21ST Century Skills

21ST Century Skills —
Introduction to Entrepreneurial and 21ST Century Skills

"Every profession has skills needed and you can divide them between technical skills needed for a specific job, and more horizontal skills, also called key competencies or 21st and entrepreneurial skills. These are skills one needs in any profession, even though the way they are shown will be different depending on the job."

— Why (these) skills?

The world around us is continuously changing and so does the labour market. Today 's jobs will no longer exist in a few years, others will come instead. The work is increasingly flexible and volatile. In such a dynamic labour market, it is important for all involved (both employers, employees and self-employed) to be flexible and broadly employable.

Therefore, labour market must focus on inclusion and lifelong learning so that as many people as possible can secure and maintain a job and build a career.

That is why we have to move away from pigeonholing, approaching people as part of a risk or target group. The best way to guarantee inclusion generically is to use competency management.

This means that we offer people perspectives based on their acquired competences, based on a positive view of humanity, the belief that everyone is a vessel of unique skills and talents and that differences are enriching. That is also the essence of the 'capabilities' theory of poverty economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen. There are no prejudices or limitations involved in competency management. It ignores age, gender, origin, colour, .. ; it is only about the 'capabilities', the ability, the talents of people. Competency management builds on what you are or can be good at, where you can make a contribution based on your talents.

​In a work environment that is constantly changing as a result of digitization and robotization, employees not only need professional or job-related skills, but they must also possess the skills that make them agile and resilient. This concerns in particular entrepreneurial spirit, creative capacity, desire to learn, social and cultural capital, communication skills, but also digital skills. After all, every profession will have a digital component in the future, so that digital will become the new mother tongue. These are called the entrepreneurial and 21st century skills and they guara

21st-century skills. Image source: https://www.slo.nl/thema/meer/21e-eeuwsevaardigheden/achtergrondinformatie/

— 21ST Century and Entrepreneurial Skills

When exploring and doing our desk research, we came across many valuable studies and researches. The recommendations on what these skills are, show a lot of the same outcome and some accent differences.

Also we found out that there is a huge overlap in what is stated to be important in order to be successfully self-employed and what is desired in order to be a successful employee. So we decided to combine them in the workshops. It might be that people start considering becoming self-employed once they have learned more about what skills are important in that context.

These are the skills we withheld after our desk research, knowing that this is limitative list, and others could have been added.

We clustered the skills is 4 groups. Each of these entail 4 or 5 competencies/ skills.

1. Social skills

a. Mobilising others: Inspire, engage and get others on board. "Inspire and enthuse relevant stakeholders. Get the support needed to achieve valuable outcomes.

b. Working with others: Team up, work together, and network. Solve conflicts and face up to competition positively when necessary

c. Communicate: Knowledge of effective and appropriate communication patterns and the ability to use and adapt that knowledge in various contexts

d. Social-cultural skills: ability to use specific information about nation, speech etiquette knowledge and communication technology in order to achieve mutual understanding with other culture bearers.

2. Power of thinking

a. Spotting opportunities: Use your imagination and abilities to identify opportunities for creating value. Identify and seize opportunities to create value by exploring the social, cultural and economic landscape.

b. Creativity: Develop creative and purposeful ideas. Develop several ideas and opportunities to create value, including better solutions to existing and new challenges.

c. Valuing ideas: Make the most of ideas and opportunities. Judge what value is in social, cultural and economic terms. Recognise the potential an idea has for creating value and identify suitable ways of making the most out of it.

d. Critical thinking: intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analysing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

e. Problem solving: Identify, prioritize, select alternatives for a solution and implement a solution.

3. Self-regulation

a. Ethical and sustainable thinking: Assess the consequences and impact of ideas, opportunities and actions. Assess the consequences of ideas that bring value and the effect of entrepreneurial action on the target community, the market, society and the environment.

b. Reflect on how sustainable long-term social, cultural and economic goals are, and the course of action chosen. Act responsibly

c. Self-awareness and self-efficacy: Believe in yourself and keep developing. Reflect on your needs, aspirations and wants in the short, medium and long term Identify and assess your individual and group strengths and weaknesses. Believe in your ability to influence the course of events, despite uncertainty, setbacks and temporary failures.

d. Motivation and perseverance: Stay focused and don't give up. Be determined to turn ideas into action and satisfy your need to achieve. Be prepared to be patient and keep trying to achieve your long-term individual or group aims. Be resilient under pressure, adversity, and temporary failure.

e. Coping with uncertainty, ambiguity and risk: Make decisions even when the result of that decision is uncertain, when the information available is partial or ambiguous, or when there is a risk of unintended outcomes.

4. Entrepreneurial skills

a. Mobilising resources: Get and manage the material, non-material and digital resources needed to turn ideas into action. Make the most of limited resources. Get and manage the competences needed at any stage, including technical, legal, tax and digital competences.

b. Taking the initiative: Initiate processes that create value. Take up challenges. Act and work independently to achieve goals, stick to intentions and carry out planned tasks.

c. Planning and management: Prioritise, organise and follow up. Set long-, medium- and short-term goals. Define priorities and action plans. Adapt to unforeseen changes

d. Client focus: Identify opportunities that benefit the client, build and deliver solutions that meet the client’s expectations and establish and maintain effective client relationships

EntreComp: The Entrepreneurship Competence Framework.

The development of the entrepreneurial capacity of European citizens and organisations is one of the key policy objectives for the EU and Member States. Ten years ago, the European Commission identified sense of initiative and entrepreneurship as one of the 8 key competences necessary for a knowledge-based society.

The EntreComp framework presented in this report proposes a shared definition of entrepreneurship as a competence, with the aim to raise consensus among all stakeholders and to establish a bridge between the worlds of education and work.

Image source: www.ec.europa.eu

— What about digital literacy?

At this moment, with the Covid-19 crisis not fully left behind us, we are all convinced that digitisation will radically change our work, social life and learning environments and we must see this as a challenge to realise a positive support to an inclusive labour market. To be able to address all these challenges we need to be prepared. Digital literacy will therefor only become more important. With digital literacy we understand:

  1. Media wisdom: safe, critical and smart use of media to participate in society

  1. Basic IT skills: understand how technology works and being able to use it

  1. Digital thinking: ability to analyse complex problems, recognise essence, see patterns and find systematic solutions

  1. Information processing: Dealing purposefully and systematically with information (or handling information goal oriented and systematically)

Also from a policy point of view, different actions have been taken and are still developing/ being elaborated in all countries. Think about the European digital skills agenda.

That is why we don’t elaborate further on them within our manual, but in each country we will refer to the existing other initiatives for people who have a need to become more digitally skilled.