Noah D. Arney

Tag: transferable skills

  • Short Review of Beyond Blue and White Collar

    A former twitter thread

    Hey #careerdevelopment #skills folks, Conference Board of Canada and Future Skills Centre has an interesting document out that I think needs more discussion: Beyond Blue and White Collar: A Skills-Based Approach to Canadian Job Groupings.

    It does two things, it breaks down skills into categories and breaks down jobs into 8 categories. Skills are broken into 5 categories # of skills in brackets: Basic (8), Social and Emotional (9), Resources Management (4), Systems (3), and Technical (11).

    This is a pretty cool breakdown, though that it’s different from the other skills breakdowns being used by the government is a bit frustrating. The Skills for Success is right there my friends.

    Here are the 8 groupings with the percent of current Canadian workforce: STEM professionals 7%, Knowledge workers 27%, Personal services 20%, Supervisors 9%, Technical trades 6%, Non-technical trades 6%, Builders 13%, Doers 12%.

    Laying that out by general education level:

    • 4 years PSE or more 34%
      • STEM professionals
      • Knowledge workers
    • 2 years PSE 15%
      • Technical Trades
      • Supervisors (40% have 4+, the rest have less)
    • 1 year PSE 26%
      • Personal Services
      • Non-Technical Trades
    • no PSE needed 25%
      • Builders
      • Doers

    It’s an interesting way of breaking thigs down, though “doers” does seem like a holding category for roles that don’t require PSE.

    What do you think?

  • Skills Assessment and Behaviourism

    This was going to be a short twitter thread, then it got too long, so I made a blog post instead. I read an opinion piece in the Toronto Star today and I’m concerned. Mostly I’m concerned about the train of thought it represents. The article, “We need to start giving soft skills more credit“, is the newest version of similar work around soft/transferable skills that’s been around for years, but now with AI.

    This seems like a good thing, because employers want employees with strong transferable skills, and colleges and universities already teach technical skills, and programs are designed so that students pick up transferable skills along the way. My problem is that the discourse is always focused on a behaviourist understanding of people. It presupposes that:

    1. Students must be explicitly taught something to learn it
    2. Evaluation means learning happened
    (more…)