Forbes’ Job Market Trend #3: Human Skills Are Becoming More Valuable

Job Market Trend #3: Human Skills Are Becoming More Valuable

A recent article in Forbes reports that “ironically, as AI grows more capable, employers are placing higher value on human abilities:

• communication
• empathy
• adaptability
• storytelling
• creativity
• relationship-building
• judgment under uncertainty”

If you’re reading over this list, you’re probably not surprised.

You don’t disagree that these are important.

The harder question is this:

“If these abilities are valuable, where can students get stronger in them?”

For example, if the skill was coding, you’d go to an 12-week coding bootcamp. If employers demanded proficiency in accounting, you’d get a 20-hour certification.

But employers are saying,

• “Hey kids, when you get here, you’ll need adaptability and comfort with uncertainty. How would you rate your experience in these areas?”
• “Oh, and how many complex problems have you encountered, and what’s your personal approach to coming up with novel solutions?”
• “Also, how many different teams have you worked with? We’re an international organization. How have you managed working with teammates from around the world?”

These aren’t skills you learn from a lecture or a poster. They’re internal, and they’re personal.

If you’re a parent, ask yourself, can your child answer these?

If the answer is no, it’s because schools don’t train kids in human skills. They train kids in cognitive skills: math, science, reading, etc. A secondary school diploma has no credit hours listed for relationship-building. And if we’re being honest, a college degree doesn’t have that listed either.

The hard truth of the moment is this: there are a lot of people articulating the problem, but no one is stepping forward with a solution.

The solution is this:

To develop human skills, you have to practice them.

The process is an experiential loop, guided by Socratic coaching

1. Put kids from around the world into small teams. [Experience with collaboration, empathy]
2. Give them a complex game with no instructions. [Experence with uncertainty, adaptation]
3. Let them try to solve it together. [Experience with coordination, communication]
4. Regardless of success or failure, ask them what worked, what didn’t, and what they can do better next time. [Experience with self-awareness, analysis, mistake recovery]
5. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. [Experience with iteration, mental model creation]

Conclusions:

When we focus on the process of collaboration and problem-solving rather than the result, ****when we give kids repeated practice navigating uncertainty rather than removing all the obstacles, we can build strong, resilient, self-aware thinkers — who happen to be kids.

I’ve personally interviewed over 60 Synthesis students from around the world who can absolutely articulate what it means to be an effective communicator, teammate and problem-solver.

Their answers are individualized to their experiences working with, on average, 500 different teammates from 40 different countries. They learned from the inside out.

Whatever the future throws at them, they’ll have a strong architecture of values to handle it.

They have human skills.