Thinking about ‘essential employment skills’

The recent Skills Imperative 2035 report from the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) is the latest in a long line of documents making the case that the shift towards more professional jobs^(a) is increasing the need for generic, transferable skills variously called core skills, essential skills, employability skills, ‘soft’ skills or transversal skills. The NFER report calls them ‘essential employment skills’ and their top six are: communication, collaboration, problem solving, organising, planning & prioritising, creative thinking and information literacy^(b).

The abilities being described are important and worth nurturing. It’s clearly useful to be able to think things through systematically, work well with others, communicate well, handle information and manage projects, and education should help students develop such capacities. But the agenda is about more than good education. Once identified, an insufficient level of ‘essential employment skills’ joins the list of ‘skill shortages’ and widening ‘skills gaps’ seen as holding back our economy, and it is education which is expected to come to the rescue. But we need to be cautious about claiming that skills policy can solve our economic or labour market problems.

Metaphors of skill: toolkits, clingfilm and thunderclouds

We often think of skills as tools, and talk about skills toolkits, which offer us a range of well-designed instruments to choose from to help us get a job done. Each tool is designed for a particular type of task and can be used in different contexts for that specific task.

Metaphors can be useful to help make what seems abstract more concrete, but they can disguise as well as illuminate. In the case of ‘skills as tools’, used well, they make a job easier, but only if the human user understands the overall job. We have to know which tool to select for which task and also how to use it^(c). Each tool has embedded in its design the learning of many people before us, but the tool itself doesn’t learn^(d) and can’t help to define the objective of the bigger task, only the human user can do that.

Pat Ainley and Jenny Corbett¹ describe the narrative of generic and life-skills as “clingfilm language, that can stretch over almost anything” making the concept of skill into a ”nebulous moral issue, outside everyday experience.” And Charles Tilly² argues that “As a historical concept, skill is a thundercloud: solid and bounded when seen from a distance, vaporous and full of shocks close up”.

Skills as social relations: context, complexity, transferability

The things we call skills are created and shaped by society and the ways we relate to each other – our social relations. They have a history, a sociology and a political economy. The categories described as ‘essential skills’ are complex social activities which are context dependent and cover a multitude of very different experiences in very different settings applying very different knowledge sets and behaviours developed over time.

Real processes have been selected, named, packaged up, lifted out of real contexts and reified as discrete generic ‘things’ to be transferred between different settings. We need to be cautious about giving these constructs more weight than they can carry. They can be described generically but are always acquired and applied in specific contexts. They are highly social and are developed and experienced collectively, so decontextualising them in order to distil their ‘essentialness’ means losing their sociality and reducing their value. They have been extracted from the situations that generated them and have lost much of their meaning. These skills are best applied and evaluated in social settings and this isn’t always compatible with our individualised modes of learning and assessment.

Take ‘teamwork’ as an example. The teamwork required in a successful sports team is very different to that needed in the team running an agricultural co-operative. Each will be shaped by contextual knowledge and experience and also by the interactions of different people who bring their various hopes and histories, assumptions and attributes with them. 

What about ‘creative thinking’? In her essay ‘Critical Thinking’³, bell hooks writes:

“Thinking is an action… thoughts are the laboratory where one goes to pose questions and find answers, and the place where visions of theory and praxis come together.”

Thinking is about as broad a skill descriptor as it is possible to have, covering the multitude of mental activities we engage in throughout our lives and underpinning every other skill. There are many different ways to think and we can train ourselves to think things through more critically and systematically and maybe even more creatively, but treating it as a singular skill is stretching the ‘clingfilm’ too far.

Whose skills?

We also need to ask who gets to define and prioritize skills. If essential skills are framed purely in terms of employment this seriously narrows the range of their usefulness. A more inclusive definition would include people’s aspirations as workers and citizens, even if some employers might not welcome the kind of creative and critical thinking which includes questioning their business practices, or the kind of teamwork which involves building an effective union branch or the demonstration of planning and organising skills which lead to industrial action! 

The term ‘functional skill’ for literacy and numeracy gives a sense of how we can limit aspiration by reducing the scope of a skill to its narrowest purpose; doing merely what is necessary to function in a job role. What would a broader conception of skills look like if it was based on different priorities, for example human survival and planetary care, or liberation and emancipation? It would require us to centre those skills associated with solidarity, democracy, planning, collective action, organising, nurturing and supporting others etc. Such a framework would not ignore work as an important context, but it would also seek to meet the wider needs of individuals, communities and society.

If we want a more democratic society and economy where everyone has some determining role in shaping production, distribution and consumption priorities, we will need to reconsider what skills we value and how best to pass them on.

