21st Century Competencies - Mapping Resources to Skills for Lifelong Learners

In this article I share an interactive graphic that curates videos, books, courses, and programs relating to each of the key skills needed by lifelong learners to thrive in the 21st century. I welcome your feedback and please do share this with those who can benefit.

I want to credit the inspiration for this article to Bernard Golstein who recently wrote an excellent article called ‘21st Century Competencies: AI-proof Education', part of a very interesting series he is working on. In his article he refers to a presentation and book by Joseph Aoun, President of Northeastern University in Massachusetts, USA , called Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. President Aoun's main recommendation is to rethink completely the higher education curriculum to cover three essential literacies grouped under the heading of "humanics" - technological literacy, data literacy, and human literacy - and to do so with a strong experiential learning emphasis. Using this framework, along with some naming changes to skill groupings based on a World Economic Forum report New Vision for Education, I have attempted to identify videos, books, courses, and programs that can best help lifelong learners become aware of these skills and, in time, use them for both their benefit and the benefit of others.

CHARACTER QUALITIES - How do I govern myself in a changing environment?

NEW FOUNDATIONAL LITERACIES - How do I apply core skills to everyday tasks?

COGNITIVE CAPACITIES - How do I approach complex challenges?

The interactive version is here and I recommend opening it so that you can zoom into sections and click on the resource icons to reveal hyperlinks to videos, books, courses, and programs I have suggested relating to each skill.

Some notes

1.     The skills listed are not exhaustive and there is some overlap between them. The choice of resources could be endlessly researched and debated - I just want to get something out into the public domain that can be of some benefit straight away and improved on in the future.

2.     I have here attempted to find materials relating to an adult lifelong learner. Future or other versions of this diagram could focus on primary, secondary, and higher education learners. This said, the resources I have referenced for the foundational literacies are typically aimed at a younger audience. However for a lifelong learner who wants to develop mastery of these skills the resources shown may be a good starting point.

3.     It will be up to the person who reads and uses this to ensure that the learning experience is truly experiential. To quote Bernard Golstein in his article:

“You cannot teach perseverance or creativity or empathy or collaboration with passive learners in a classroom. These traits have to be experienced and practiced.”

As Stephen R. Covey also reminds us in the preface to his wonderful book on the seven habits of highly effective people:

“Remember, to learn and not to do is really not to learn. To know and not to do is really not to know.”

4.     For ‘Video’ I have relied mostly on TED talks that helpfully introduce a skill or illustrate its use or benefit as the format of TED talks is such that a new subject is easy to grasp within ten to twenty minutes.

5.     For ‘Book’ I have supplied mostly links to Amazon Kindle since the ability to download a free sample is very useful before buying in whatever format and provider you choose.

6.     For ‘Course’ and ‘Program’ I have tried to identify an online offering, free or inexpensive where possible, that is a either a few hours for a course, or a few hours over a number of weeks for a program.

7.    As a disclaimer please know that I have not validated each and every resource here in terms of quality throughout and would therefore welcome feedback and suggestions for more suitable alternatives in a future version of this graphic.

An example of using this approach

Considering the character quality of grit as an example here is how I intend to benefit from this exercise of mapping resources to skills.

A. Discuss the VIDEO below by Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance with my wife so we can share an understanding and share enthusiasm in being intentional in our modelling and parenting.

B. Act on at least four key ideas from the BOOK Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by 1.Choosing one hard thing to do and persevere in, 2. Watch more intentionally for opportunities to model and encourage follow-through in my children, 3. Use the beep test in our back garden as a way of building mental attitude, and in the years to come encourage them to stick with an extra-curricular activity that both interests and challenges them for not one but at least two years.

C. Go through the LinkedIn Learning (free for first month) 40-minute short COURSE called Building Resilience by Tatiana Kolovou to get a different perspective on the skill of grit.

D. Participate in the 3-hour online masterclass PROGRAM Angela Duckworth on Building Grit for $25 via Plus Acumen to help me fully consolidate and apply what I am learning since it is a very human trait to vastly overestimate our our level of competence in understanding something new (aka the Kruger-Dunning effect).

