Best Practice

Careers education: Eight key skills for students

Careers guidance Work experience Skills
Socio-emotional skills are just as crucial to the workplace as academic qualifications for our students – especially in a world of AI. Dr Leila Walker names eight crucial skills and looks at how we can ‘teach’ these…
Image: Adobe Stock -

How does education best support young people to prepare for their future work lives? And what skills are needed to become workplace-ready – especially in a world that will be increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence?

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2020) these skills include non-verbal communication, “deep empathy”, growth management (coaching), mind management (counselling skills), and creativity.

So alongside the technical and digital skills required for the future workplace, there is seemingly a significant requirement for a range of wider skills.

However, the recent Beyond Academic Learning survey from the OECD (2021) showed that these “social-emotional skills” actually decline during the teenage years. It appears that the average 10-year-old has up to 30% better social and emotional skills than the average 15-year-old.

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