (timekeeping. pay, following instructions) or as complex as teamwork and problem solving. But they need to be learnt in a context, not as an abstract standalone.
Exactly, Peter. I’ve been an employer in the STEM sector for 20 years, but both prior to that and concurrently with it I was involved in educating young engineers and scientists.
Keenly aware of which ‘soft skills’ they needed on exit, I’d train collaboration, negotiation, conflict management, ethics, leadership, marketing, sales, interviewing, communication and time management, concurrently with whichever technical modules those dimensions fit with (and there are always some that will fit.)
This meant less lecturing and a lot more experiential group exercises and discussions, so I’d restructure the course and some career academics would come and watch me deliver it, since they hadn’t seen technical education done multi-modally before. It was more work to design and deliver than chalk and talk, but as an employer I also knew why it was needed.
As well as being welcomed by the undergraduates (they could see immediately how it would help), and especially welcomed by students who loved group-style learning (often but not always or solely our female STEM students), it also accelerated their development once they graduated. A significant number blew straight through the usual decade-long tech monkey phases of their careers, were put into team leadership positions within three years and kept growing from there.
I hired a number of them too, and took opportunity to get them back two and three years later to talk to their peers about what the gap was and how they’d prioritised and filled it.
But one thing I wouldn’t have done is gotten a pure generalist in to tell bright problem-solvers how to succeed. They would have seen through the ignorant, self-satisfied posturing and empty rhetoric and lost all respect. (In fact, they’d have shredded the pretense to authority by testing the evidence, which I also taught them how to do. 🙂 )
The problem with soft skills is that they can be taught how to be mimicked, but they most likely come from family life and junior school experiences.
Hard skills can be taught and empirically measured, so they get done. Soft skills can be acquired, but not really taught. Very few take up the difficult problem of acquiring soft skills where they don’t come naturally. It is a life journey, not an education.
How about objective journalism – rather than one-eyed, partisan, subjective, cant commentary? The art of journalism over spruiking propaganda politics?
Serving the greater public interest : rather than their own politics and egos?
Boynton must be so pleased to know “He’s right” – as adjudged by King?
And what an opportunity for her “good ol’ Scotty From Marketing” …. to go with all the others he’s ignored in favour of benevolence for his donor sponsors. Or hasn’t she noticed his fossilised dependencies?
Meanwhile her pet Limited News Party has waged war by a thousand cuts on our universities……
Great theory.
Show me the curriculum.