Every now and again parents need to look past the day-to-day demands of child rearing to consider what it will take for their kids to meet the challenges of adult life. This higher order parenting addresses qualities that underlie specific activities (like doing chores or getting good grades) or life domains (like organized sports or friendships). While lots of attention is paid to higher order issues like morals and manners relatively little attention has been devoted to identifying the core competencies your teenager will need to excel in the 21st century work place. Your kid will be growing to adulthood in a century where technological advancements and the rate of change is unlike anything humanity has ever experienced. Here’s what experts and business executives are saying your kid will face in the 21st century job market.
Twenty-first century workers will be faced with a business environment characterized by the ongoing, rapid expansion of information and knowledge, unprecedented technological advances and new heretofore impossible to produce products fulfilling needs from the most trivial to the most essential. Competition for resources, market share and customers will be fierce. Global competition will contribute to a glut of products and services that are difficult to distinguish from each other in quality with price becoming the great leveler. Costs (and thus profit margins) will be pared down to the bare minimum. Consumer interest and demand for products will shift rapidly. Small business and entrepreneurial enterprises will continue to be a significant driver of the 21st century economy. Economic demands and market forces will force businesses to operate with a reduced work force placing greater demands on individual employees who will need a broad array of skills. Collaborative, project based work environments will be the norm. Workers will have to contend with an overwhelming volume of information. Business will be transacted through instantaneous communication both person to person and through electronic media. Products will be increasingly tailored to the individual consumer and niche markets. Each niche market will require its own product development and marketing plan. In addition, consumers will increasingly expect to have ready access to the new New thing. This results in a ongoing need for fresh ideas and perspectives as well as the recognition of significant trends and potential new products and markets. There will be a reduced time frame for deliberation prior to product development. Employment will increasingly imitate a consultant or project based model even within a formal corporate structure. Jobs will only be as stable as the value of a worker for the immediate product or service.
Getting good grades and doing well on standardized tests will not be enough to provide your kid with a competitive edge in this kind of business environment. In some ways, it can actually work against them. Even entry level positions (including many minimum wage jobs) will need employees who know how to think, access relevant information, take initiative in solving problems and work collaboratively to respond to quickly changing marketplace demands.
So, how can parents help prepare their kids to succeed in the new global economy? In this series of columns a set of core competencies teens will need if they are to meet the demands of the modern workplace will be identified. The focus will be on how parents can help foster and develop these skills within everyday family life.
21st Century Skills
In a world where lay-offs and job changes are the norm, rather than the exception, teens will need to learn how to manage their own careers. They must understand how to assess their own interests, skills and work values so that they have a clear understanding of what they want and what they have to offer employers. They will need to know how to research and evaluate the job market and understand where they fit in as a competitive job candidate. And they must be able to develop effective career plans and goals and be able to adapt those plans to changing market conditions. This will require a set of skills that go beyond just academic knowledge and intellectual abilities. Your kid will need some specific competencies that set them apart from their peers and colleagues. There are 15 core competencies that keep showing up in discussions by employers and business executives, experts in economics and employment and in the speculations of academics about the future of employment in the United States. Here’s the list.
Problem solving. As reductions in work force continue to be implemented across this century, increasing responsibility will be placed on individual workers to deal with issues that arise on the job. Your kid will need to be able to recognize problems and figure out how to resolve them whether it is as direct as an unhappy customer or problems that arise with their area of expertise. Further, workers who can identify potential problems will have a unique value to the work place over and above any technical skills they may possess.
Leading by influence. Traditional top down leadership (called bossing people around in other contexts) works best in (and perpetuates) a static economy. The rapidly changing economic forces of the 21st century along with the increasingly collaborative nature of 21st century work environments are not well suited for this kind of leadership style. Instead, your kid will need to be familiar with and (ideally) practiced in a leadership style that influences employees or coworkers by reasoning, persuasion, collaboration and modeling rather than telling them what to do. (This is also known as transformational leadership.)
Flexibility. The rapidity with which changes can occur in the marketplace, reductions in work force and the need for companies to target niche markets will require workers to wear several different hats. To be prepared for this, your kid will need to be able to apply their skills and abilities in flexible ways as well as to shift direction in response to sudden marketplace changes.
