nature of work. They are massively reducing the numbers of people in industries and professions that were once labor-intensive. New forms of work rely increasingly on high levels of specialist knowledge and on creativity and innovation particularly in the uses of new technologies. These require wholly different capacities from those required by the industrial economy. (p. 5)
Robinson (2001) goes on to comment on the mismatch between the skills workers need relative to the skills that schools too often focus on:
Employers are complaining that academic programs from schools to universities simply don’t teach what people now need to know and be able to do. They want people who can think intuitively, who are imaginative and innovative, who can communicate well, work in teams and are flexible, adaptable and self-confident. The traditional academic curriculum is simply not designed to produce such people. (p. 52)
Although it may seem clear and obvious from quotes like these why students in the digital generations need new skill sets to succeed in the 21st century, it is still common for us to have teachers ask us questions like: “Haven’t schools always been equipping students with skills for success in life?” And, “Isn’t a skill a skill? How can there be new skills?” Don’t dismiss questions like these out of hand. They are very good questions that deserve answers before we go further.
Consider what happens to skills over time.
• Some skills become obsolete: These are skills society values at some point but that become a victim of progress. Some obsolete skills include shoeing horses, sharpening swords, running a telephone switchboard, or typesetting. These are skills some may practice for highly specialized circumstances or out of nostalgia, but other skills have superseded them in mainstream life. There’s nothing wrong with these skills, but for all practical intents and purposes they are obsolete.
• Some skills that are on their way to becoming obsolete: These are traditional skills that are still useful to some degree but are not as important as they once were. Examples of these kinds of skills include hand accounting, using the Dewey decimal system, long division, handwriting, and even driving. Only time will tell whether these skills will fully lose their usefulness.
• Some skills never lose their usefulness: Traditional literacy skills, for example, remain as valuable as they ever were. These skills include reading, writing, numeracy, social and communication skills, and so on. The reason why these skills continue to be so important is that they are the fundamental building blocks of our society, and they are an essential part of interpersonal communications.
• Some skills become more important: These are not new skills. They are skills that have simply received a promotion due to the shifting needs of an ever-changing world. This set of skills includes information processing, critical thinking, problem solving, understanding graphic design, video and sound production, and imaginative communication skills like storytelling and art and music creation.
• Some new skills are unique to the 21st century: These are the skills that weren’t necessary prior to the 21st century. In fact, they may never have existed before. These skills include such things as social-networking skills, online communication skills, digital citizenship, and online collaboration.
Schools are absolutely the best places to equip students with the essential skills they need for their adult lives, but to effectively meet this goal, it is necessary to continually alter school instruction to match life changes outside of school. Because of the exponential increase in disruptive technologies, and the effects of this on the modern workplace, we see a critical need to shift our educational focus to keep skill instruction relevant for the modern world.
To that end, we have worked and researched with other educators in our industry to identify nine critical skill areas on which instruction must focus to keep schools relevant in the modern world. Ted refers to our specific skill set as the nine Is (McCain, in press):
1. Intrapersonal skills
2. Interpersonal skills
3. Independent problem-solving skills
4. Interdependent collaboration skills
5. Information investigation skills
6. Information presentation skills
7. Imagination creativity skills
8. Innovation creativity skills
9. Internet citizenship skills
As you read our perspective on these essential skills, it’s important to understand these are not just skills the digital generations require. Everyone needs these skills to function and succeed in the modern world.
Intrapersonal Skills
Intrapersonal skills constitute the mental habits that enable people to work through real-world situations and respond to challenges using awareness and well-thought-out strategy within their own mind. They are habits that students can learn, develop, and enhance at school. It’s easy to skip these skills because we often don’t explicitly focus on them in the classroom, but these are the most important skills that students get from their school experience because they empower students for long-term satisfaction and success in their personal and professional lives.
We break intrapersonal skills into two categories: personal character skills and personal productivity skills. Personal character skills include self-confidence, patience, honesty, open-mindedness, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence. Personal productivity skills include knowing how to learn, taking initiative, overcoming boredom and self-motivating, persevering when things are difficult, managing time, evaluating one’s own work, and setting long-term goals.
Each of these intrapersonal skills makes for good personal character and productivity. Although most schools go to great lengths to ensure student productivity, some schools go to great lengths to ensure they don’t teach character because many view teaching these skills as a parent’s responsibility. In our view, all schools should teach character because developing these intrapersonal skills is a natural byproduct of giving students work to do to learn the material in the curriculum and then holding them accountable for doing that work. Indirectly, teachers have always been helping students acquire these skills ever since formal instruction began.
In an age when employers are contracting more and more work out to individual entrepreneurs, these metacognitive and introspection skills are essential not only for personal growth but for finding and maintaining steady employment (Torpey & Hogan, 2016). The key point here is that it is critical that we state these intrapersonal skills explicitly and make acquiring them a targeted goal in instruction.
Interpersonal Skills
Face-to-face communication skills remain the most important communication skills for people to develop for success in the professional world. Interestingly, technology is making them more important than ever. As we write in chapter 2 (see Technology Transforms Lives, page 18), the rapid growth in the power of smart machines and autonomous robots threatens to replace jobs that humans traditionally do. Many of the higher-paying jobs that will survive the coming expansion of automation will require strong interpersonal skills (Mahdawi, 2017).
Interpersonal skills are outward-focused life skills that we use every day to communicate, interact, and comprehend with other people and groups. Developing these skills is essential to effectively function in a family, in relationships, and
