Ms Sarbari Dutta , Founder Director -Alpha School of Life Skills Success Couch, Mind Power Expert
It goes long back to the childhood folklore: the guy who has spent time in sharpening the axe was the one to succeed; this has been taught to us from times immemorial that we need to get ourselves prepared for the adversities of life and there comes the need of skill development .
At any step of our life ,career or business, we need to skill up in order to scale up.
In order to keep pace with the fast moving technology driven world we need to constantly upgrade ourselves . This upgradation includes not only knowledge , but more importantly the will to change and the skill to prepare us for any kind of situation.
Though educational qualification is the first key to enter the professional world ,40% of the employers complain lack of skills in the entry level employees.
These skills include hard-skills as well as soft skills Hard skills are easy to define and evaluate in an individual ; they are dependent on the technical knowledge, related to the stream /profession (eg. Accounting, computing etc.).
But what makes the real difference are the soft skills which are difficult to evaluate tangibly ; also the reason why 80% of the people struggle in the initial stages of their professional life.
These soft skills include decision making, problem solving, negotiating skills, time management & prioritization, to mention a few.
These skills are learnt through experience. We as a generation have acquired these skills through life experience , both personally and professionally; we have learnt from failures ,coped with harsh realities and become wiser as we traversed the path of adulthood.
But we do we have for our next generation?
As a wiser counterpart in the generational queue we need to acknowledge the need of skill development in the younger generation as a mandatory part of their curriculum. We need to explore possibilities of exposing our children to Skill Development Programs from a very early stage of life, so that they are better prepared for the personal and professional challenges .
In this era of technological revolution the newer generations are competing not only with better skilled humans , but also with machines . Technology has replaced humans in 90% of the roles. In order to get over this competition of the man and the machine our youth needs to be skill-trained which will enable them to rule over technology , but not get ruled by it.
Man has the “mind” that machines does not have , hence training the mind to deal with the personal and professional roadblocks , will enable our youth to have the extra edge over technology.
Our youth needs to be empowered with the knowledge of Self (Self-awareness) so that they can take conscious and responsible decisions, they need to learn being sensitive to the world around(Empathy) so that they can build better relationships leading them to a happier and healthier lifestyle.
As educators , parents, coaches, mentors, trend-changers, each one of us have a responsibility in exposing our YOUTH to SKILL TRAINING as this is what will build their capability to live a better life.
Let`s gift our youth with the SKILLS for LIFE, ie. the LIFE SKILLS