How can we achieve success?
If we look at examples of successful people, Jack Ma has his 10 rules for success, Elon Musk has his 6 secrets to business success, and Steve Jobs has his top 10 rules for success. But among all these rules from business people of diverse cultures and backgrounds, what is the common denominator that links them all together? The answer: soft skills.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the global population of university graduates is expected to nearly double over this decade and reach 300 million by 2030. As more and more people have access to higher education and are increasingly equipped with hard skills, employers are starting to turn to soft skills in order to differentiate their employees. As Kate Lorenz, author of Top 10 Soft Skills for Job Hunters, puts it, “Companies value soft skills because research suggests and experience shows that they can be just as important an indicator of job performance as hard skills.”
Companies value soft skills because research suggests and experience shows that they can be just as important as indicator of job performance as hard skills
Kate Lorenz, author of Top 10 Soft Skills for Job Hunters
So what are soft skills?
The Oxford Dictionary defines soft skills as personal qualities that enable people to communicate well with others. In contrast with hard skills, soft skills cannot be taught through formal education or training. Rather, they have to be nurtured over a long period of time and are highly dependent on individual personalities. This is why we need to start nurturing these soft skills in our children now while they are still young so that when they grow older, they will be fully equipped to succeed in the workplace.
In order to help you with your journey in inculcating soft skills in your children, we have put together a list of some of the most important soft skills that employers look out for, and how you can nurture them in your children.
1. Critical thinking
Critical thinking is a skill that requires your children to think clearly and deeply about what to do and what to believe. Being critical thinkers allows children to be able to understand the information that they are exposed to, instead of just memorizing it.
For instance, identifying whether a piece of news is fake news requires critical thinking – we need to observe the facts, analyze the source, and make inferences about the information we have to draw a conclusion.
Critical thinking is important both in and outside of the classrooms as it helps people to improve their comprehension and self-expression abilities. It can be nurtured by encouraging children to embrace questioning, where children are challenged to ask questions. There is a common saying, “there is no such thing as a stupid question”. Asking questions reflect the critical thinking process – it is only when children think critically do they then come up with questions to ask. At the same time, children should be asked questions to get them to think critically about their answers as well.
2. Resourcefulness
Being resourceful means that children have to find their own ways and methods of overcoming difficulties instead of constantly relying on someone else, like their parents or teachers. The ability to be resourceful will allow your children to be independent thinkers and lets them showcase their own abilities in dealing with challenges. Resourcefulness often allows people to maximize opportunities, giving them a greater chance at success.
The idea of self-directed learning is based on this very concept. In encouraging children to take control of their own learning and try to solve problems by themselves before asking others for help, we can nurture children to be able to leverage on their existing knowledge and skills to overcome the difficulties that they face. For example, before asking a question, a resourceful child could try to find the answer on his or her own by doing a quick Google search first, before asking a parent or teacher for help.
3. Adaptability
Being resourceful greatly contributes to this next soft skill, adaptability. Adaptability would help children to have an unparalleled advantage in this volatile, uncertain, changing and unambiguous (VUCA) world, and being resourceful would help children to adapt more quickly and efficiently under changing circumstances.
Take the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as an example – businesses all around the world have been impacted by this unprecedented crisis. And yet, we see the ones that survive, and even thrive, are the ones who have adapted to the crisis in various ways – shifting their operations online (like we did with our move towards online classes!), adjusting their business models, and even coming up with new products and services to cater to customers’ new shopping habits.
Now more than ever, we need to be adaptable. How then do we teach our children to be adaptable? Perseverance, not perfection. By encouraging children to keep going even in the face of difficulty, they will learn how to adapt to their circumstances by learning new skills and behaviours, and will eventually adapt to overcome the challenges they face.
4. Perseverance
As Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Having perseverance will give your children opportunities to fail, learn, grow, and succeed. Perseverance, not perfection is a concept that encourages children to have a positive mindset to overcome the fear of making mistakes, and learn from it.
As human beings, it is inevitable that we are afraid to fail, but the truth is that we learn best from making mistakes. Like with programming, the debugging process is very common especially when we encounter errors with the code or program. It is times like these we encourage students to continue to persevere to find out the root of the problem to solve it.
5. Creativity
Children are blessed with the power of extraordinary imagination. However, students are so used to the current education system where they go through a rigorous process that strips them of this power at times, leaving us with barren systems that excel in parroting information. As the world faces rapid advancement into the digital age, the problems we face are becoming increasingly complex and unfamiliar. Now more than ever, we need to be creative to be able to stand out in this competitive space.
In order to keep children creative and imaginative, we must teach them to adopt the innovator’s mindset – to break limits and create innovative solutions. It is only with such a mindset will children be able to have real-life application of the skills and knowledge they learn in school, and effectively carry their takeaways from their academic lives into the workplace in the future. We are thankful to be able to witness that in our classrooms everyday seeing the amazing creations of our students!
Check out how our students create award-winning projects using Scratch or CoSpaces Edu!
6. Positive Attitude
Above all, having a positive attitude is important. In face of difficulties and problems, it is easy to feel discouraged. However, having a positive attitude can help to reduce stress, increase productivity and improve decision-making. Being positive can also help the other soft skills such as creativity and perseverance. We should encourage children to prioritize attitude over intelligence, and teach them that great results stem from a great attitude and a critical thinking process. By inculcating an attitude of positivity in children from a young age, they are more likely to carry this positivity into their daily lives in the future as well.
In the end, we can see that many of the soft skills are intertwined, most of which are interdependent on each other. To be able to have effective problem solving skills, we need critical thinking to identify, analyse and understand the underlying issue that creates the problem. Beyond that, critical thinking is required when evaluating the solutions that we come up with. Do our ideas and suggestions truly value-add, or do they only seem to tackle the problem when taken at face value? In the real world, things are unlikely to sail smoothly according to our expectations. We may be met with changing circumstances and conditions. In such situations, we need to be adaptable and adjust to our environments accordingly, and be able to solve our problems under all conditions. It is important that we encourage one another with positivity to persevere through in order to come out victorious on the other end.
