The reason I was intrigued by this course was quite simple. More often than not each of us has been guilty of being lazy at some point. Before I completed my PhD I was quite a laggard. But I understood that if I wanted to complete PhD in this life I needed to get my act together. Even though I always had an impressive GPA in my ungrad and graduate years it was my “reactive” approach that I lamented. Anyway, to make a long story short I fixed my real problem (being a “laggard”) and it made the rest look so easy.

Coming back to this course, I called up the institute to learn more about it. They do make students look under-the-hood and make them understand how to recognize a problem.

My point in this article is about the rapidly changing demands on the global worker. It is fine to assert that the global slowdown is causing record unemployment in many countries. Things are difficult due to the ripple effect even in those countries registering positive growth. But no one is asking a fundamental question: how could most of these workers, regardless of their occupational specialization, prevented the slowdown hitting them? No university or curriculum offers a “How to beat a global recession” course to my knowledge. And yet there are some who are doing just fine even in these times. What are these folks doing right that I should be learning? For starters, these people never took anything for granted even in the best of times. Their creativity never ceased. They simply moved from one challenge to another. I can bet that they are adept at overcoming challenges (perhaps many of their own making), and that a global recession to them is like a mild flu.

What’s my take from this? Well, I believe curriculum in schools should start focusing on soft skills early on. Perhaps some of these courses could be on ethics, responsibility, honesty, mutual-respect, self-criticism, and so on. These may not be the most jazzy courses, but if we look at the pervasive greed around few could argue their inclusion. Next, I look at the plight of those who are out of work and unable to readjust. That may have a partial solution – change the professional model that at least encourages workers to develop skills in areas they appear the weakest. Perhaps employees get a tax deduction if they take training in an area not correlated to their primary source of income (something like a tax accountant taking training as a carpenter). It may erode some of the insecurities workers have while assessing their chances to reenter the workforce at an acceptable level after a layoff.  

For far too long the world has operated on static employment models. And this has largely been due to an education system that concentrates all the learning in a very narrow discipline. Unfortunately, this model is hardly sustainable in today’s world. Workers have to be multi-talented and need skills on introspection. Yes, I am suggesting a special course on how to introspect, say in the first year of university. I liked the course at Soft Skills Coordinates because it offers me hope that at least some institutes are making it part of their curriculum. Someday it may be part of mainstream academic institutions too. Hopefully!!!