Young People, 21st Century Skills and the Future of Work

Professor Peter Kelly

In this blog on 21st Century Skills, I will pick up on a number of themes introduced in a previous blog on Young People and the Future of Work to examine critically and creatively (21st century skills!!) the ways in which these skills are understood, and how they have come to be seen as providing some sort of solution to the ‘problem’ of young people’s education, training and employment pathways in/to the future of work.

In a video at the end of this blog Anna-Hickey Moody, the Vital Arts project lead, critically reflects on the sorts of 21st century skills that she observed in a recent intensive period of fieldwork with the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).

21st Century Skills: What Are They?

In a 2018 report that canvases a number of challenges for Australian VET systems, Anne Jones, from the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at The University of Melbourne, outlines both the context of profound changes in labour markets, especially for young people, and the sorts of capabilities young workers need to develop in order to be employable in these labour markets:

‘We do not know how work and employment opportunities will change in the near future. Predictions range from “forecasts that nearly half of jobs in advanced economies may be automated out of existence” to confidence that high-level vocational skills will be more important than ever in the digital world…What we do know is that people will need educational breadth as well as occupational depth to adapt and thrive as industries and society change. Researchers who have looked specifically at how vocational education can prepare people for digital disruption emphasise the importance of acquiring broad technical skills that can be adapted and applied in novel contexts, complemented by what have become known as twenty-first century capabilities…’ (Anne Jones (2018) p.2)

‘Twenty-first century capabilities…represent the knowledge, skills, attitudes and dispositions individuals must acquire to adapt to complex and unknown circumstances…For example, European Union countries have identified the capabilities they consider necessary to remain globally competitive and to best prepare individuals for lifelong employment. These comprise high-level technical skills, core skills and a range of capabilities referred to in the EU as transverse capabilities – “the ability to think critically, take initiative, problem solve and work collaboratively will prepare individuals for today's varied and unpredictable career paths…particularly entrepreneurial skills” (European Commission, 2012)…’ (Anne Jones (2018) p.4)

These are things computers/AI cannot do. This is a point that we will explore as the project develops.

In a ‘technical’ paper from 2018 Stephen Lamb, Jennifer Jackson and Russell Rumberger from the Centre for International Research on Education Systems at Victoria University in Melbourne report on some of the work that they have done in defining, categorising and assessing these sorts of capabilities:

‘…Increasing attention is being given in contemporary educational research to non-cognitive or 21st century skills, or capabilities believed to meet the demands of “21st century work”…While test scores have been centre stage in international comparisons, there has been growing recognition of the effects that education has on the development of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and capabilities that affect the success of students in school and success in the labour market…Some studies point to lasting effects of non-cognitive skills on student’s lives including impacts on educational, career and health outcomes…Emphasising these skills, alongside core literacy and numeracy, arguably creates “more powerful learning experiences that lead to deeper understanding and more useful knowledge in tune with our times”…Assessing such skills may also help make visible the achievements of students who do not perform well in academic tests, and the contribution schools make to their learning… (Stephen Lamb, Jennifer Jackson and Russell Rumberger (2018) p.1)

‘…While there may be general agreement in the literature that 21st century skills are important, there is far less agreement as to what these skills are; whether they are malleable; whether they have any effect on other outcomes; and how they might be measured…’ (Stephen Lamb, Jennifer Jackson and Russell Rumberger (2018) p.2)

The World Economic Forum (WEF 2016) is just one of many organisations that continues to try to identify and classify the ranges of behaviours, competencies, skills, dispositions and capabilities that apparently comprise 21st century skills.

Source: World Economic Forum (WEF, 2016) New Vision for Education: Fostering Social and Emotional Learning through Technology, p.4.

Figure 1: 21st Century Skills.

21st Century Skills: How Can they be Identified and Captured?

This sort of classification mirrors the work of others (including Lamb and his colleagues). It’s useful at this stage for its relatively clear representation of the ‘skills’ that an individual young person should have, should develop, and be able to use.

One challenge, however, is that many of these ‘skills’ - the so-called ‘COMPETENCIES’ and ‘CHARACTER QUALITIES’ in particular – might also be thought of as ‘personality traits’ or ‘intrinsic’ parts of a person’s ‘make-up’. And, therefore, not that easy to teach, or develop, or measure (see our critical examination of these challenges in our recent Rethinking Global Grammars of Enterprise) .

Recognising this dilemma, Stephen Lamb and his colleagues, as part of the work that they do in the report, present a ‘taxonomy’ of different clusters of ‘competencies’ (Cognitive, Intra-personal, Inter-personal); a list of commonly used terms that name 21st century skills in each of these clusters; and a list of corresponding cognitive and personal abilities.

Source: Stephen Lamb, Jennifer Jackson and Russell Rumberger (2018) p.4

Figure 2: 21st century skills clusters, with associated cognitive abilities and personality traits.

This sort of classification captures a sense of the range of ‘capabilities’ that are most frequently described when people are talking about 21st century skills. At the same time, while:

‘…The taxonomy at Figure 1 provides a useful conceptual foundation for differentiating between malleable skills and non-malleable traits…it does not address how these skills operate within the education system….’ (Stephen Lamb, Jennifer Jackson and Russell Rumberger (2018) pp.4-5)

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), in a submission to a summit of national VET stakeholders in 2013, outlined its understanding of 21st century skills, and why they should be a priority for VET:

‘While defined sets of skills and knowledge can be developed for particular areas of work and study at particular points in time, rapid changes in technology and social and economic structures, including those related to globalisation, may mean that specific skills and knowledge learned during education and training are quickly outdated in the real world.

Masters (2013) notes that employers, in particular, have emphasised “the need for employees who can work collaboratively in teams, use technology effectively and create new solutions to problems” and highlights the work of the international collaboration known as the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S).

ATC21S is one prominent attempt to define in detail this wider range of skills. These can be grouped into four broad categories:

• ways of thinking (including creativity, critical thinking, problem- solving, decision-making and learning);

• ways of working (including communication and collaboration);

• tools for working (including information and communications technology and information literacy); and

• skills for living in the world (including citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility).’ (ACER 2013. p.5) 

This model offers much for thinking about how to imagine, and then capture, 21st century skills in different contexts, and for thinking about how this evidence might be included within a micro-credential (micro-cred). For example, Ways of Thinking, Ways of Working and Skills for Living in the World can be used to organise a series of questions in any instrument that is developed. And Tools for Working could be mapped against the kinds of literacies that are appropriate to any particular micro-cred.

At the same time, in this project we want to use these more orthodox understandings of21st century skills as a space of departure to critically rethink, and explore the limits and opportunities afforded by this manner of categorising, compartmentalising, quantifying and disaggregating the diverse range of attributes and capabilities that are deemed essential for young people’s ‘employability’ in new worlds of work. And how, by locating this project in diverse fields of creative practice, with diverse and different populations of young people, we can both contribute to a more critical and productive interjection into these debates about skills, capabilities and young people’s education training and employment pathways, and co-produce a series of micro-creds that can create and capture the value of these capabilities for young people, educators, arts organisations and the wider economy.

In the video below, Anna Hickey-Moody reflects on a number of these concerns from recent fieldwork with the Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP):