For Educators seeking to prepare their students for opportunities that won't fade away before they graduate, here is an example of one with enduring promise:
The Knowledge Manager will join the Engineering Education team, which works with all the engineering teams to educate engineers inside and outside Timescale and provides the resources each team needs to communicate effectively with other teams and the public.If you love understanding how teams work, and helping them work better together in a dynamic, fast-paced, growth-minded startup environment, this is the right role for you.
The Five 21st Century Skills
Notice that this 21st Century Job Description covers four of the most desirable skills generally recognized as essential for jobs of the future. They are highlighted in bold:
- Leadership
- Team Building
- Problem Solving
- Sales
- Communications
So how do we know these are the most desirable skills in the evolving job market?
They surfaced out of a deep dive review conducted by researchers at Georgetown University in 2020. Their report, Workplace Basics, was published in 2020. It focused on the entire US Economy.
The GU researchers broke down every sector of the American economy into rankings of required skills by sector. The Top 10 desirable job skills were listed by each sector. These five skills ranked high in every sector. The top 5 skills filtered out as a high priority need for all candidates looking for work in the modern workplace. And yet, not one of these five skills is cultivated in high school or Junior College programs.
While still in school, every student should take a hard look at their skills and talents. How good are your leadership skills? Are you a good team builder? Do you know how to solve problems, or do you rely too much on other people? Can you sell yourself, ideas or products? And, can you communicate in many forms and on many platforms? Are you only a good writer, but not a good speaker? Can you make social media posts that people like, understand, and engage with? Or does every post you make — receive crickets?
In the Industrial Park era, most employers would develop these skills in promising employees. They could count on them being there for the long term. But it is not like that in the Global Village. They can recruit skilled and "ready to work" employees from anywhere there is an Internet connection and the ability to communicate effectively with other remote teams
and the public. This is a fact of life both students and their teachers need to head if "educated in the USA" is to have any meaning in the 21st Century.
