Pondering Careers – Edition 39 – Which core skills should we be talking about?

In this edition of Pondering Careers, Lucy looks at core skills and whether or not how we define them impacts their efficacy.

Welcome back to another edition of Pondering Careers, where we talk about everything related to careers, work, and jobs.

Over the past few months I’ve done a fair bit of thinking about skills taxonomies (see Edition 35 for my ponderings on skills-based hiring) because they present a conundrum.

On the one hand, I want to incorporate transferable/core skills into our programs, but I’m not sure which ones to use, or what to call them.

We all need to get on the same page when it comes to non-technical skills, because how on Earth can we teach these core competencies if we can’t even agree on what to call them? So while I want to rampage ahead with resources and learning tools that build key skills, I can’t because I’m stuck on which ones to teach, and what we should be calling them.

Just in case you can’t tell by now from my tone, I’m frustrated.

Core skills are incredibly powerful – they help us not just at work, but in every aspect of our lives – and they are in demand by employers.

Some believe that we’ve reached the point at which core/transferable skills have overtaken technical skills, and as our existing educational systems are not geared to teach these skills we need fundamental systems change – but I’m not sure how we can start this process when we can’t even agree on what to call them!

Others have also been speaking about core skills, especially Chris Webb in his the Week in Careers Newsletter and Tom Ravenscroft who often writes on the intersection of technical and essential skills.

So, in this edition I’ve outlined my thoughts on a couple of key questions those of us in education and career development should be asking, and then listed all the Core Skills Taxonomies I can find. If you know of others, please send them my way.

A rose by any other name…

Before we can dig into this topic we need to agree on some naming conventions.

I’m talking about those skills which are non-technical, and which are commonly referred to with any of the following descriptors:

• Core Skills
• Transferable Skills
• Soft Skills
• Human Skills
• Durable Skills
• Essential Skills
• Power Skills
• Future Skills

And I’m sure this list isn’t exhaustive.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to them as core skills, not from any preference of my own (personally, the term makes me think of skills you build during pilates), but simply because I’ve found that this is the term used most frequently in the taxonomies.

If you prefer something else, please feel free to argue your case in the comments because I want to hear your ideas.

I’m not even going to try to list my preferences for individual skills – there are too many and to be honest I think some people just like to be creative, so I’ll use the terms from the taxonomies when we get to that bit.

First question – do we actually need to build these things, or do they develop organically?

Easy answer – yes, we need to build them.

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) did some work comparing their General Capabilities to the core skill curriculums of four other high performing educational systems from across the world (find the research here) and they found that when core skills are built into the curriculum, positioned at the same level as other subjects, and taught explicitly student academic performance improved.

The World Economic Forum has also done a lot of work in this area, and have an excellent skills taxonomy which I’ll talk more about later, and they find that employers are changing hiring practices to focus on core skills, such as analytical and creative thinking, and self-efficacy skills.

We can no longer pretend that these skills aren’t as important as technical skills or pure academic knowledge.

There are examples of where this has been done well, and in every case the results speak for themselves.

The archived New Basics program from almost twenty years ago transformed student performance – kids in the program from disadvantaged schools were outperforming those in the most elite schools in the state. This program took a transdisciplinary approach and created a series of rich tasks for learners to engage with, which required core skills to address.

The CPaBL initiative from New Zealand is another example, where teachers were equipped to build core skills and career education into the curriculum, with great academic and engagement results, but unfortunately without ongoing support.

Skills Builder Partnership have been leading the way in this space for a while, and their research indicates that students with access to improved skill development during education feel more confident with their careers, and make more money.

So, in other words, when we make an effort to incorporate core skill development into our educational systems, students benefit.
Next question – which skills do they need?

If I’ve learnt one thing from researching all these taxonomies, it’s that people like to reinvent the wheel. Every taxonomy makes the case for why it’s collection of core skills is superior and fit for purpose, but I’ve been able to break them into three categories of frameworks:

1 – Core skills taxonomies

These focus on the core skills we need to thrive at work, and are generally designed for all ages (not just for students). They also don’t tend to list career management competencies – in other words, they don’t list the skills we need to manage our careers, just the ones we need to do the actual work.

When I started this process, I assumed that these would be one and the same, but it turns out I was wrong, and that’s a story for another article.

These skills tend to be the ones highly rated by employers and industry bodies, and I’ve listed a stack of these below.

2 – Curriculum Core Competencies

These are designed for educational systems, and are developmentally appropriate for children and teenagers. I feel that they’re designed to prepare children for the world, not just for work, and there’s a focus on creating ‘good citizens’ (whatever that means).

