Skills are the cornerstones of a person’s career prospects, which is a key determinant of quality of life. Skills development enables us to perform with excellence in our work and to uplift others.

The Essential Skills Framework addresses the transversal skill sets we need to adapt and excel in our increasingly complex world and the future of work.

 

Skills demands

The mix of skills needed in the economy and by society changes over time, driven by technologies, demographics, national priorities and challenges. For example, climate policy and the green energy transition, the growth of specific industries or sector based critical skills shortages. 

In advanced economies such as the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and Europe, job requirements have considerably risen over the last four decades. Employment opportunities increasingly lie in skilled roles that call for greater preparation through education, experience or other forms of training. Although unprecedented amounts of people are now gaining qualifications in response to these demands, employability isn’t guaranteed with a degree or formal training alone.

In the congested and highly competitive graduate labour market students increasingly see the need to add value to their degrees in order to gain an advantage. For experienced professionals ongoing training, learning and skills development is necessary for career progression, and central to being an effective leader.

 

The World Bank advocates that to succeed in the 21st century labour market, individuals need a skillset that includes higher order thinking skills, socio-emotional skills, specialised skills and digital skills. Much of the higher order thinking skills and specialised skills must be developed during post-secondary education and during professional experience.

 

Skills for the future of work and life

What skills should we develop now to be prepared and capable for the future?

Depending on who you ask, the answer will vary. The continuing evolution of workplace skills that we all need includes models for thinking, domain specific knowledge, technology tools for the 21^st century workplace and attitudes. Defining, measuring and building these skills— even naming them— can be challenging.

 

IBM Institute for Business Value Talent and Skills Global Survey

 

Hard skills are more technical or quantifiable in nature and include computer programming, literacy and numeracy, and foreign language proficiency. Soft skills, also called transversal skills, including communication, leadership and adaptability, are equally critical as part of our skillsets. 

Transversal skills are transferable across professions and occupations. Growing evidence shows that soft skills not only complement hard skills but rival technical skills in their ability to predict employment, earnings and other outcomes. Soft skills such as collaboration, creativity and problem solving enable us to achieve more from ourselves, with others, and from novel technologies. Although transversal skills are an integral part of skillsets that we all need, they are more difficult to identify and assess than technical skills.  

 

7 Transversal skills were coupled with 8 key competencies ratified by EU parliament in 2006 to ensure these skills were prioritised in education and training in the digital era (in Whittemore 2018)

 

Transversal skills

The Edaith Essential Skills Framework focuses on transversal skills. Transversal skills are cross-functional competencies that can be utilised across domains, geographies, occupations and roles, and throughout life. Essential for personal and career development, they help us adapt to changing workforce demands and to excel at tasks that cannot be automated by novel technologies. The development of transversal skills has a strong connection to improved self-awareness and self-knowledge and plays a critical role in ‘employability’.

 

The U.S Department of Education Office of Career Technical and Adult Education framework for employability underscores the range of non-technical skills, abilities and attitudes for skills development.

 

Transversal skills also enable us to work better with digital tools and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, which will play an increasing role in everyday work and life with the digitalisation of organisations and product and service provision for quality enhancement and productivity. Edaith takes the view that a range of digital competencies are equivalent to conventional transversal skills due to their crosscutting nature and utility across occupations and day to day activities. To highlight this importance technology skills is one of the pillars of the Edaith Essential Skills Framework.

Edaith has built on the work of researchers, policy makers and industry experts at agenda setting institutions and government organisations across the globe. Key foundations include Jobs and Skills Australia Skills Classification, the U.S. Department of Labour ONE Net, European Commission ESCO Classification (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations), OECD Annual Employment Outlook and the International Labour Organisation Global Framework on Core Skills for Life and Work in the 21st Century. 

 

Edaith’s Essential Skills Framework 

Cognitive skills	Thinking and conceptual capabilities
Intra- & Inter-personal skills	Self-regulation and working with others
Transformative skills	Enabling concepts and methods to get things done
Technology skills	Proficiency to utilise conventional and emerging technologies

 

Edaith’s skillset categories provide a pathway to identify and develop skills identified by national skills organisations and institutions. For example, the European Commission disaggregated skills, knowledge and competencies into almost 14,000 types and the datasets of the Australian Skills Organisation, which builds upon the U.S. O*NE net databases, includes thousands of skills and competency categories and classifications.

Through working across the Essential Skills framework, Edaith supports high level competency in core crosscutting skills that are needed across the workforce, particularly for high performance in knowledge work.  

The Edaith Essential Skills Framework enables the Essential Skills Series publications to embrace and decipher complexity. Delving deep into specialist subject matter, Edaith transforms information abundance into evidence based insights, enabling skills uplift and the pursuit of excellence no matter how short on time we find ourselves.

 

The first publication of Edaith's Essential Skills Series Problem Solver: the problem solving toolkit will soon be released. Sign up for By Edaith to get first access.