ATD Blog
Mon Jan 16 2006
There are a list of skills that could be classified as soft skills, but I prefer the term "Big Skills." These skills have a few attributes:
These skills are critical to almost any job, but more than vocational, they are truly life skills.
We practice them, in some form or another, almost every day.
Schools, self-help book, and enterprise training programs have done a terrible job at facilitating their adoption, although they talk incessantly about them.
I know I have given various lists before, but enough people have emailed me about them that I beg your indulgence in posting them again. These skills include:
Business Process Improvement and Business Process Reengineering:
Contracting, Sourcing and Outsourcing :
Communication.
Conflict Management
Cost Benefit Analysis
Creating and using boards and advisors
Creating new tools
Decision-making
Ethics
Innovation/adaptation
Leadership
Negotiation
Nurturing/stewardship
Project Management/ Program Management
Relationship management
Researching
Risk Analysis, Management/Security
Solutions sales
Teamwork
Turning around a bad situation
Some call these 21st century skills, which they are, but they are also 20th century, 19th century, 18th century... and so on.
My premise is that educational simulations will make considerable headway in allowing the formal development of these skills, and that they will be hard to scalably teach without using simulations.
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