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Why transferable skills are the key to a better future

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Why transferable skills are the key to a better future

Imagine a world where you’re competing with AI and other technologies for work. With each new patent filed by the likes of Amazon and door-opening potential terminator created by Boston Dynamics, we edge ever-closer.

In order to thrive and bring value to a post-industrial society, humans will need to adapt and learn continuously.

At FutureLearn, we help people develop new skills to close current technical skill gaps. For instance, to meet the digital skills gap we offer coding courses. We also believe that closing the ‘soft skills’ gap will be what’s needed to diversify the type of work we can do, and to differentiate human from machine.

Soft skills training in an area like emotional intelligence is an important stepping stone towards developing other transferable skills – leadership, communication, collaboration and even cultural competency (find out more about what soft skills are).

Through developing our soft skills, we all have the opportunity to transform society for the better.

We can and must train the next generation to explore the depths of our human ability: breaking down communication barriers where we find them, making connections between what we see, hear and feel. We have to challenge the mindset that practical or ‘hard’ skills reign supreme and invest equally in learning important transferable skills, like emotional intelligence.

Beyond helping us to meet our full human potential, transferable skills also help us to excel in a rapidly changing society. Emotional intelligence provides a heightened sense of reality that can help us to view and solve problems differently.

“Emotional intelligence gives us a heightened sense of reality that can help us to view and solve problems differently”

Our current education system is based on churning out mini replicas of adults. It’s a system designed for the Victorian era, when people needed to learn to conform in order to get work in the factories of the industrial revolution. In a world where change is a constant, emotional intelligence gives you the basic skills needed to thrive – no matter what life throws at you.

As globalisation, climate change and conflict displace populations and employment opportunity, resilience and intercultural competency will be more important.

Beyond the courses we offer to learners, we as an organisation are prioritising our internal learning and development towards transferable skills. We’ll be sharing some more practical ideas for how you too can do this in your own organisation in the coming weeks.

How are you developing your own soft skills? Does your organisation recognise the importance of this collection of skills?

Let us know in the comments.

Category
Learning,
Digital Skills

Get ahead with Soft Skills

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Get ahead with Soft Skills

This week is Learning at Work week in the UK. But making sure you have the right professional skills is important wherever you’re based. So how good are your soft skills?

These aren’t the specialist skills required in your role that you might already have (for example coding or writing) these are skills that are often missed by most of the working population. Despite the fact that employers are looking for them.

What are soft skills?

‘Soft’ skills, sometimes known as ‘transferable skills’, can be quite hard to define. But generally soft skills refers to a group of skills that help you work successfully with other people. Common examples of soft skills are communication, leadership and collaboration.

They are usually contrasted with ‘hard’ skills which are more technical skills, like knowing how to wire a plug, write code or drive a car.

Why are they important?

For two reasons. The first is that you need hard AND soft skills to succeed. Let’s use the example of writing code. Imagine you’re hired as a programmer. You’ve built a web page, but when you show your team the page they don’t seem to understand it and when you explain  your language is confusing and you forget things. They choose to remove the page. With better communication skills you could have helped your team understand, with collaboration skills they would have already been on board with your project.

In a globalised world you might end up working with a huge range of people, being able to communicate and work with them is vital.

The second reason is a changing job market. The advance of automation means that soon machines might well be capable of more and more technical or ‘hard’ skills. But we still can’t teach a computer how to collaborate or show leadership – having soft skills like being able to negotiate well or motivate others means even in a digital world you can add value to a company.

How can you improve your soft skills?

We’re here to help. So far over 300,000 learners have joined our most popular ‘soft skills’ courses. To make it easy we’ve grouped them together, along with some extra information about soft skills, so you can easily find which skill you want to improve.

We’re also going to be sharing more advice this week about how we’re improving our soft skills at FutureLearn, so keep an eye out!

