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Lesson 1 - Skills Needed in a Digital Age

4. What Skills?

The skills required in a knowledge society include the following:

  • Communications Skills: As well as the traditional communication skills of reading, speaking, and writing coherently and clearly, we need to add social media communication skills. These might include the ability to create a short YouTube video to capture the demonstration of a process or to make a sales pitch, the ability to reach out through the Internet to a wide community of people with one’s ideas, to receive and incorporate feedback, to share information appropriately, to identify trends and ideas from elsewhere.
  • Ability to Learn Independently: This means taking responsibility for working out what you need to know, and where to find that knowledge. This is an ongoing process in knowledge-based work because the knowledge base is constantly changing. Incidentally, I am not talking here necessarily of academic knowledge, although that too is changing; it could be learning about new equipment, new ways of doing things, or learning who are the people you need to know to get the job done.
  • Ethics and Responsibility: This is required to build trust (particularly important in informal social networks), but also because generally ethical and responsible behavior is in the long run more effective in a world where there are many different players and a greater degree of reliance on others to accomplish one’s own goals.
  • Teamwork and Flexibility: Although many knowledge workers work independently or in very small companies, they depend heavily on collaboration and the sharing of knowledge with others in related but independent organizations. In small companies, it is essential that all employees work closely together, share the same vision for a company, and help each other out. In particular, knowledge workers need to know how to work collaboratively, virtually, and at a distance, with colleagues, clients, and partners. The ‘pooling’ of collective knowledge, problem-solving, and implementation requires good teamwork and flexibility in taking on tasks or solving problems that may be outside a narrow job definition but necessary for success.
  • Thinking Skills (Critical Thinking, Problem-solving, Creativity, Originality and Strategizing): Of all the skills needed in a knowledge-based society, these are the most important. Businesses increasingly depend on the creation of new products, new services, and new processes to keep down costs and increase competitiveness. Also, it is not just in the higher management positions that these skills are required. Trade people in particular, are increasingly having to be problem-solvers rather than following standard processes, which tend to become automated. Anyone dealing with the public in a service function must identify needs and find appropriate solutions. Universities in particular, have always prided themselves on teaching such intellectual skills, but the move to larger classes and more information transmission, especially at the undergraduate level, undermines this assumption.
  • Digital Skills: Most knowledge-based activities depend heavily on the use of technology. However, the key issue is that these skills need to be embedded within the knowledge domain in which the activity takes place. This means for instance real estate agents knowing how to use geographical information systems to identify sales trends and prices in different geographical locations, welders knowing how to use computers to control robots examining and repairing pipes, radiologists knowing how to use new technologies that ‘read’ and analyze MRI scans. Thus, the use of digital technology needs to be integrated with and evaluated through the knowledge base of the subject area.
  • Knowledge Management: This is perhaps the most over-arching of all the skills. Knowledge is not only rapidly changing with new research, new developments, and rapid dissemination of ideas and practices over the Internet, but the sources of information are increasing, with a great deal of variability in the reliability or validity of the information. Thus, the knowledge that an engineer learns at university can quickly become obsolete. There is so much information now in the health area that it is impossible for a medical student to master all drug treatments, medical procedures, and emerging science such as genetic engineering, even within an eight-year program. Thus, knowledge management is the key skill in a knowledge-based society: how to find, evaluate, analyze, apply, and disseminate information, within a particular context. Above all students need to know how to validate or challenge sources of information. Effective knowledge management is a skill that all graduates will need to employ long after graduation.