Future Skills as New Currency for the World of Tomorrow

<<ENGLISH>> Our everyday lives, the job market and education are in a constant state of change, making it almost impossible to predict the future with any accuracy. How should students at universities be prepared, in particular, for life and work when the clear lines are blurred?

The discussion about future competences is one of the most current in educational research, but these competences, the Future Skills, are still often intangible. It is often not clear what exactly these Future Skills are and what significance they actually have for the future. Digital Future Skills, for example, are little explored in many studies.

In the chapter „Future Skills as New Currency for the World of Tomorrow“ published in the „Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education,“ the NextSkills study conducted by my NextEducation working group at DHBW Karlsruhe is explained. The research presented here is based on a solid empirical approach, the multi-method and multi-part NextSkills studies. The aim of the project is to explore the demand for certain Future Skills in more detail and, in a second step, to provide educational theoretical foundations. These Future Skills are classified according to the „Future Skills Triple Helix model of agency in emergent practice contexts“.

In the NextSkills study, I developed 17 Future Skills profiles through which the required skills of the future workforce can be concretely analyzed. These Future Skills are considered to be the new currency for tomorrow’s world. They can be described primarily by two central characteristics: a strong, transversal and well-developed capacity for self-organization, accompanied by the ability to act in unpredictable contexts, thus advancing to key components for professionalism – regardless of the occupational field.

The future skills model presented here goes beyond a static model of simply enumerating and defining skills. While the model assumes that digital or technical skills will be an important component of future skills, it does not consider these skills to be sufficient on their own. The real value of these skills therefore lies primarily in the personal development of dispositions that enable individuals to act in a self-organized manner in a specific area.

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Find out all about Future Skills at www.nextskills.org

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