Why is knowing about 21st Century skills important?

I recently was introduced to the concept of scenario planning at a presentation by scenario planner Frans Cronje here in South Africa where I now live. My key take-away was that after generating a set of scenarios - by following a formal process - it is then most important to watch and act on the probability of the scenario most likely to align with reality.

In my day job I follow the work of many technology consulting firms as they study trends and predict the impact of changing demographics, automation technologies, and artificial intelligence on labor and skill clusters over the coming decades. I am not going to summarize here the scenarios envisioned in these reports but a quote from the first page of the extremely detailed Bain report called Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality will suffice:

"Demographics, automation and inequality have the potential to dramatically reshape our world in the 2020s and beyond. Our analysis shows that the collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than we have experienced over the past 60 years."

This statement certainly gives significant cause for concern BUT I would contend that by acting on warnings such as this we can each seek to positively shape the lives and futures of our children, our companies, our communities, and by extension of our influence, the peoples of this world.

Over to you...

I would like to invite your feedback in the following ways:

A.    Considering the audience of an adult lifelong learner, can you recommend other or better resources than I have shown relating to the development of these skills?

B.    Can you recommend resources for the audiences of primary, secondary, and higher education learners relating to these skills so I can add them to a future version of the interactive graphic? (Ideally you have either benefited from or used these resources with these learners) 

C. If you found this article interesting or beneficial please share it with your network so that others can also benefit.

I grew up in a library…said almost no-one, ever.

To give you a sense of my own background I remember many of my evenings as a child when bedtime preceded sunset trying to make and remake imaginary patterns out of the coloured spines of familiar but unread books that towered in seemingly endless shelves both beside and opposite my bed. There were decades of National Geographic back-issues, an almost-complete set of Britannica encyclopedias, as well as an extraordinary number of children’s books, including the Famous Five and Secret Seven, and very memorably the first book that truly ignited my love of reading, White Fang by Jack London. Most likely I developed a need for glasses while reading in torch-light during these years in my library bedroom but it is only now I realise the life-sight reading gave me was worth the trade-off for slight myopia. I'm deeply thankful for my parents Mervyn and Daphne (entrepreneurs by the way) and the generations of my family in Co. Cork, Ireland who bought those books giving me the opportunity to read them.

My love of books and the world of ideas they unlocked persisted throughout my teenage and student life. Thankfully the value gained from the science, philosophy, and theology books I couldn't get enough of made me immune to the perceptions of others as a I read while walking to engineering lectures at Dublin City University. A decade later after completing another undergraduate degree at University College Cork in Social Science I even persuaded by young wife to help me catalog our own home library using the Dewey system for labels. Don't ask but I think I read somewhere once that George MacDonald (whom C.S. Lewis regarded as his literary "master") cataloged a library in his youth and thought it might be a good idea to do the same. I am glad to say that Nadine and I are still happily married nine years on.

We tend to project our biography and beliefs onto the lives of others – what they should know, should do, how they should behave. Both life experience and travel can begin to cure us of this hubris. However there is an important distinction between the respect you can show others by not insisting they follow your advice (the healthy plurality of ideas) and the laziness of not sharing advice that you have found to be very good indeed (information, the principles of knowledge, and the wisdom of beliefs that transcend cultures). As I consider how to form character in my own children (far more of an ongoing process than series of events), as well as develop in them the skills they will need to thrive as adults in a new economy, I wanted to write and share this article with my professional network with a particular focus on 21st Century skills development so that those who read this, and those you influence, can benefit also. Please do share with me some stories in the coming years. After all, not all the best stories are in books. <Family photo by Hillsong Centurion>

Sources / recommended reading:

Bain Report: "LABOR 2030: THE COLLISION OF DEMOGRAPHICS, AUTOMATION AND INEQUALITY"

DQ Institute 8 Digital Skills We Must Teach Our Children

Joseph Aoun: Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (MIT Press)

McKinsey Report: How to improve student educational outcomes

McKinsey Report: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages

WEF Report: New Vision for Education

WEF Book: Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Worldskills Report: Worldskills Vision 2025

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#scenarioplanning

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#wef