I found that these often contained watered-down versions of the core skills from the adult/employer taxonomies – so, for example, the adults usually split up cognitive skills into Critical Thinking, Innovation, and Problem Solving, but in the curriculum these would be combined into Critical and Creative Thinking.

These also sometimes contained elements of the career management competencies (in #3), for example, in Finland one of their competencies is ‘Working life competence and entrepreneurship’.

3 – Career Management Frameworks

These are the skills we need to manage our lives, but particularly our career pathways. I found that they contained different skills from the other two frameworks, and these tend to focus on:

• Self-Awareness/Management, which could also be pushed into Self Efficacy
• Information seeking and processing capability
• Making decisions

There is overlap…

Many of the skills appear in all three types of taxonomies (Communication is a popular contender), but there are also some areas of non-alignment which need exploring further. And that is a subject for another article.

For now, I think we need more research into these skills and competencies, to see if it’s even possible to distil them into one set that covers everything.

I have questions:

• How do the skills interact with each other? Does development in one area lead to development in another, or do you need to build one skill before you can work on another?
• Is it possible to have high levels of skill in one area alone, and, if so, how does this impact on capability?
• Which skills do our young people already develop in school, or through the other things they do, and which ones need work?
• How can we change up our curriculum so it builds core skills alongside subject knowledge?
• What do career outcomes look like for people with different levels of skills?
• Do we even need to agree on one global set of skills, or is it OK for local groups to develop their own sets of skills, based on what people need in each place?

Lots of questions…

One curveball

There is one framework which is relatively new and which needs talking about because, to be honest, it doesn’t really fit with the others.

I’m talking about the OECD Education and Skills Transformative Competencies, part of the OECD Learning Compass 2030:

The three Transformative Competencies are:

• Creating new value
• Reconciling tensions and dilemmas
• Taking responsibility

And these cross over numerous core skill areas to combine them into three mega-skills.

Personally, I like some aspects of this new way of thinking about skills. It takes them out of the abstract, theoretical space and grounds them in purpose, allowing us to bring our own ideas about our strengths and skills to the process.

The three competencies are also as valuable and applicable at home and in the community (including in our schools) as they are in the workplace.

I’m not alone in feeling that these competencies hold potential and can align well with existing frameworks – there’s an excellent paper here from Rosemary Hipkins, Sue McDowell, and Bronwyn Wood which looked at how the OECD’s work compares to the New Zealand Curriculum and it’s well worth a read.

It will be interesting to see if/how other systems incorporate some of these ideas into their own core skill taxonomies in the future. But, now that we’ve looked at the one real outlier, I’d like to list the other Core Skill Taxonomies I’ve found.

Core Skill Taxonomies from around the world

Two things: this list is not exhaustive, so if I’ve missed one you like please share it with me. Secondly, these are only the pure taxonomies that fit into section one of the three types of skills listed above – not the curriculum competencies, or the career management frameworks. If I listed those as well we’d be here all day!

These are not in any particular order, this is just how they appear in my mapping, so don’t read anything into which ones are first. New ones I find get added at the end, which is why some of the best ones are there.

Australian Skills Classification – Jobs and Skills Australia – Australia

There are ten Core Competencies in the ASC which are defined as follows:

“Core competencies are common to all jobs. They describe a set of non-specialist skills gained through schooling and life experience which provide a base to further develop skills and specialities.”

Jobs and Skills Australia – Australian Skills Classification

They seem to have really honed in on academic skills – they break literacy into Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication, for example, which seems a little excessive – and there are some other interesting pairings like Initiative and Innovation, which don’t tend to go together in my head.

Here’s an example of how they appear in relation to a specific job (Architect):

So, the ten skills are:

1. Digital engagement
2. Initiative and innovation
3. Learning
4. Numeracy
5. Oral communication
6. Planning and organisation
7. Problem solving
8. Reading
9. Teamwork
10. Writing

Read more here.

Essential Skills – Skills Builder Partnership – UK

They have eight skills, and while they’re technically a skill taxonomy they also have close links to education, which means the list is less complex than some of the other taxonomies. I’m also interested in the inclusion of Aiming High and Leadership, which don’t often appear in the other adult-focused taxonomies, and it would be interesting to map these to some of the self-management and collaboration skill areas.

The eight skills are:

1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Problem Solving
4. Creativity
5. Staying Positive
6. Aiming High
7. Leadership
8. Teamwork

The Essentials Skills seem to be really popular with schools, I know I’ve spoken with quite a few devoted Career Advisors about them (thanks Ladi Mohammed-Chapman for introducing me to them) and they offer some great learning programs to help build these skills, so this taxonomy is one really worth checking out if you’re working in the education space.

