The focus on skills, in the learning industry and beyond, continues. Every time I hear discussion on the topic I can not help but think of the Beastie Boys…
Skills to pay the bills
Skills, y’all, I got skills to pay the bills
Skills, y’all, skills to pay the bills
What skills? Skills, skills to pay the bills
Yeah, yeah, skills to pay the bills
Recent pods and reports on skills
One of the more interesting recent conversations on the topic was over on the Mindtools podcast and I enjoyed some of the points made. One point was that businesses are too often thinking about skills as tasks and that’s something I need to keep in mind given previously working with models where knowledge, behaviour and skill combinations allow for the completion of tasks. It is worth a listen (Becoming a skills-based organization):
I also recently attended a webinar on the launch of the “Non-Negotiable Skills In The Future Of Education With AI” report. The discussion around the report, listed the Non-Negotiable Human Skills as:
- Critical Thinking & Independent Judgment
- Ethical Reasoning & Moral Courage
- Deep Empathy & Human Connection
- Creative & Original Thinking
- Communication & Persuasion
- Resilience & Adaptive Problem-Solving
- Self-Knowledge & Metacognition
- Collaboration & Social Intelligence
- Civic & Democratic Literacy
- The Will to Learn & Intellectual Humility
My question/comment in the webinar was if this is really new – for example, information literacy courses (such as one I taught 20 years ago) have argued for many of these points for a long time. Yes, SCONUL 7 Pillars and other models may have brought an information lense to the skills but they librarians have always looked to make people critical thinkers and ethical researchers, who are able to synthesize information and produce original thining via different communication methods. Seemingly because I mentioned the word “librarian” in my question to the webinar panel, the reply focused on books which, in 2026, was a bit depressing to say the least (albeit showing it is hard to put across a detailed question in Zoom’s Q&A tool). The Non-Negotiable Human Skills report seems to be based on extensive research and, at times, the webinar presenters seemed to admit the outcomes were not revolutionary but perhaps more confirming/articulating what others have said. Indeed the World Economic Forum, as one example, has talked about some of the same/similar skills being “on the rise“, their list:
- Creative thinking
- Systems thinking
- Analytical thinking
- Al and big data
- Technological literacy
- Motivation and self-awareness
- Curiosity and lifelong learning
- Talent management
- Resilience, flexibility and agility
- Service orientation and customer service.
Over on the “Change It” podcast, guest Dara Simkin discussed their work and book – Full Stack Human. The podcast descibes the book’s five “human capabilities”:
- Serious Play
- Strategic Hope
- Intelligent Optimism
- Radical Curiosity
- Embodied Adaptability
I will not go into this list in too much detail either but I have been a critic of the corporate world’s Lego powered “play”. Little in the podcast engaged me on that point. Side note – I even got into a slight argument with a pre-school educator once as they were using “play” to mean something very different to what it means in the corporate world so it is worth remembering that as well when discussing more broadly.
However, I did quite like Simkin’s “perfect, panic, or play” as responses to uncertainty, in this regard I would tend to say I do “play”. In other words, I will experiment around uncertainty rather than just panic or look for an immediate perfect solution.
What do I mean by mentality?
Personally, I have not been a big fan of the recent focus on skills, I commented on this trend back in 2022 including one of my favorite gifs from this blog:
For me, just talking about skills ignores too much of the human element (as identified by behaviors or other language in ‘traditional’ competency models) not to mention deep technical knowledge that sits behind, for example, skills in domains such as healthcare and engineering. Indeed I have discussed this a few times lately with professionals worldwide, including whilst in China, around if mentality is actually what matters.
By using “mentality” I am trying to articulate the mindset we bring to a problem. In other words, an IT professional, L&D professional, sales professional, etc. will all approach a problem differently and use AI (and more traditional tools and methods) differently as a result. Thus much of the skill focus in conversations, which seems in part born from the long standing consultancy approach of building engagement teams based on skills, still applies – but my point would be that you should bring different mentalities together for their skills and foundational knowledge.
That all said, perhaps I am saying much the same thing and just getting worried about the semantics. Another way to consider this would be to combine the professional identity with curiosity and other traits to develop your mentality. When it comes to semantics on the topics we can look at high profile examples like Google’s Project Oxygen and see characteristics and behaviours used to effectively mean the same thing. Ultimately it reinforces the point that the first thing to crack is your vocabularly so people understand what they mean.
All of this in the same year as Arsenal’s winning Premier League title, one where the importance of be mentality monsters was talked about like never before. Few people would say that top-flight footballers lack football knowledge or skills. Therefore, mentality should certainly be considered in any attempt to make sense of a world of skills – be you in a more or less AI-impacted field.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 
