Tag: #skills

Why our views on building people’s skills are outdated

2023 is the European Year of Skills. This is an initiative from the European Commission to address skill shortages within the EU.

Considering that it’s October and you probably never heard of this, I’m going to suggest that this initiative hasn’t been a roaring success.

This week, I attended the EU Industry Days – all things industrial policy. One of the topics that came up frequently was around skills, including a set-piece panel on it.
I must admit this conversation was the one that left me the most disillusioned.

Change your relationship with learning new skills

As the old life-script goes, we are born, we go to school, we work, we retire and we die. The suggestion is that we spend the early part of our life learning, until we hit the working age where we are ‘doing’ until we retire.

In modern times however, this script no longer works. Unfortunately our education system was not built to prepare us for these new realities, pushing us to focus on what we are ‘good’ at, rather than developing the skill of getting better at what we are ‘bad’ at.