Category
Learning,
Business

Tips for Implementing Evidence-Based Learning Strategies in your Classes

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Tips for Implementing Evidence-Based Learning Strategies in your Classes

At the same time, we are also transitioning to putting out a variety of resources on the blog and podcast once per week. So, I’d like to take this opportunity to invite everyone to listen to our podcast, as it will soon be a part of our weekly rotation on Thursdays! You can listen to this week’s episode, Episode 35 – Implementing Effective Strategies, on the web. You can also subscribe to The Learning Scientists Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

This week’s blog is a bit of a crossover, covering the same topic as the podcast episode from this week: tips for implementing evidence-based learning strategies in your classes. While in England, a number of consistent themes popped up as we were presenting research and applications for the classroom. Here’s a summary of what we noticed when talking about implementing the six strategies for effective learning:

Don’t try to implement all of the strategies all at once all of the time. We don’t like to recommend complete overhauls of teaching. First, this is a TON of work, and we know time and balance is important. Also, all of this work may not bring as much benefit as we might like. It also can lead to confusion and difficulty for the teacher. (Remember, difficulty is good, but too much can have the opposite effect!) This also means if something is not working very well, it is really hard to tell what that something is. Instead, we recommend making small changes a little bit at a time. Pick one or two things that you want to try to do more intentionally in your classes, and start there. You can work your way up to utilizing the strategies more as you gain more feedback about what works well in your classroom and what doesn’t work as well.

GUEST POST: A Call to Action: Mental Health and Smartphone Usage

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GUEST POST: A Call to Action: Mental Health and Smartphone Usage

If you are a student like myself, become more self-aware. Note the moments when you pick up your smart phone right when you wake up or when you scroll through Instagram right before you go to bed. Think about how you feel looking through hundreds of posts a day. Pay attention to the way you feel during school and any symptoms of anxiety and depression you might be experiencing throughout. Think about how phone usage and mental health are all intertwined. Some strategies to help relieve you of your cellphone-inflicted mental health issues include turning off app notifications or the phone in general, setting time and use limits, mindfulness training, or cognitive behavioral therapy (2). Cell phones possess immense influence over the minds and bodies of students across the country. It is time for students and the institutions that support them to take action- if not for the sake of the present, at least for the sake of future.

(1)   Boumosleh, J. M., & Jaalouk, D. (2017). Depression, anxiety, and smartphone addiction in university students- A cross sectional study. PLoS ONE, 12(8).

(2)   Cain, J. (2018). It’s Time to Confront Student Mental Health Issues Associated with Smartphones and Social Media. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 82(7), 738–741.

(3)   Demi̇rci̇, K., Akgönül, M., & Akpinar, A. (2015). Relationship of smartphone use severity with   sleep quality, depression, and anxiety in university students. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 4(2), 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.4.2015.010

(4) Naslund, J. A., Grande, S. W., Aschbrenner, K. A., & Elwyn, G. (2014). Naturally Occurring Peer Support through Social Media: The Experiences of Individuals with   Severe Mental Illness Using YouTube. PLoS ONE, 9(10), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0110171

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly Digest #130: SoTL Researcher Spotlight

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Weekly Digest #130: SoTL Researcher Spotlight

Dr. Regan Gurung conducts health psychological and social psychological research on cultural differences in stress, social support, smoking cessation, body image and impression formation. He has also received numerous teaching awards, organized teaching conferences, and served on many different committees and executive boards with teaching organizations. For more information about Regan and the work that he does, see his website or TED talk.

Hocus Focus

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Hocus Focus

From a cognitive psychologist’s point of view, these results are particularly impressive because they demonstrate transfer. There are a number of training tools that are marketed as improving mental processes. While a number of these show improvement on the training task itself, very few show improvement on things outside of the task (4). In other words: if you do a sudoku puzzle every day you’ll get very good at sudoku, but nothing else. In contrast, several studies have shown that meditation and mindfulness training have shown improvement on attention tasks that are very different from the training task (1, 5).

So should every student get training in mindfulness? Maybe! I think it’s important to note that the mindfulness training in this experiment followed a pretty structured regimen. The researchers also noted that the classes were taught by professionals. Therefore it is important to carefully evaluate any program that claims to improve cognitive performance to make sure it isn’t just a bunch of hocus focus.

