Student Skills List – 10 Skills Students Need to Be Successful

What are the skills that our students need to be successful? In order to help students develop these skills, what type of projects and assessments can we engage them in? What are some tools and practices that we can use to implement these skills into the classroom? The goal of this post is to address the first of these three questions

The Issue

In the United States, 55.6 million students attend elementary and secondary schools, and 20.5 million attend college, and 65% of students will be employed in jobs that don’t exist yet

How do we prepare them for this?
Help student develop the skills that they will need to succeed in a future filled with uncertainty

The Skills

Adaptive Thinking: In the digital age, things are changing at exponential rates. Future employers will need to continuously adapt to changing conditions as well as be able to learn new things quickly and efficiently.

Communication Skills: There continues to be an emphasis on the ability to communicate. We need our students to learn how to learn. We also need to collaborate with others within and outside of the organization, often using a number of new technologies
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills: In a rapidly changing world, employers need employees who can solve problems, provide ideas and help improve the organization
Personal Management: This includes the ability for employers to independently plan, organize, create, and execute, rather than wait for someone to do this for them
Inquiry Skills: Rarely do we assess students on how well they can ask questions. The ability to ask great questions is a critical skill that is desperately needed in a culture which requires constant innovations
Technology Skills: Employers will need skilled at using technology. Schools, however, have been slow to adapt to this change. Rarely are students required or taught to learn technology efficiently

The Action

As educators, we need to stop depending on the lower level skills, such as memorization and recall, and help students develop higher-order thinking skills such as applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.