Durable Skills - Exactly What Are They?

 By Jama S. Coartney and Eric K. Kaufman -- 

Many have identified the need for more durable skills as students transition from school to the workforce. But, what exactly are durable skills? And why are they so important?

Durable, employability, and soft skills have pretty much the same meaning. For example, the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities defines employability skills as the “nontechnical skills used every day in the workforce to ensure the smooth operation of projects and offices.”

America Succeeds and Training Industry also provide lists of competencies related to durable, employability, and soft skills. Examples of these types of skills can range from empathy to decision-making to adaptability. While these studies highlight the importance of—and need for—teaching these skills to current and future generations of workers, they do not provide much clarity on how to go about doing so.

image of podcast episode

Luckily, Dr. Theo Dawson and team have developed teaching and learning approaches to build the skills needed for a world full of VUCA-volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In a great podcast interview, Dr. Theo Dawson discusses how to build durable skills, such as collaborative capacity. She considers collaborative capacity to be a mega-skill as it combines four different skills: self-regulation, perspective-seeking, perspective-taking, and communication.


Through a learning practice technique Dawson calls Micro-VCOL, virtuous cycles of learning, people can build their own collaborative capacity. It can also be a tool for parents and other educators to use in the learning process.


For more information about collaborative capacity building, VCOL, and other aspects of Dr. Theo Dawson’s work, consider the following resources:


Additional Resources Referenced throughout the Post


Images

Goodman, J. (March 15, 2019). Image in Editorial, Business & Work. Free to use under the Unsplash License.

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