The New Skills?

What are the skills required for handling future jobs?

I found this report  from National Academies Press. A few skills listed in this document include:

1. Creative Problem Solving
2. Complex Communication Skills
3. Adaptability
4. Self-management
5. Self-development
6. Systems thinking

From my experience of working across two continents, I would like to add a few more:

1. Critical Thinking
2. Cross cultural training
3. Curiosity
4. Inspired and Inspiring (got this from a job ad at Forrester’s research)

I want to dwelve a bit on “Self Management”. I use it as a primary metric to hire people since I do not believe in supervising or managing people. I found that many people who are great at managing themselves do it because they believe in a cause, passionate about what they do or extremely proud of their work.

How do you develop these competencies? Or even explain why they are important? That is the challenge that requires a lot of innovation in teaching or coaching.

Also See:

Malcolm Gladwell on the challenge of hiring in the modern world.

Meta:

This post was triggered by an email from ACM news about a study done in Ireland. Looking at the study, I felt that some of these problems have global implications. So I started searching on “future skills” India, USA.