ESSENTIALS DON’T CHANGE
Analytical thinking, innovation and creativity are as important as technical knowledge
Analytical thinking, creativity and innovation are as important as technical
What do you need to be successful in the workplaces of tomorrow?
According to the World Economic Forum, it’s the “soft skills” that employers see rising in prominence over the next five years. In last year’s Future of Jobs report, the international NGO listed analytical thinking and innovation, complex problem-solving, and creativity, originality and initiative as a few of the top skills for 2025.
The pandemic’s push toward remote work has only increased their importance. Online education platform LinkedIn Learning, in its fifth annual Workplace Learning Report, cited adaptability, emotional intelligence and communications across remote or distributed teams as the most critical this year.
But productive personality traits can’t be mastered from a textbook. So how do universities and colleges, tasked with preparing graduates for the workplace, equip students with the soft skills they need to thrive?
“I would start by objecting to the term soft skills,” says Alison Gibbs, director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation. “As a teacher, they are much harder to teach than the technical skills. It’s hard work to acquire them and maintain competency in them. So, we tend to use professional skills or power skills.”
Though they’re harder to teach, postsecondary institutions have various strategies.
“We’ve been doing it forever, it’s just not always labelled like that,” says Celia Popovic, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University. “If I said, today we’re going to be working in teams, the focus would be on the thing that you produce. But, while doing that, you’re developing team-working skills.”
Learning interpersonal skills from group work can go unnoticed because universities don’t typically grade and measure those skills.
But assessing students in new ways can help put skills like creativity in the spotlight, says Camille Soucie, dean of the Faculty of Arts at Seneca College.
“One example is in our ‘World Literature’ course. Students might have the opportunity to either write an essay about ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or to write a whole new chapter. So, they have to understand the text and understand the context, but then be able to apply what they know in a really creative way. I think the way we assess students helps to bring out that creativity.”
One of the most effective ways to teach these soft skills, instructors say, is through experiential learning, whereby students learn by doing.
“It’s about getting away from education as just a set of theories, and specifically getting students to apply them,” Popovic says. One of the most common ways to do that is through job placements, which is becoming embedded in a great number of post-secondary programs, and regardless of the subject it gives students “the opportunity to go and face the real world,” she adds.
Experiential learning also gives students the opportunity to struggle with difficult problems.
“We’re always working on ways to integrate high-impact practices at the University of Toronto, where students are solving real problems with real people on the other end. The problems tend to be more poorly defined because they’re real problems,” Gibbs says.
“But the struggle isn’t enough. They learn to stop and reflect on the process and what allowed them to get beyond the struggle. To explicitly articulate the strategies that they took is extremely important.”
Some institutions take a direct approach to teaching soft skills. The University of Toronto, for example, offers continuing education programs that focus on career development and workplace communications, which address topics like public speaking, sensitive communication skills and negotiation. At Seneca, a new degree program was introduced for students who have a diploma in a vocational or professional area — the program, Soucie says, is all about adding soft skills to those already armed with practical vocational skills.
But, naturally, developing soft skills goes beyond what you can learn in the classroom. That’s why university career centres are offering capacity-building workshops, help students to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and work on their research and problemsolving skills.
Then, there’s the nearly limitless extracurricular options available to post-secondary students — the clubs, societies and athletics that develop skills like teamwork, decisiveness and leadership.
“It sounds simple, but just getting involved and interacting with others (develops soft skills),” says Michael Halinski, an assistant professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management. “The more interaction people have, the better they are at communicating. And communication is a highly sought after skill which employers often look for, and often find lacking in recent grads.”