Initiative. Businesses from the food service sector to large technical corporations can little afford to have employees who sit and wait to be told every single thing they need to do. There will be an increasing demand for self-directed employees who are proactive and take responsibility for getting things done. With the increasing recognition of the importance of small businesses as an engine for economic growth, initiative in the form of entrepreneurialism will have particular value in the 21st century.
Communication skills. With the kind of collaborative, dynamic environments that characterize the 21st century work place, your kid will need to be able to directly inform, discuss, disagree and advocate with colleagues and customers. Equally important will be the ability for clear, concise and appropriate written communication. Your kid’s opportunities will also be severely limited in the 21st century work place if they can only communicate clearly and effectively with their own generation. They will need to be able to communicate with people from different backgrounds and cultural references (you know, like how to talk to someone who remembers when you had to actually dial telephones).
Critical analysis. The glut of information available through the internet and other open source media will leave 21st century workers bewildered and overwhelmed if they are not able to critically evaluate the information available to them or the ideas presented to them. Your kid will need to be able to assess the legitimacy of information sources as well as the validity of argument structures. They will need to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Imagination. The astounding possibilities presented by technology along with the universal access to information and ideas will place a premium on curiosity, creativity and imagination in the 21st century work environment. The days of just reproducing the same product, idea, priorities, prejudices or business practices are quickly disappearing. Your kid’s ability to generate fresh ideas or fresh approaches to established ideas will make them an important resource for 21st century companies.
Work ethic. Hard workers will be as important to 21st century businesses as ever. Your kid’s ability to buckle down and get to work will be an important distinguishing attribute.
Patience. In the vast majority of work environments, any one worker is unlikely to be in a position to just pursue their ideas regardless of what others think. Your kid’s success in the 21st century will be greatly enhanced by their ability to manage frustration, accommodate to coworker’s agendas, temper responses and exert self-control.
Decision making. With increasing responsibility placed on individual workers in the 21st century, the ability to make decisions will be a necessity. Once a situation or issue has been evaluated and the options have been identified your kid will need to be able to act decisively. Being comfortable making decisions will be an advantage in the 21st century business world.
Dissenting opinions. As work environments become more collaborative, group decision making dynamics will become more prominent. One well documented process is the pressure groups exert on individual members to form a general consensus, sometimes to disastrous and self-defeating effect. Your kid’s ability to disagree and stick to a well-reasoned, opposing opinion (appropriately without alienating colleagues) will be important to the effective functioning of 21st century businesses.
Project management. Jobs in which workers are responsible for discrete, repetitive and isolated tasks are disappearing in the 21st century work environment. In all levels of employment, workers are faced with the requirement to accomplish multi-step tasks toward the completion of complex projects. In this environment, your kid’s ability to plan, coordinate and bring to completion complex projects will give them a decided advantage.
Saving Grace. Honesty, kindness, integrity, generosity, trustworthiness, any of the timeless character traits will serve to distinguish employees in an increasingly personal work environment. Your kid’s particular saving grace(s) will be as important as ever in the highly competitive work environments of the 21st century.
Continuous learning. By some accounts, digital information doubles every 18 months. Currently it is estimated to be at 3 x 1021. (That is 3 with 21 zeroes after it.) That’s a lot of information. It is no longer sufficient to establish a basic knowledge set that will carry you through the end of your working career. Your kid will need to be life-long learner if they are going to continue to be a viable employee in the 21st century.
Anchoring skills. And, finally, 21st century workers will have to contend with the global nature of intellectual capital. There are smart, accomplished people all over the world that can transmit that knowledge instantly anywhere in the world. While your kid will need to have a solid intellectual foundation, they will also need skill sets that are not exportable to other countries; skills that can only be performed in a particular geographic location (i.e., not through electronic means). These anchored skills include low wage jobs like food service providers, skilled trades like carpentry and truck drivers and professions like health care providers. These skills will increase your kid’s job security throughout the 21st century.
In the columns that follow, I will be elaborating some of the ways you can help your kid develop and practice each of these core competencies. The next column will focus on the general parenting strategies that are most useful in fostering these important skills. Then, each week a column will be dedicated to identifying specific ways you can promote each individual core competency within everyday family interactions.
