Gabriela Samela wrote an article for the Argentinian newspaper, Clarin, about the 5 skills that shall define the executive education of the future. Samela based her article on the keys ideas of the Global Education & Skills Forum (GESF 2016), developed on March 12^th and 13^th in Dubai.

The event gathered 1.600 attendants from 110 countries, including politicians, businessmen, and social and educational organizations’ leaders. A rather large part of the sessions developed focused on thinking how to integrate the education and labour worlds and on teaching, anticipating and defining the skills of the 21st century.

The GESF 2016 promoted the idea of combining 5 skills that shall be key to think about the executive education of the future. Those skills are:

Thinking beyond the limits of your discipline

An uncertain context and the fast evolution of businesses forces people to prepare for accelerated changes and for jobs that still have not been created. People must become flexible, innovative and creative.

Innovation is about being able to connect scattered dots. In other words, it is about going through the limits of your own field and connect information from different fields. To achieve this, people must be capable of thinking broadly and understand the context. According to experts, including art in business formation is extremely useful to include these skills.

In addition, experts state that new types of thinking must be included in executive training. The most important are: design thinking (designing products with focus on teamwork and problem solving) and systems thinking (system perspective, where you can appreciate how a certain element has an impact on the other elements).

Developing socioemotional skills

These skills include soft skills, as well as self-management skills and interpersonal skills. Some of the most important socioemotional skills include: creativity, curiosity, resilience, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, leadership, perseverance, adaptability, initiative and sociocultural awareness.

According to experts, business schools are becoming more focused on developing these skills. The reason is that leaders’ roles are becoming more about understanding how to motivate and encourage people to collaborate. Furthermore, most work teams are diverse, which means that the leader must be capable of managing different people with different motivations and ways of working. This takes us to the third skill.

Leading diverse work teams

Besides the abilities of teamwork, collaboration and leadership, executive training must develop the skill to develop to lead and manage diverse work teams.

According to experts, collaboration implies being respectful towards other people and towards difference. Being a leader is the ability of managing diverse groups and gathering different people for a common cause.

Putting knowledge into practice

This capacity means being capable of making a practical use of the knowledge you have. A way to train this skill is learning by doing, which helps to reduce the gap between theory and practice.

Having a global perspective

Having an international experience during formation enhances the development of some of the skills mentioned so far, particularly thinking beyond the limits and leading in diversity. One-dimension education is obsolete, it is necessary to have contact with other cultures to keep on developing, maturing and growing.

Source: Clarín