21st Century Learning and Teaching

As the world fills with more sophisticated AI and ubiquitous technology, human skills--compassion, empathy, etc.--will define the competitive edge of workers and entire organizations. So those interested in thriving in a high-tech world must put renewed prioritization on emotional intelligence and soft skills.


Soft skills represent the top three missing skills of job applicants according to the Society of Human Resource Management's (SHRM) 2019 State of the Workplace.

Top 6 Missing Skills in Job Applicants

Problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation, and creativity (37 percent)

Ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity (32 percent)

Communication (31 percent)

Trade skills (carpentry, plumbing, welding, machining, etc.) (31 percent)

Data analysis / Data science (20 percent)

Science / Engineering / Medical (18 percent)

The significance of developing and applying social and emotional skills is growing. Soft skills are twice as predictive of a student's academic achievement as home environment and demographics and 30-40 percent of jobs in growth industries require soft skills. Additionally, 57 percent of leaders say soft skills are more important than hard skills.

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If you define winning as getting the upper hand, backing your opponent into a corner, and winning at any expense, you’ve got it all wrong. You may win in the short term, but think about the relationship going forward. Do those actions build trust, teamwork, and respect? I think not. You’ve probably created enough animosity, distrust, and jealousy to last a lifetime. In other words, you may have won the battle, but lost the war. There’s a better way…winning doesn’t have to be at someone’s expense.

Compromise: A Win-Win Strategy

Some people need to win at all costs because their ego won’t accept anything less. They’d rather win personally than accomplish something meaningful. Compromise isn’t a synonym for surrender; it’s a winning battle plan.

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Soft Skills List – 28 Skills to Working Smart
I originally published this soft skills list in June 2011.  I am honored to discover that more than 500,000 of you have since read my soft skills list and found it helpful.

There are 28 soft skills essential to your career success.  I wished I knew about many of these earlier in my career.   I want to share them so I can empower you to work smart and achieve more.  I look forward to your comments.

What are Soft Skills?

For a skill to be considered a soft skill, it needs to have three characteristics.

Rules for mastering this skill is not black and white –  Unlike hard skills, like math, where the rule for doing it perfectly is always the same, how effective you are at a soft skill changes depends on your emotional state, external circumstance, and the type of people you interact with.

This skill is portable and valuable to any job/career – Because soft skills are about your inner strength and interpersonal effectiveness, as long as you work with people, these skills are valuable to your career.

Mastering this skill is an ongoing journey – You can reach a level of competency in it but you can always encounter new situations or people that will test your soft skills and push you to learn more.

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We all probably know someone who is very intelligent, but does blatantly stupid things. Despite evidence that intelligence predicts a variety of life outcomes, the relationship between intelligence and good thinking is less clear. This research explored whether critical thinking ability or intelligence was the better predictor of real life events.

Community adults and college students (n = 244) completed a critical thinking assessment, an intelligence test, and an inventory of life events. Individuals with higher critical thinking scores and higher IQs reported fewer negative life events. Critical thinking more strongly predicted life events than intelligence and significantly added to the variance explained by IQ.

There is ample evidence that critical thinking can be taught, so there is hope that teaching critical thinking skills might prevent the occurrence of negative life events. We advocate for critical thinking instruction as a way to create a better future for everyone.

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Like other aspects of modern life, education can make the head hurt. So many outcomes, so much important work to do, so many solutions and strategies, so many variations on teaching, so many different kinds of students with so many different needs, so many unknowns in preparing for 21st Century life and the endless list of jobs that haven’t been invented.

What if we discovered one unifying factor that brought all of this confusion under one roof and gave us a coherent sense of how to stimulate the intellect, teach children to engage in collaborative problem solving and creative challenge, and foster social-emotional balance and stability—one factor that, if we got right, would change the equation for learning in the same way that confirming the existence of a fundamental particle informs a grand theory of the universe?

That factor exists: It’s called empathy.

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Part of the challenge facing educationalists is that technological change will call for skills that fall outside of age-old approaches to curriculum design and teaching. Emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and collaboration are just three core aptitudes that will be needed, but which cannot easily be taught in a traditional classroom environment.

“Updating curriculum should always be on the agenda,” says Jaime Saavedra of the World Bank, quoted in the WEFFI report. “But it is incredibly urgent to invest in changing the behaviour of teachers and improving what happens inside the classroom.

What are Soft Skills?

The phrase ‘soft skills’ is often used to describe the skills which characterise relationships with other people, or which are about how you approach life and work.

Others phrases that are often used for these types of skills include: ‘people skills’, ‘interpersonal skills’, ‘social skills’ or ‘transferable skills’.

‘Hard skills’, by contrast, is a phrase usually used to describe job-specific skills. Examples of such skills include professional skills like bricklaying or accountancy, medical expertise such as diagnosis and treatment, or other skills that can be taught and whose presence is testable through exams.

Ironically, for many people, the so-called soft skills are often some of the hardest skills to develop.
The Relative Importance of Hard and Soft Skills
Job-related expertise is essential in any profession and in many other careers. However, over the last twenty to thirty years, understanding has grown that perhaps the soft skills may ultimately be more important in determining levels of success.

That is, the hard skills are a basic minimum necessary in order to operate in that particular workplace. Whether or not you are successful in your career may depend on how you relate to other people and to work: the so-called soft skills.

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Soft skills to help your career hit the big time
You’d be hard-pressed to find professional skills that matter more than these.

You’ve got a reputation for being the best coder/editor/mechanic/whatever, but it amounts to little if you don’t work well with others. Some of the most important professional skills for workers and employers alike simply can’t be taught in a classroom or measured on paper. These traits are called soft skills and they’re more crucial to your job search and overall career than you think.

What are soft skills?
Unlike hard skills, which can be proven and measured, soft skills are intangible and difficult to quantify. Some examples of soft skills include analytical thinking, verbal and written communication, and leadership.

Research from the Society for Human Resource Management found that employers actually care more about soft skills than they do technical abilities like reading comprehension and mathematics.

One reason soft skills are so revered is that they help facilitate human connections. “Soft skills are key to building relationships, gaining visibility, and creating more opportunities for advancement,” says Kathy Robinson, founder of Boston career-coaching firm TurningPoint.

Basically, you can be the best at what you do, but if your soft skills aren’t cutting it, you’re limiting your chances of career success. Read on to learn which soft skills are critical to have firmly under your belt and what steps you can take to acquire them.

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