In a modern world, the traditional “career stairway” past students could use isn’t working anymore. The reality is changing so quickly that a student can enter a popular faculty today, study perfectly and then still graduate with a profession not needed to anyone tomorrow. How to avoid that? Which skills should students learn? Homeworkneeded.com experts state that it is not enough to master learning skills and study well at school, college and university. Students need to study other skills, too.
1. Student Skills to Study: Self-Discipline
Many people work outside the office nowadays: remote workers or freelancers. With time, their number will only grow, and traditional companies will switch to “flexible hours” and the job estimated according to results, not time spent at the workplace.
In this situation, it is important for students to study skill of organizing their day, to calculate their abilities in order to do the job till the deadline without getting overtired and to have enough energy to work during the next day, too. Students should get a skill of self-motivation as well: the “superior” control will weaken, and there will be more tempting distracters at home rather than at the office. So, people having a skill of productive work through their internal motivation and able to switch to the working mode and create office conditions for themselves, having good concentration and self-discipline will get the most of job places in future.
2. Adaptation Skill: Important for Students to Study
In a crazy life rhythm when it is required to make and reject decisions rapidly, new information appears every second and plans change all the time, the skill of situation adaptation becomes critical for students to study it. It is already important to react quickly but thoroughly, to change considering new circumstances and to avoid postponing plans. In the future, the need to have this skill will only increase. All the standard tricks and templates will be automated, so workers able to think flexibly, to generate unusual problem solutions and to think “out of the box” will gain the most value. That is why students should study skills of critical thinking, logic and creativity nowadays: attend the art club (drawing, music, poetry, etc.), or play logical games which train brains very well.
3. Emotional Intelligence Skill: Study it ASAP
The emotional intelligence is the ability to determine intentions, feelings and wills of other people, to understand your emotions and control them. Nowadays, having this skill is one of the most important conditions to achieve your goals.
A developed emotional intelligence skill allows controlling your emotions without suppressing them, to distinguish real wishes and to move towards the right direction because of that. This skill is important in communication, as it lets you adapt to various groups of people, react correctly to their words and actions and influence them when the need is. To start studying this skill while being a student, it will be useful to extend the circle of people you communicate with: for instance, to find a hobby and absolutely new fellows with it. What are these people interested in? How to get in touch with them? What is their difference from other people from your college? After you think on your answers to these questions, you can reveal many helpful nuances, secrets and rules to use in order to study the skill of emotional intelligence.
4. Virtual Cooperation Skill
The fact that companies like using remote offices is frequently caused not only by their care about workers but with the need to contact with colleagues located in other cities and countries. Virtual offices become normal, so a skill of working in them is critical. And it is not easy: the difficulty is to adjust to common working hours and to be flexible enough in Internet communication. And here, the everyday communication practiced by students is very helpful: they gain a skill of communicating through texts, not voices, and learn how to use new technologies. It is especially good to practice business conversation through emails, Skype conference calls and the interaction with Google Docs.
5. Study Interdisciplinary Knowledge and Skills
Multiple fields and disciplines become closer and even unite with each other in our times. So, a good specialist of the future will have to deal not only with their professional field well, but to be familiar with quite distant knowledge sectors, too. For instance, an engineering student will need biology and medicine knowledge (to become a bioengineer), and programmers working with AI development will require not only IT skills but philosophy.
Even if your job doesn’t stand on the edges of disciplines itself, you will have to communicate with specialists of other fields and to solve tasks together. So, you will have to study something else in addition to your profession at least on the intermediate level. That is why the combined specialization skills and studying will be perfect for future. What will be your “additional” skills? You might be unable to know that in college, especially if the future profession is questioned yet. But it is possible to study interdisciplinary skills in such cases, too: you only need to interest in “neighbors” of your beloved subjects. For instance, to study programming additionally to math, or to go in for foreign culture studying together with learning any foreign language.
6. Teamwork: a Critical Skill for Students to Study
It is almost impossible (or extremely time-taking) to create a big and worthy project alone. So, a skill of working as a team, finding consensus, partnership and common language is important in any profession. The skill of communication, listening to colleagues who disagree with you, negotiating and human management becomes the key ability to study.
Such skills will be useful not only for students planning to become “bosses”: many companies have already refused traditional “chief – worker” models and switched to more liberal structures with many small teams working together. You can try to adjust to a new rhythm while in college: for instance, try to organize shooting a movie, creating a presentation, a lesson report with group mates. Things won’t run smoothly at once, but small mistakes made during such training activities will be very helpful in future.
7. The Skill of Intercultural Competence
Globalization grows across the world, so everyone will have to communicate with people belonging to other cultures much in future: business partners, customers and consumers. It won’t be enough to have a skill of foreign language here: you are going to need to find out about one’s cultural features, to know how to catch communication nuances and find touching points even with those who aren’t likely with you at all. To start studying this skill right away, try making friends abroad: for instance, on Tumblr or Twitter. There are many different people from all over the world using these social platforms.
8. Know How to Refresh Your Skills and Knowledge
In a modern world, students can’t rely on the possibility to earn money after studying at school, college and university well and then finding a job. Professions modify, old ones disappear, and new ones enter the market. Even if your professional field is incredibly stable, it is still evolving: new trends appear, new technologies start being used, etc. To avoid getting kicked off the boat, students will have to refresh their knowledge on purpose, to study new skills quickly and to stay posted about trends dominating their field and close professions.
The skill of studying itself is another competitive advantage among students, too. We don’t mean learning things by heart here, but the skill to perceive the information critically and to find the point. Being a good college student is not enough here, too: you can gain the real skill of thinking through reading and attending logics and rhetoric courses. By the way, ancient Greek and Roman thinkers studied exactly this way.
9. Student Skill: Work with Information
Most modern students from developed and developing countries can find out anything and collect much data to study on any question quickly. But then students are to find what is needed in the flow of information and to check it: to make sure the data is true and relevant. For modern students, it is important not to have much knowledge and to study everything by heart, but to know how and where to get the precise and trusted data on the topic and to think over it critically. Students can easily study this skill with the help of any online search engine. Study “googling” like a pro: ask your student friends to give you a task. For instance, try to find the data about the string theory, new planets, rare languages or classical comics hero origins.
10. A Complex View on the Problem
When simple tasks are trusted to machines, skills which only humans can use become especially important. One of them: the systematic problem-solving approach, the ability to view the trouble from above, to notice hidden connections and senses, to “read between the lines”.
The students having the skill of determining the point of the problem and solving its cause, not a consequence, will be especially valuable in future. We mean the student’s skill to study and cure not a “symptom” but things causing it. It is the ability to understand the incoming data and to react according to that studied knowledge.
It all will help the student reach a new level of competence as a specialist.
