The role of skills development in the successful delivery of transformation projects.

In this week's 3@3 Al and Steve discuss the role of skills development in the successful delivery of transformational projects. 

Al talks about his own eclectic learning journey that incorporated further, higher, mature, online learning and everything in between. Having experienced the full spectrum of learning pedagogy's, Al suggests that the most important aspect of up-skilling is to find a learning approach that works for your circumstances and your preferred style of learning.

Whatever the approach it's important to implement that learning in the real world and turn the skills you learned into knowledge. Most crucial, however, is developing the mindset of a life long learner and being cognitive that through this 4th wave of industrialisation, even those considered to be experts' in their fields will require continuous learning throughout their careers to maintain their depth of knowledge on a subject. 

This isn't new of course, plenty of professions require continuous up-skilling, nursing being one of them. However, the rate of technological advancement is at a pace previously unseen, and it is now incumbent on individuals as well as businesses to prepare for this change if they hope to benefit in the future. Ultimately, getting started is the most important part. You won't really know what you don't know until you start.

Steve and Al talk about World Economic Forum predictions, which suggests that 65% of jobs in the next decade currently don't exist and asks, do we know what the key skills for the future look like?

While 'coding' could be a valuable skill to drive your kids towards, in our future driven by automation and AI. Coding is also something that computers with the help of AI, will get better at themselves and the real 'future skills' lie in your adaptability and other 'soft' or rather 'fundamental skill' attainment.

Our training programmes are built on a foundation of industry need and the resounding response from 'industry' is that job skills can be taught but they can't teach the fundamental skills and this message from industry mirrors the finding by the WEF. Soft skills are no longer an accurate name for this collection of interpersonal skills and these skills are now considered a fundamental requirement.