Read more here.

Global Skills Taxonomy – World Economic Forum

This taxonomy is part of a really interesting reskilling project the WEF is undertaking to establish a skills-first approach.

This taxonomy differs slightly from the others in that they’ve included technical skills (i.e. Programming) alongside core skills, but the taxonomy makes sense and you could argue that they’re just being more specific about things like digital literacy, which appear in other taxonomies.

You really need to go here to explore the taxonomy properly, as it’s quite involved with multiple levels.

I’ve mapped the skills to their Top 10 Skills, and one thing that stood out to me was the prominence of Self-Efficacy in the skills they predict we’ll need to navigate the workforce into the future:

This is from my mapping, not their site, but you can see how when we look at the four Self-Efficacy sub-skills they all appear in the Top 10 Skills.

I found this really interesting because self-efficacy is incredibly important, but it was missing from the other taxonomies – sometimes the sub-skills would appear, but self-efficacy itself was absent.

Through this process, I’ve started to wonder if we need to split out self-efficacy from the other skills and see it as a meta-skill, one that we need on top of all the others to be able to accurately assess our capabilities. But that’s also a topic for another day.

Career Readiness Competencies – National Association of Colleges and Employers – USA

I really liked this taxonomy – it’s very focused on skills college grads need to thrive in the workforce, but I liked the simplicity of it. They also include career development as a skill, which many of the other taxonomies ignore, and within this competency they include things like self-awareness, networking, lifelong learning, and exploring opportunities.

They list eight competencies:

1. Career & Self-development
2. Communication
3. Critical Thinking
4. Equity & Inclusion
5. Leadership
6. Professionalism
7. Teamwork
8. Technology

Skills for Success – Government of Canada

This is another broad taxonomy which is designed for adults but could be applicable in educational settings as well. They define these skills as:

Skills for Success are skills that help you in a quickly changing world. Everyone benefits from having these skills. They help you to get a job, progress at your current job and change jobs. The skills also help you become an active member of your community and succeed in learning.

Government of Canada – Skills for Success

The nine skills are:

1. Adaptability
2. Collaboration
3. Communication
4. Creativity and Innovation
5. Digital
6. Numeracy
7. Problem Solving
8. Reading
9. Writing

This is another taxonomy which is quite literacy-heavy – this is something that seems to happen when the creators try to cover educational competencies alongside the skills for work.

Read more here.

Critical Core Skills – SkillsFuture SG – Singapore

With this taxonomy we’re back to a workplace-focused list. They list 16 skills overall, but these are broken into 3 key areas:

1. Thinking critically
2. Interacting with others
3. Staying relevant

And I quite like these three areas – they remind me of the OECD Transformative Competencies.

By including double the number of skills (compared to the usual 8) they’ve brought more depth to the conversation, but the three overarching categories give it structure. One interesting point is that the taxonomy refers to ‘core’ skills, but the literature refers to ‘soft’ skills – not sure if that was deliberate or not.

Read more here.

Future Ready Talent Framework – University of Waterloo – Canada

This is another work-focused taxonomy, designed to help individuals prepare for the workplace. I like a lot of the language they’ve used in this framework as it’s very practical, for example, under each skill they link the skill to its practical application:

There are 12 competencies across four areas:

And you can read more about the framework here.

I particularly like the ‘Design and Deliver Solutions’ group – they’ve linked the ability to think critically and innovatively with the practical implementation of solutions, which is something that tends to be lumped with other self-management skills in other taxonomies. In this grouping, they’re saying that the ideas are only as good as your ability to implement them.

Durable Skills – America Succeeds – USA

Last but not least we have Durable Skills, which is a mega taxonomy with 100 skills split into ten areas:

They analysed job postings to develop this taxonomy, which is one tactic I quite like because it ensures the skills are grounded in what employers are literally looking for (and, incidentally, in their research they found that the top durable skills were requested in job postings more than 5 times as often as the top ‘hard’ skills.)

I’m not going to list all 100 skills, but there’s a lot to unpack here – thanks Evelyn Van Til for sharing them with me.

You can learn more about the skills here.

That’s a lot of skills…

I’m still mapping and unpacking, and I’d love to hear what everyone else thinks, so please reach out if you’d like to chat about skills, or if you’d like to write something for a future Pondering Careers Newsletter about your own experiences with core skills.

Thanks again for joining me this week, it’s always so great to have you here and to be part of this incredible community of people trying to do good things for the next generation.

You can read previous editions of Pondering Careers here.