skills include conducting a conversation, listening, understanding nonverbal communication, persuading or defending in a debate, selling, asking questions, showing respect, accepting and giving constructive criticism, and asserting oneself. Interpersonal communication skills are a significant aspect of many jobs in the modern workplace, and many companies are specifically looking for these skills when they interview potential employees (Graduate Management Admission Council, 2014). The importance of acquiring these skills means we can’t just expect students to develop them on their own.
Independent Problem-Solving Skills
As automation and artificial intelligence (AI) increase in sophistication in modern workplaces, employers decreasingly hire for positions that demand physical skills and low-level-thinking skills (McIntosh, 2002). High-paying jobs in the 21st century increasingly require higher-level-thinking skills, including independent problem solving. This means workers must be able to develop solutions without overreliance on external guidance.
In the 20th century, employers predominantly required high-level, independent problem-solving skills only from their management personnel, but this is changing rapidly in the modern workplace. As digital tools become more powerful and ubiquitous, management is giving frontline workers more and more decision-making authority to solve the problems that occur daily in a broad range of jobs. This means employers need fewer workers, but those they do require must be more productive and able to work independently without waiting for someone in management to learn about an issue and develop a solution. Teaching students effective thinking strategies for solving problems equips them with powerful tools for the modern workplace.
What many teachers don’t realize is that there is a structured process anyone can use to solve problems, just like there is a structured process to follow when you sit down to write a paper. Ted learned about structured thinking and problem solving in his systems-analysis studies and in the computer science curriculum at Simon Fraser University. In fact, there are extensive research and resources available to you on structured problem solving (Cameron, 2015; Rasiel & Friga, 2002; VanGundy, 1988). What Ted has done is reduce the problem-solving process down to its four essential steps, the four Ds (McCain, 2005).
1. Define the problem.
2. Design the solution.
3. Do the work.
4. Debrief the process.
By following these four steps, anyone can develop an effective solution to any problem. It is critical that teachers familiarize themselves with this process to teach it to their students.
Interdependent Collaboration Skills
Being just as productive working within groups as when working individually has always been an important skill, and the importance of having strong collaboration skills is only increasing. Interdependent collaboration skills include such things as being able to organize functional teams with members who complement one another, criticize ideas without criticizing individuals, negotiate and brainstorm within a team, solve problems in a group setting, elicit and listen to feedback, and take responsibility for tasks.
To consider collaboration’s increasing role in modern workplaces, note that many companies use collaborative workgroups with members from offices located in different time zones across a country or around the world (Flynn, 2014; Seiter, 2015). When workers on the U.S. East Coast go home at the end of their working day, workers operating on the West Coast pick up and carry that work forward. Work then begins the next morning when the workers on the East Coast start their working day, several hours before the West Coast staff start their working day. By doing work in this way, a given project progresses more rapidly and efficiently. International companies use the same strategy, but they create workgroups with members in branch offices around the globe, ensuring that project progress continues twenty-four hours a day.
Consider what it’s like to work in this kind of work group. In addition to traditional teamwork skills, working effectively in this type of virtual group also requires a fundamentally different set of collaboration skills than those people use in traditional face-to-face environments because collaboration can now be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous collaboration is real-time. Collaborative partners or groups simultaneously work and communicate using online digital tools. However, collaborating with virtual partners who are not physically in the same place and not in the same time zone often means workers work asynchronously by doing their collaborative work at different times. Learning the skills to function effectively in these kinds of virtual work groups has already become an essential skill for the modern world, and its role is only going to increase.
Fostering this kind of collaboration goes way beyond having students work with a partner. We must encourage teachers to think beyond the classroom and develop projects that involve partners and groups across the school, across the city, across the state or province, across the country, and across the world.
Information Investigation Skills
An ever-increasing amount of information—hyperinformation—arrives daily due to the number of people in the world producing new material combined with the global reach of information technology. This avalanche of data is already far more than anyone can process. Consequently, all this material provides little, if any, real value. In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman (1989) states, “We are like a thirsty man who has been condemned to use a thimble to drink from a fire hydrant. The sheer volume of available information and the manner in which it is often delivered render most of it useless to us” (p. 36). Consider that Wurman wrote those words in 1989 and how access to information has exploded since then. When you consider the ever-growing power of digital tools’ advanced-search capabilities to access this incredible breadth and depth of material, it is clear that high-level-information-investigation skills are becoming much more important in workplaces than rote-memorization skills.
Students and workers alike need to be able to investigate a specific topic, find data that are pertinent to their investigation, and then determine the data’s meaning. In other words, the world needs people who can figure out the relative significance of the information they find. Having the skills to determine what is significant and meaningful gives a person great power in the new information landscape. Therefore, we must move beyond the traditional focus on low-level recall when we teach young people how to find and process information. We want students to comprehend and be able to apply in new ways what they find, not just regurgitate theoretical knowledge.
This means encouraging and empowering teachers to teach beyond the test. Schools must shift toward more complex project-based coursework that requires students to investigate a topic and evaluate the information they retrieve to form fact-based opinions, decisions, and ideas.
Information Presentation Skills
Those of us born to an analog world predominantly gained information from printed text in newspapers, magazines, and books. However, the ability to economically print images and text in color and with greater clarity created a graphic-design revolution in communication that we often take for granted. But something even bigger has occurred in communication in the modern world—communicating with full-color, audiovisual movies.
Consequently, for most daily communications, written words are not enough. We are not saying that writing and the logical thought development behind it are not relevant anymore, and we are not saying that we shouldn’t teach the writing process to students. But we are saying that the vehicle for presenting those thoughts for most daily communication moves well beyond just words.
To be clear, information presentation relates to how one presents a message, not the content’s creation. Modern information-communication skills include an understanding of graphic design, typography, effective use of color, photo composition, video composition and production, and sound recording and
