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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Integrating Employability Skills in a Traditional Ag Classroom through Learning Badges

Image
by Dr. Mallory White -- To weave workforce readiness skills into a traditional agriculture classroom can be a little challenging. My first-year animal science class tackled four of the twelve AWT4CL employability learning/digital badges. This blog discusses how we did it, challenges and possible lessons for the instructor and the student, and overall perception of the digital badges.  How We Did It   First, I set aside one lab period to discuss the project and complete many of the in-class activities. This required me to combine two traditionally separate, short labs into one to free up a week, but I was determined to make room for important employability content . The activities from each digital badge created by the badge authors are short and effective, but I wanted the students to do more in order to earn a badge. As an instructor, it can be difficult to come up with new, creative activities in the limited time we have. As I was rushing to come up with additional activ...
Read more

Agriculture Peer Group Formation at the Virginia Community College System

Image
by Adam O'Neal -- Based on input from a cohort of agriculture faculty from around Virginia, an Agriculture and Food Systems Peer Group has been constituted by the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) to serve the needs of agriculture program faculty around the Commonwealth of Virginia. Peer groups have existed for other disciplines for some time, but none for this area of study until now. From the shared experiences of the Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) cohort members and other agriculture faculty, we understand that collaboration at professional levels has proven challenging. This peer group promises potential benefits to agriculture faculty in unraveling professional challenges and related classroom and teaching concerns. Agriculture is the largest private industry in Virginia, with over 43,000 farms contributing to $82.3B a year in economic impact (Virginia Farm Bureau, n.d.). Though a number of Virginia Community College System ( V...
Read more

Fresh Year, Fresh Perspective

Image
by Megan Seibel -- I don’t know about you, but there is something about starting a new year that brings mixed emotions – anticipation, excitement, and even a bit of stress over all the things that were supposed to get accomplished last year and, well, just didn’t.  It is also interesting that each new year seems to be long anticipated, yet happens abruptly. And the changes that go with it sometimes require thought and attention. Take writing the date for example. After 365 days of writing 2023, it became a motor memory. It takes thoughtfulness to write 2024, with the trust that it will quickly become automatic.  So it goes with habits and intentions. New Year’s resolutions, so to speak. Looking back over the past year, perhaps some things warrant reflection so that adjustments can be made to improve, begin, or even stop certain behaviors. Here are a few tips and thoughts, similar to the PDSA (plan-do-study-act) model , to consider as we go into this new calendar year, and seco...
Read more