4. Labour Market Skills for a New Economy Overview of Skills Skills for a New Economy Skill#1 Become an Informed Consumer of Educational Services Skill#2 Develop Generic Employability Skills Skill#3 Realign Expectations Skill#4 Develop Entrepreneurial Skills and Outlook Skill#5 Career Decision-Making Skills Skill#6 Self-Reliance Skills Skill#7 Research Skills Where to Find More

What information can career counsellors take from the new business trends and pass on to their clients?

• Problem solving for customer satisfaction is something you will have to do.
• Expect to make more decisions on the job.
• Train yourself to work in a team.
• Use the employment interview to talk about your knowledge of customer service.
• Learn leadership and presentation skills.
• Expect to be continually training on-the-job.
• Raises in pay will likely be based on skills or knowledge acquired, not by moving up the organizational ladder. The room at the top is diminishing and organizations are spreading laterally, yet still looking for ways to motivate employees.

ZAP You're Stupid

"Half the skills of technical workers become obsolete within three to seven years of completing a formal education", says the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre.

In other words, the half-life of knowledge is three to seven years, says futurist John Kettle. s Mr. Kettle projects, if you're one year out of college, you will have already lost nine percent of what you learned (if the half-life is seven years) or 21 percent if the half-life is three years.

In the most rapidly changing fields - such as biogenetics - most of what you know will be wrong in four years. Unless you act like a student for the rest of your life while keeping your job going, you're going to be hopelessly out of touch, Mr. Kettle says. Or have to go into management.

While the specific or general academic and technical skills gained from post-secondary education or on-the-job training are necessary, generic or transferable skills are at least as important as technical expertise. In their guide to employability skills, The Conference Board of Canada (McLaughlin, 1992) has developed a list of transferable generic skills that employers are beginning to demand along with the necessary technical skills. It lists generic skills, qualities, competencies, attitudes and behaviours that employers are looking for in new employees who are technically qualified.

The employability factors can be grouped into three categories of foundation skills.

• Academic Skills. People who can communicate, think and continue to learn all their lives.
• Personal Management Skills. People who can demonstrate positive attitudes and behaviours, responsibility and adaptability.
• Teamwork Skills. People who can work with others.

The three categories of generic employability skills are discussed below.

Generic Employability Category: Academic Skills

From clerical workers to air traffic controllers, mathematics skills are essential. Virtually all employees will be required to maintain records, estimate results, use spreadsheets or apply statistical process controls as they negotiate, identify trends or suggest new courses of action.

Upgrading mathematics skills is of particular importance to women whose background in the subject may have been limited by their own actions or the influence of others, e.g., stereotypes of female capacities. All workers must be able to come up with innovative ways to meet a customer's needs, anticipate problems and find solutions. Even those employees who don't ordinarily deal directly with customers should keep the customer in mind and stay current with regards to market trends.

This includes basic computer literacy which means using a computer keyboard on a daily basis to work with word processing, spreadsheet or other software programs such as those used in accommodation and food services. Similar considerations affect those who wish to work on cars for a living or those who want to pursue a career in the arts, such as multimedia or music - two fields very much affected by technological change.

While lifelong learning is essential in the high-tech sector where a worker can be outdated in three to five years, almost all occupations now require that learning be an ongoing process.

Clients and students must understand that all workers must continually upgrade their knowledge in order to stay current with new technology or techniques.

It is estimated that workers and students will go from school to school, from school to work, from work back to school and from retraining back to work in an ongoing lifelong cycle. Workers must act like people in business for themselves by maintaining a plan for career-long self-development.

Generic Employability Category: Personal Management Skills

As our work force expands to include an increasing proportion of minority groups and, as the global economy brings countries together in planning and sharing ideas for improved production and service, a complexity of cultural values will need to be addressed by employers and career practitioners. Employers will need workers who can communicate with companies in many different countries. Understanding customs and traditions of other countries will become a valuable commodity in a worker. In order to keep these valuable employees, companies will need all workers to appreciate the knowledge and contributions of those who have a different cultural background.