We might want to think more widely in terms of ‘literacies’, a term which implies a dynamic web of subject specific knowledge and skill within domains which have some shared economic, social and cultural history. We could start by defining such literacies in fairly broad terms such as: scientific, political, economic, social, cultural, aesthetic, emotional etc. and then focus in on smaller categories.

We do students a disservice if we encourage the idea that skills exist independently from knowledge and that complex social practices are actually simple competencies. Skills cannot easily be lifted up and moved around to be put to work in different settings like the tools in a toolbox. Tools are good for specific tasks but even our best tools are not necessarily transferable to different jobs.

What can educators do?

None of this is to advocate turning our back on essential skills, quite the opposite. It is important for teachers and students to discuss and practice these skills, to make them visible and analyse them in and out of context, in their wholes and their parts, to break them down into elements and to aggregate them up and see how they connect to each other. In doing so, we need to question the labelling and parcelling-up as well as their degree of transferability between different contexts and domains of knowledge.

Watching others, trying things out and talking about what we’re doing are important stages of learning. We can set tasks and create contexts where these skills can be developed and give them time to enter into the students’ habits, behaviours and routines, whether in an educational or a work setting.

It might help us to have a common language, an agreed national taxonomy, for these skills and this could build on existing frameworks like SkillsBuilder or past ones like the Wider Key Skills.

Challenging the ‘skills fetish’

In their article ‘Challenging the skills fetish’⁴, Leesa Wheelahan, Gavin Moodie and James Doughney, make the connection between the skills discourse and human capital theory, which started as a descriptive theory in the 1970s (‘education can prepare people for employment’) but has now become a prescriptive dogma (‘education must supply skilled workers to the labour market’). The skills policies which flow from human capital theory seek to shape and fund educational provision purely in terms of its relevance to the labour market.

What Wheelahan and her co-authors call the ‘skills fetish’ is premised on a narrow, reductive conception of human beings, human motivation and human capacities. It regards skills as discrete, disembodied entities that can be quantified, traded and accumulated in various ways. In this confusion of outcomes and processes, skills are developed, transferred and applied regardless of context, occupation or field of practice and learning becomes an investment by individuals in specific skills to enhance their employability, and by employers to improve their productivity.

Conclusion

Doing things well, including at work, requires both knowledge and skill. Trying to separate out skill as a different kind of knowledge and the acquisition of skill as a different kind of learning is like trying to detach a current from the water which it travels through. While it may be useful to understand the components of a skill, atomised competences are not much use in isolation. They can be described and analysed separately but in practice they are inseparable from each other. Becoming skilled at something can’t be achieved by accumulating essential skills. Becoming a skilled engineer, a skilled historian or a caring, engaged citizen is an emergent process which takes time and can’t be measured on a simple linear scale.

So, we should welcome the focus on the rich diversity of ways of ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, their interplay, their specificity and the contribution of ‘knowing for doing’ and ‘doing as learning’ to building our understanding of work and life.

Notes

(a) This shift is not inexorable. The growing need for personal care and the potential for machine learning to ‘deprofessionalize’ many current jobs could lead us towards a more ‘hourglass’ labour market with fewer professional or associate professional jobs.

(b) The only surprise in this list of skills valued by employers is the absence of numeracy from the top six. This is despite the narrative that a general lack of maths skills is harming our productivity and competitiveness. Perhaps the assumption is that ‘maths’ is getting plenty of attention as a curriculum subject in its own right.

(c) Although digital tools which incorporate machine learning and AI can interact with their user and ‘learn’ from them, creating a synergy between the tool and the human user.

(d) There is also an element of the tool ‘suggesting’ the task. Good tools, particularly those designed around the human body and human movement (a screwdriver, a paintbrush, a bicycle etc.)  ‘show’ us how they might be used and in some cases can even ‘inspire’ us to want to use them.

Sources

1. Ainley, P., and Corbett, J. (1994) ‘From Vocationalism to Enterprise: Social and Life Skills Become Personal and Transferable.’ British Journal of Sociology of Education 15 (3): 365–374.
2. Tilly, C. (1988) ‘Solidary Logics: Conclusions.’ Theory and Society 17 (3): 451–458.
3. hooks, b. (2010) ‘Critical Thinking’, Routledge.
4. Wheelahan, L., Moodie, G. and James Doughney, J. (2022) ‘Challenging the Skills Fetish’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 43, No. 3: 475–494

See also

Knowledge Rich and Skills Rich. (Aug 2019)

Resisting classification (Dec 2021)

Learning, earning and the death of human capital (Feb 2021)