Are Life Skills Also Employability Skills?
I employ a number of people throughout the year, and I have been aware of some employability issues.
Let’s be really honest. Anyone who has graduated from a specific degree or diploma must go through it in order to be a decently educated individual. Or at least this is the norm. other than this, the only way I can tell whether or not a person is worth employing is not through the degree that they get.
In fact, it is constantly getting more and more difficult to base decisions of employment on qualifications alone. Here are some reasons why.
1. Job demands are changing.
Nowadays, workers need to be adaptable and flexible. Often, organizations will want to restructure. Jobs will also be changed. In my company, we usually follow the rule of “suit the job for the person” rather than “hire the person into the job”. Most of the time, it is progressively getting tougher to force people into a mold because they tend to be multi-talented.
2. What you study may not be your passion.
I can see if someone is really passionate about their life when I speak to them and see them at work. However, I won’t we able to tell a person’s passion for life simply through their studies. Hey, I train thousands of unmotivated children and teenagers - specifically those who are unmotivated about studies. But I do know that when they display their passion for things outside their studies, I can tell more about their character and interest. Helps me make a decision if they can suit the organization.
3. Teams are more important than the individual.
In case you didn’t realize, individuals have taken a back seat in the priorities of an organization. It’s all for one, one for all now. Even the CEO isn’t the most important person in the company anymore. Can individuals display team skills? If you have this, it’s going to be more welcome. However, you will also realize this is never going to be taught in school. Often, you have to do this on your own - productively.
4. Nobody really has a clue about what job you’ll be required to do.
In many organizations I’ve seen so far, there’s no such thing as a specialization of labor. It’s more like the sharing of labor that’s the most important, which brings to mind the fact that people need to be flexible. While they’ve not lied when they say that when you learn a specific job, you will have the skills and competence for employment, they neglected to inform you that very often, the work you do has nothing to do with your capabilities you developed in school. After all, if you only developed capabilities in school, you’d be in serious trouble. As an employer, I’ll want my guys to have basic pre-requisites where necessary, and then as you develop, you will learn and grow along the way. That’s where job fulfillment comes from.
5. Parents influence their childrens’ decisions.
I have taught thousands of students. And the fact that there are people who are constantly being influenced by their parents to take up a job that their parents feel is a mark of respect of some kind of family tradition shows a severe lack of insight into the current employment trends. I know a friend who is a lawyer by training and car salesman by passion. His degree was done to prove that he was competent and had the choice to do whatever he wanted. Parents will have to open their eyes to the new world of possibility. After all, in the past there was no such thing as a full time computer game tester. There would be no such thing as a graphic designer. And the prospect then of being an entertainer would be ridiculously unsound. Today, things have changed. You can set up any business in any part of the world instantly and make a whole load of money with the right kinds of strategies. The ‘generation gap’ is not a gap of age - it’s a gap of involvement. Perhaps parents can play a few computer games once in a while.
In other words, there are a number of new changes that are required of our mindset. We have to develop more skills that are going to give us an unfair advantage. One such skill is NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming. With this skill, it allows us the capacity to grow any capacity we want. Is it going to come with a certification or qualification? Heck, no. NLP is hardly even considered effectively because it is completely misunderstood. They think NLP is motivation, when it actually is far more than that. Today, NLP certification is also just another piece of paper. The real people who are heroes of NLP actually go way beyond the certification column of NLP - they develop skills and enhance themselves by developing models from their learnings. They innovate. They seek out differences to find a new, possibly better, path to success in any area of life.
If you want to find out more about NLP, go to www.WorldOfNLP.com to learn about it.
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