We often hear the term, “21st-century skills.” However, it is not often clear exactly what that means and how it relates to things like employability, education, and hiring. As old jobs fall victim to automation and advancing technology, the need for transferrable skills and new knowledge and competencies has increased. In this information-rich Credentialate Guide, we examine the workplace needs of the global economy, 21st-century terms and definitions, what skills are important and how are they are taught and assessed.

The Essentials: 21st-century skills

• What are the drivers behind the need for 21st-century skills?
  There is a skills gap across an entire generation of workers. If that gap isn’t addressed, it could have dire
  consequences for the new global economy. Additionally, the nature of work itself is undergoing rapid transformations, from too much specialisation, automation and the rapid rise of the digital age.
• What are the workforce requirements of the new global economy?
  The need for transferrable skills, new knowledge and competencies has increased exponentially. At the same time, employers struggle to find candidates with the skills the business needs. Recruiters find it hard to identify strengths and potentially transferrable skills that are not easily shared on a resume or through interviewing.
  
• Is there a difference between 21st-century, professional, workplace and soft skills?
  There are many terms used interchangeably to describe modern skills, including 21st-century skills, professional skills, workplace skills and soft-skills. By and large, there is a common meaning across all terms to mean the same or very similar set of skills.
• What are the 21st-century skills?
  21st-century skills are based primarily on “deeper learning” skills (like critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork) and are comprised of a combination of soft-skills (such as interaction, collaboration, processing information, and managing people) and hard-skills (with a mainly IT focus. Dgital literacy, media literacy, etc.).
• How do 21st-century skills help to address the skills gap?
  21st-century skills are those that hiring managers value most.  Displaced workers who upskill and retrain to learn these new skills have the opportunity to reenter the workforce in a meaningful way, along with providing for the means for them to support themselves and their economies.
• What are the issues with teaching 21st-century and career skills?
  Many curricula have become standardized since the identification of these core skills. The outdated “transmission” model of learning has been replaced by more creative and freestyle type of learning. This presents a challenge however, because every student learns differently, and training must be personalised. Short-form learning, such as micro-credentials, are on the rise, along with workplace, real world learning. 
• How do you assess attainment of 21st-century skills?
  Unlike traditional assessments, where there is a definitive right and wrong answer, soft-skills are far more intangible to measure against. Performance-based or authentic assessment has arisen in response and is open ended or task-based. Learners utilise their 21st-century skills and are scored against grading rubrics that allow educators to assess without bias.
  
• What is the role of micro-credentials in 21st-century skill development?
  Micro-credentials are based on small, well-designed courses that target specific skills or subsets of skills. They are “bite-sized” compared to traditional credentials - usually available over weeks or months, not years' - and cost less as a result. Micro-credentials are increasingly compared on the same level as traditional degrees and are validated in digital format, such as a digital credential or digital badge.
  
• How Credentialate provides a new perspective
  Credentialate is the world's first Credential Evidence Platform. It helps you discover and share evidence of workplace skills. Credentialate is the only Credential Evidence Platform that includes personalised qualitative, quantitative and artefact evidence record verified directly from within the digital badge. For institutions, educators can map and manage their skills infrastructure and track skills attainment across the institution and against existing frameworks.

The Full Story: What 21st-century skills are, why they are important, how they are taught and assessed

• What are the drivers behind the need for 21st-century skills?
• What are the workforce requirements of the new global economy?
• Is there a difference between 21st-century, professional, workplace and soft skills?
• What are the 21st-century skills?
• How do 21st-century skills help to address the skills gap?
• What are the issues with teaching 21st-century and career skills?
• How do you assess attainment of 21st-century skills?
• What is the role of micro-credentials in 21st-century skill development?
• How Credentialate provides a new perspective

We often hear the term, “21st-century skills.” However, it is not often clear exactly what that means and how it relates to things like employability, education, and hiring. The expression does legitimately refer to a discrete body of specific competencies. The value of these competencies came to light in a recent discovery about our global workforce: there is a skills gap across an entire generation of workers. If that gap isn’t addressed, it could have dire consequences for global economies in the first half of the 21st century.

Recent studies have shown that some professionals over the age of thirty-five follow an outdated paradigm. They learn one trade and become increasingly good at it until at some point they reach a “skills plateau.” 

This specialisation isn’t necessarily negative. In fact, humankind has needed it in one form or another since the dawn of the industrial age. Unfortunately, we’re now living in a rapidly progressing digital age. Jobs and skills have emerged in the last ten years that didn’t exist before. Rapid technological advancements have been increasingly changing the workplace. However, job training and education in general haven’t changed enough to keep up.

What are the drivers behind the need for 21st-century skills?

What are the issues with teaching 21st-century and career skills?

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet.

Education in 21st-century skills has been a work in progress in many countries. The methods of instruction vary as personalised teaching methods dictate how learners achieve competencies in the classroom. Thankfully, many curricula have become standardised since the identification of these core skills. Modern teachers replaced the outdated “transmission” model of learning. But teaching these skills is a challenge, because every student learns differently, and training must be personalised to their needs and learning style.

