Youth worldwide are finding it increasingly hard to enter and be successful in the workforce. Global youth unemployment stands at a staggering 75 million and the number is rising. Over the past 20 years, as the workforce has modernized around the world, soft skills—the skills, competencies, behaviors, attitudes, and personal qualities that enable people to navigate their environment, work with others, perform well, and achieve their goals—have become centrally important.
For a recent Child Trends report, Key Soft Skills that Foster Youth Workforce Success, researchers examined more than 380 international resources across multiple disciplines and held focus groups and interviews with stakeholders. The study looks at relationships between soft skills and four workplace outcomes: getting a job or being employed, performance on the job, wages, and entrepreneurial success. There is strong evidence that the following five skills increase workforce success among youth ages 15 to 29.
The evidence supporting the importance of these five soft skills is strong. Their importance is backed by a solid research base and supported by stakeholders including employers, youth, and experts; there is evidence they are important across sectors and diverse world regions. Each skill can be observed in the workplace and is developmentally appropriate for youth to cultivate. Youth workforce development programs, funders, and schools can be confident that developing these skills will likely improve the chances of success for young people in the workforce.
Social skills are a cluster of skills necessary to get along well with others, including respecting others and expressing appreciation, resolving conflict, and behaving according to social norms. Social skills predict all four types of workforce outcomes (employment, performance, income/wages, and entrepreneurial success), are sought by employers, and are seen as critically important by experts in the field. A study set in New Zealand found a positive relationship between sociability and establishing relationships at age 18, and occupational attainment and work stimulation at age 26. In Great Britain, a study found that social skills measured at age 10 predicted higher wages among entrepreneurs. Employers in Egypt, India, and Vietnam seek social skills when hiring new employees.Communication skills include effective expression, transmission, understanding, and interpretation of knowledge and ideas. There is evidence that communication skills are related to three of the workforce outcomes studied for youth. They are the most frequently sought skill among employers, and they were strongly endorsed by stakeholders in this project. In Europe, 35 experts identified communication as the number one skill required in the workforce and recommended its inclusion in academic curricula. In India, non-verbal skills such as recognizing non-verbal cues and body language were identified as important by employers.Higher-order thinking enables young employees to solve workplace problems independently using available resources, prior knowledge, and experience. Higher-order thinking is very much sought by employers and is critical for all four workforce outcomes in all regions of the world. For example, problem solving was identified as a top skill in employer surveys in Pakistan, Macedonia, and Lebanon. Decision-making was highly ranked by employers in both India and Brazil.
Self-control refers to a person’s ability to delay gratification, control impulses, and regulate behaviors. Employers look for self-discipline or employees who can manage their emotions. Self-control is highly supported by rigorous literature as related to all four workforce outcomes. For example, a child’s level of attentiveness at age eight was predictive of their employment in upper-level, white collar jobs at age 42 in Finland. It is also related to entrepreneurial success. In the West Bank, a survey of young entrepreneurs nominated “patience” as a key skill for success as an entrepreneur.
Positive self-concept was also found to be among the most important skills across all outcomes, and specifically for job performance and income outcomes among youth. Self-awareness, self-confidence, job search self-efficacy, and self-esteem are important for obtaining work in multiple countries worldwide.
| Students learn to swim as a life skill in Hai Phong Province. Life skills should be offered as a subject in Viet Nam's education curriculum to encourage a more well-rounded development of students, such was the takeaway. — Photo laodong.com.vn |
HA NOI (VNS) — Life skills should be offered as a subject in Viet Nam's education curriculum to encourage a more well-rounded development of students, such was the takeaway at an education conference held yesterday.
Deputy Director of Save The Children Viet Nam, Doan Anh Tuan, spoke about life skills education at schools. Tuan cited increasing numbers of Vietnamese parents calling for life skills courses, arguing that such skills were needed in addition to academic knowledge nowadays.
The Ministry of Education and Training had already taken actions to equip students with basic life skills, Tuan said.
However, including life skills courses in Vietnamese schools was difficult, partly due to a shortage of trained teachers and partly time concerns. Vietnamese students' educational programmes were already criticised for being overloaded and stressful.
An officer from Save the Children foundation, Hoang Tay Ninh, said that lack of life skills make youngsters unconfident in crowds, dependent, selfish, irresponsible to family, and incapable of coping with sudden problems.
She cited a survey of 45 students from a class in central Ha Tinh Province. All 45 students rode bikes to school but few could name parts of the bike and none could fix it if needed. Only four of them can swim and a third of them can cook. All of them remember friends' birthdays but only four remembered their parents' birthdays.
Others have blamed lack of life skills for adolescent crime, for example the case of a teenager boy who killed his seven year old neighbor for money for computer games.
Ninh said that, at school, life skills education is not an official subject, it is mixed into Literature and Biology subjects.
"When teachers have to teach both life skills and their expertise, they are under pressure, which makes the teaching process less effective," she said, adding that few teachers are trained to teach life skills.
Le Anh Lan, an inclusive education officer of United Nation Children's Fund, said that the organisation started life skills education in Viet Nam 15 years ago.
She said that now, as Viet Nam updates education and training systems to foster more practical skills, was the right time to formally bring life skills education into the national education programme.
However, she said, life skills should not be approached as a typical subject.
"Life skills can be learnt in any subject, from anyone, anytime and anywhere," she said.
An officer from the Education and Training Ministry's Students Affairs Department, Vu Duc Binh, said the ministry issued life skills teaching materials to teachers to teach in five subjects at schools and outdoor activities.
Since 2009, Save The Children along with provincial and city education departments ran projects to improve students' life skills from primary school to university. The projects focused on health, money management and natural disaster response.
Le Duc Anh, a tenth grader in Hai Phong City's Do Son High School, said he benefited from the financial and money-management lessons.
"It helped me know more about money, the value of money, how to spend and save money effectively, and how to talk about money with my parents," he said.
"I hope to have more life skill lessons," he said, "It would be great to have life skills as part of our school curriculum." — VNS
In my opinion, Vietnamese teenagers should learn and practice. Among them, i think communication skill is one of the most important ones as this affects their future. Actually, many youngsters lacks of basic abilities of interact with people in the society. For example, they do not know how to have successful conversation with other people, especially the elder. In addition, they should boost their representation skill in public. In fact, Vietnamese students are quite shy and lack of confidence when speaking and giving their opinions in front of many others, which limits their creativity. Consequently, they cannot get good jobs after graduation although they graduate with flying colors.
