#2 Young? Essential? Skills?

These were the first three questions when I began my brief workshop at the British Council today. The workshop was titled Essential Skills for Young Professionals and I opened with, "Do you have any questions?" Asked for it, literally!

How young is young? Someone said 20-30 years, someone else said it's the ability to change, be flexible, adopt new technologies. As expected the one liner, age is just a number,  you're as young as you feel was popped up. So, I used my facilitator's shield - I don't know the answer, ask yourselves why you have come here. To me it's really not important to define the word 'young'. It's more important to recognize that these people attended a workshop with that title to learn a little about skills considered essential to the workplace.

What are skills? This was easy. Anything that can be learnt and practised. So while the group recognized that there are some people born with innate characteristics, the rest of us need to learn and practise skills which will see us blossom at work.

Which workplace? There were some 4 school teachers, 2 engineers, 2 IT professionals, a couple of PSU execs, a couple of mass comm students, a construction engineer and a doctor! Everyone had a view on what skills are essential to their work. A simple worksheet later led to an animated discussion on which skills are important to whom. Wide disparity as expected, plenty of real life examples.

Brief inputs on research results discovered that the softer skills are the ones most missing with personal managerial skills and interpersonal behaviour coming in a close 2nd and 3rd. Of course, each person made their own hit list for development.

So, out pops the question, Now we know what we need, how do we get there?

We shared views on Self-Learning methods and Facilitated Learning methods with everyone making an action plan for the immediate future.

Short and sweet.