Five Life Skills for a Truly Fearless Generation
Remember your early twenties? I remember mine.
With a university degree under my belt and inspired by the relationships I had cultivated with both fellow students and professors, I was full of passion (still am), optimism and self-belief, and gripped by the absolute conviction that focus, discipline and clear goals were all I needed for success.
Today, hand on my heart, I still believe in those principles as crucial to professional and personal growth and achievement…
However, like all of us as we acquire real-life observations and experiences, I’ve evolved my views over time. Especially when it comes to getting young people ready for the 21st century workplace.
These days, the words on everyone’s lips are ‘disruption’, ‘automation’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’, as well as ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.
In other words, a tsunami of relentless, escalating and no-guarantees change on every level – from technological to financial to professional.
Here are a few more words: ‘unemployment’ and ‘Generation Z’.
Gen Z are the newest cohort to be showing up at hiring interviews, following on the heels of the famously entrepreneurial ‘Millennials’ or Gen Y, having been born after 1995.
More risk-averse, conservative and privacy-loving than Millennials, Gen Z have never known a pre-internet world, and they are the true digital natives.
However… my takeaways in mentoring these young people, either during the FEARLESS self-development workshops I lead, or the one-on-one mentoring I undertake throughout the year, is that most Gen Z teens are still VERY under-prepared for the skills expected in today’s workplace.
According to professional networking platform LinkedIn, the top five HARD skills that companies need most in 2019 are:
- Cloud computing
- Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)
- Analytical reasoning
- People management
- UX design
What about 2019’s top five most-desirable soft skills? LinkedIn tells us they are:
- Creativity
- Persuasion
- Collaboration
- Adaptability
- Time management
But I think that beyond hard and soft skills… there are timeless LIFE skills which new Gen Z workforce members need to know and implement, in order to become a truly FEARLESS generation.
And these are:
- Cognitive flexibility (the ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts, or think about multiple concepts simultaneously)
- Problem solving (finding solutions to difficult or complex issues)
- Critical thinking (competently analysing facts to form judgments)
- Goal-setting and execution (the development of an action plan to motivate individuals or groups to materialise a target or achieve a pre-determined milestone)
- Resilience (the ability to cope with a crisis or failure, or minimise the impact of stressors or pressure)
These are the game-changer skills that people of all ages would do well to learn… and they are PARTICULARLY crucial to Gen Z, who, unlike previous generations, will have managed their home, school and social lives almost exclusively via smartphones and apps, without having had the independent opportunity to cultivate and practise the life skills listed above.
They say time waits for no man (or woman), and that is especially true today, with exponential disruption occurring across almost every industry and profession.
And for every generation still represented in the workplace – and most particularly for Gen Z hires – displaying cognitive flexibility, problem solving, critical thinking, goal-setting and resilience – are only going to grow in desirability in the years ahead.
Which is why, helping young people acquire these skills, so they become as natural as brushing teeth or riding a bike, is ultimately part of my personal mission in helping create (and grow!) a truly FEARLESS generation.
For one-on-one mentoring to transform your teen’s communication, leadership, self-management and long-term employability potential, please check out the FEARLESS track of my services by clicking here.