(1) Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776–781. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612459659

(2) Brefczynski-Lewis, J. A., Lutz, A., Schaefer, H. S., Levinson, D. B., Davidson, R. J. (2007). Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104, 11483–11488. doi:10.1073/pnas.0606552104

(3) Chambers, R., Lo, B. C. Y., Allen, N. B. (2008). The impact of intensive mindfulness training on attentional control, cognitive style, and affect. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 32, 303–322. 

(4) Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Online First Publication. DOI: 10.1177/0963721417712760

(5) Hodgins, H. S., & Adair, K. C. (2010). Attentional processes and meditation. Consciousness and Cognition, 19(4), 872-878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2010.04.002

Weekly Digest #129: Students Under Stress

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Weekly Digest #129: Students Under Stress

When one of our very first guest bloggers reached out to us recently asking about resources for students under severe stress, we realized that we hadn’t broached this issue on our blog yet. This hugely important issues will take more than a quick digest to explore, so expect more on this topic in the future. Stress can come in many forms, but can be severely exacerbated from lack of access to essential resources such as food, money, and health services. In this digest, we mainly set the scene with respect to the problems many students are facing; in later digests and posts, we hope to provide more resources for interventions or strategies that have helped.

Do You Worry About Your Digital Privacy?

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Do You Worry About Your Digital Privacy?

How concerned are you about your digital privacy? To the best of your knowledge, has your online privacy ever been breached or compromised?

In the article “In a Stumble for Apple, a FaceTime Bug Lets iPhone Users Eavesdrop,” Brian X. Chen writes:

The iPhone as an eavesdropping device? Watch out. It can happen.

On Monday, Twitter and other social networking sites lit up with anxious Apple users after the news site 9to5Mac reported on a strange glitch in the company’s iPhones. The issue: It turns out that an iPhone user can call another iPhone user and listen in on that person’s conversations through the device’s microphone — even if the recipient does not answer the call.

The problem was the result of a bug and involves Apple’s FaceTime app for placing video and audio calls over an internet connection. The bug could also give a caller access to a live feed of the recipient’s camera.

On Monday night, Apple said it had disabled Group FaceTime, the feature that was causing the glitch.

The glitch is embarrassing for Apple, which is set to report disappointing financial earnings on Tuesday. The Silicon Valley company has long positioned itself as a protector of user privacy offering more secure devices than its rivals.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

— How safe is your privacy in the age of digital technology?

— Have you ever used FaceTime? If yes, how concerned are you that someone might have been eavesdropping?

— The FaceTime glitch is one of many recent digital privacy breaches that have come to light. We have learned that game and cellphone apps have gathered data on users that has been shared with advertisers and online tracking companies. Facebook disclosed that it has given access to user information to major tech companies, including Yahoo and Netflix. How big a problem is digital privacy and security? Will these and other recent revelations change your tech behavior? Why or why not?

— How much do you trust tech companies with your private information? Should tech companies do more to protect our privacy? Or does the responsibility fall to users?

— Should the government do more to regulate digital privacy? Or do you worry that more government regulation will stifle innovation in the tech industry?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Holiday Recipes

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Holiday Recipes

What foods do you cook and eat to celebrate your favorite holidays? How do you make them? What memories and feelings does preparing these dishes bring up for you?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related article about the banh chung — or rice cakes — Vietnamese people make to celebrate Lunar New Year.

Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.

Word + Quiz: plenary

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Word + Quiz: plenary

Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18.

1. full in all respects

2. of or pertaining to a meeting attended by all participants of a conference

_________

The word plenary has appeared in 14 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 26 in “Vatican Faces Modern-Day Suffragists, Demanding Right to Vote” by Elisabetta Povoledo:

Vatican synods are held every few years. Women have emerged as a major concern of this one, which opened earlier this month and focuses on how the church can better minister to today’s youth in an era of emptying pews.

“The presence of women in the church, the role of women in the church,” has been repeatedly raised, in the synod’s plenary meeting and within smaller working groups, said Sister Sally Marie Hodgdon, the superior general of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery, and a synod participant. “The youth bring it up, as have some of the bishops and cardinals.”

_________

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