Success using these teaching methods has varied. Educators can facilitate effective learning as long as they follow some key precepts. Students are empowered to guide their own learning. Learners flourish in an inquiry-based classroom environment. They’re encouraged to collaborate, and they’re given the opportunity to develop critical thinking skills. Each course is designed to bring out the learners’ creativity.

The sticking point is that much of this effective learning focuses on K-12 education. There are fewer options for adult learners seeking to develop 21st-century skills. Many professionals cannot put their lives and jobs on hold so that they can return to classroom learning. Soft skills and digital literacy need to become a part of ongoing personal development, but there are challenges to overcome.

Adult learners need upskilling that does not take a full two years to complete. The valuable competencies are needed now, not 24 months from now. They need learning methods that won’t cut into their normal job hours and won’t tie them down to a physical classroom location. Adult students need to benefit from the methods that have made achievement successful for secondary and post-secondary students.

One solution is a new kind of job training, based on frameworks that highlight capability, transferrable skills, and result in new competencies. Since this kind of training does not result in a “degree” or “certification” in the traditional sense, learners must also be able to “prove” their skills and validate their learning through another means, one that is more robust, specific, and verifiable and verifiable in modern formats, such as micro-credentials or digital badges.

And as the shift towards shorter, skills-based and employment-focused micro-credentials builds momentum, education providers must strategically evolve their credentials and curriculum to meet demand. In Rethinking Employability Beyond 2020: Ten Recommendations for Universities, Emeritus Professor Beverley Oliver explores the drivers behind the new meaning of employability.

She posits that interest is shifting towards shorter, skills-based and employment-focused micro-credentials. Businesses know this, and some are bypassing degrees and developing their own micro-credentials to create a talent pool with the precise skills needed to fill designated roles. Further, most adult learners are primarily motivated to acquire a credential, micro or macro, in order to secure meaningful paid employment, or more broadly, career advantage. But if credentials of all sizes are a bridge between education and work, then providers need to consider that if work has changed, then so has employability, and so must credentials and curriculum.

Employability, however defined, must be related to empirically observable employment outcomes. Future research is needed to determine:

• The factors that affect a graduate’s likelihood of success in finding, creating and retaining work over a lifetime;
• Whether those factors can be influenced and if so, how; and
• Which factors can be influenced during a learner’s enrolment, regardless or age or stage?

Rethinking employability in higher education has the potential to bridge across the intersection between the need for development of transferrable skills such as 21st-century skills, to deliver better employment outcomes.

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How do you assess attainment of 21st-century skills?

Given that the need for 21^st-century skills is clear, the question of how to assess a learners’ attainment of these essential skills becomes the next challenge. Unlike traditional multiple choice assessments, where there is a definitive right and wrong answer, performance tasks allow an opportunity for a much more authentic experience.

In a five-year study into using performance-based assessment to measure “those skills our students need to thrive as 21st century learners, workers, and citizens”, it was discovered that measuring outcomes such as critical and creative thinking was somewhat of a tall order.

With the help of the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) - a non-profit organisation dedicated to designing innovative performance-based assessments that measure essential college and career skills – the VBCPS adopted a method of assessing higher-order skills by replicating the use of these skills in the real world. Their performance-based assessment model, using the CAE’s College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA+) instrument as inspiration, required:

• Creating performance tasks to measure students’ critical-thinking, problem solving, and written communication skills
• Generating rubrics to score the responses, and
• Developing and implementing a viable scoring process

After refinement and pilot testing, they were able to validate that  performance tasks could be used to make valid inferences about their students’ 21^st century skills and abilities. 

A mission-driven, non-profit organisation, CAE develops performance-based and custom assessments that authentically measure students’ essential skills and identify opportunities for growth. CAE’s flagship assessments – CLA+, CWRA+ and SSA+ – evaluate the skills educational institutions and employers demand most and which are predictive of positive college and career outcomes: critical thinking, problem-solving and written communication.

Edalex partnered with CAE in late 2020 to assess and validate students’ attainment of the skills essential for success in college and career – critical thinking, problem-solving and written communication.

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What is the role of micro-credentials in 21st-century skill development? 

Micro-credentials are based on small, well-designed courses that target specific skills or subsets of skills. They are “bite-sized” compared to traditional credentials like university degrees. You would expect to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and 2-4 years of your life on a college education. A micro-credential can be earned in weeks or months for a fraction of the cost of college - or in some cases the costs of a single college course.

This method of learning has found favour with employees and employers in recent years. It addresses specific needs brought by the rapidly changing times. More employers are putting micro-credentials on the same level as traditional degrees, and some have developed their own internal frameworks for establishing and verifying micro-credentials. They have shifted to hiring practices that target specific, transferrable skills, or skill sets. These qualities make it an excellent vehicle for earning 21st-century skills.

Innumerable work veterans need inexpensive, time-flexible ways of learning new skills that will get them new jobs. Alternatively, they need a reliable method of surfacing evidence of those skills if they already have them. A LinkedIn survey of global talent trends validated what these skills were.

It revealed that companies struggle to assess those skills without a formal process, and this is really where micro-credentials and the frameworks being developed around them shine.