In schools that once taught a majority of white, Canadian-born students, counsellors and teachers are having to sensitize themselves (and the student body) to students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. Preparing all students to find a work force niche that encompasses their varied and unique values is a major challenge.

Practitioners working with young people will have to broaden their scope of awareness and acceptance of cultural patterns. They may see widely varying amounts of parental influence on career decision making, or they may have to deal with many kinds of sex-role stereotyping in occupations. Some of their students may believe that certain jobs are only for men or only for women, while others may not care and demand to try out for the job.

Cultural variances will also affect the willingness of students to go out on a cold call for information, particularly in a case of a young woman going to a male employer's office for an information interview. The ability to look a person in the eye when talking can mean different things in different cultures.

In the case of student placements, the practitioner can do a lot to educate an employer to understand why two women come to the interview together when only one is interested in a particular job, why certain students will look down when answering a question or why a student may say yes when no is really meant. This may be the first step toward understanding for an employer who has had no experience with other cultures.

Many immigrants express a desire to be trained in any field that will allow them to make enough money to support their families rather than in a field which offers greater potential fulfillment or is best-suited to their interests. Practitioners may have to accept an alternate definition of fulfillment for some clients, when they say: "At this time in my life, I am fulfilled when I can feed and support my family."

Contrast this with the changing value being put on quality of life by many Canadian-born members of the work force in the baby-boom bulge. In an article in the April 13, 1993 Medical Post, Jeff Brooke commented on studies indicating doctors are working 10 percent to 20 percent fewer hours than they were 20 years ago, a trend likely to continue. He quotes Dr. James Silcox, admissions dean at the University of Western Ontario's medical school: "The number of patients a doctor sees and the number of operations a day a doctor does have shifted as doctors take on more responsibility for [their own] family and personal life than they ever had before" (p. 1).

There have been many lifestyle articles in the media focusing on the stories of high-level executives and professionals giving up their jobs to take something more fulfilling or something that would give them more time with their families. One high-powered executive quit his company and a six-figure salary to serve the environmental cause. In order to have normal work hours and to spend more time with his family, a corporate lawyer left his lawyer associates to take a job with the government at a drastic cut in pay.

Practitioners may find themselves serving more mature clients trying to work through this type of difficult decision.

At the same time as a large portion of the middle-aged work force is looking for more leisure and family time, companies are revising their missions toward continuous improvement. They are implementing Japanese methods of management requiring employees to adapt to new company values of giving customers more than they expect. In order to attract employees who are willing to take on more responsibility and make more decisions, employers will have to consider the culture and values of the employee. This may mean offering custom-designed compensations comprising a combination of money, status, flex-hours, daycare and extra time off.

Generic Employability Category: Teamwork Skills

It is estimated that workers need to work on teams 80 percent of the time and lead only 20 percent. Management expert Peter Drucker (1992) describes three team models.

• The Baseball Team: Each player separately fulfills a specific role, and assumes other players will co-operate by doing the same. The old-style U.S. auto industry, with rigidly defined roles, was set up on this model.
• The Symphony Orchestra: Players hold specific positions and are directed by the conductor at all times. The Japanese used this model in the 1970s.
• The Jazz Quartet: Each player is very familiar with the other group members, and they play to complement one another with no outside direction. Since each player covers the shortcomings of other players, this team is greater than the sum of its parts.

With innovations in information technology allowing everyone on a team to access information, companies can now move to the jazz quartet model. However, a jazz quartet requires higher skill levels, including an ability to:

• switch focus rapidly from one task to another;
• work with people with very different vocational training and mind sets;
• work in situations where the group is the responsible party and the manager is only a co-ordinator;
• work without clear job descriptions; and
• work on several projects at the same time.

The following excerpt is from Occupational Outlook's (Alfred, 1994) issue on careers in tourism, and it illustrates how generic employability skills are needed in specific job duties in food services.