The future of skills is at the intersection of technical skills for the digital economy, higher cognitive functioning, and social-emotional learning. The way we look at our education structures needs to shift in order to satisfy these future-ready skills needs. This week, Kelly is joined by Mark Sparvell, an award-winning educator with over twenty-five years of experience leading improvement for schools, systems, higher ed, and professional associations. In his current role with Microsoft, Mark is interested in how we can empower every learner on the planet to achieve more.  

Mark believes the aim isn't to develop second-class robots, it's to develop first-class humans. 

Big Takeaways:  

• (7:00) “Emotions are the gatekeeper to motivation, to cognition and attention. They are the contributing factor to personal success, to organizational success, to health, to well-being, to productivity as an inoculation against uncertainty and ambiguity and stresses in life.” 
• (21:00) “One of the things that I think is the greatest kind of a misname is when people talk about soft skills, because there are a lot harder to learn or a lot harder to apply. And they're hard, unfortunately, to measure, which is what their greatest challenge is because you can't really easily measure that on a standardized test. And we avoid that. Unfortunately, we treasure what we measure.” 
• (30:00) “At the end of the day, you know, we want young people to be able to, get a job, to keep a job. Or to create a job because we know that ultimately if we want young people to be active and informed citizens who are capable of making ethical and responsible decisions and contributing purposefully and positively to society, you know, they need this beautiful blend of this new future in skills.” 

Follow Mark on Twitter @sparvell 

Join Mark’s Facebook Group: Social-Emotional Learning in Education: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SELinEDU 

Microsoft Education  

Workplaces cannot afford to miss out on one of the most valuable resources. Parents, and more specifically, mothers. There is an incredible power that is gained from the responsibility of caregiving that is an asset to any business, organization, or institution. The trick is to apply self-awareness to your experiences so that you can translate them to other opportunities and spaces.  

Kelly is joined by Ricarda Zezza, the founder and CEO of Lifeed to discuss how caregivers can step into their power at work. Lifeed is the only learning platform in the world that transforms life transitions and care activities such as parenting, caring for an elderly person, or going through a crisis into opportunities to train soft skills, or as we like to call them, life skills. 

Riccarda believes that caregiving is a superpower. 

Big Takeaways: 

• (5:28) “What we can do, the kind of caregiving attitudes we have, the capacity we have of communicating, of understanding the instance we have, the empathy we can bring to the workplace, but also to the world they are needed. And we can see that now. I mean, it's pretty clear that the world needs more care.” 
• (7:03) “While our children grow, our mind keeps on growing with them. They change every day and they challenge us to understand every day, a new reality. And that's an incredible exercise of mental agility...It will be easier for you to keep on learning as you are asked to do nowadays.” 
• (20:50) “Time is a very little factor nowadays, because...machines have changed the idea of time. Humans are about capacity. Humans are about attention intuition. It's about creativity. It's about how we manage change or those skills that we only have and machines can have them.” 

Lifeed.io: https://lifeed.io/en/ 

Follow Riccarda on Linkedin @Riccarda Zezza 

Book mentioned: The 100 Year Life by Lynda Grafton: http://www.100yearlife.com/ 

One of the most devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is that social distancing has made learning extra challenging. Particularly, social-emotional learning. The skills such as confidence, and self-awareness that are developed through social-emotional collaboration with others are essential for not only students in school, but adults in any walk of life.

Danielle De La Fuente created an incredible solution to this problem with her work at Amal Alliance. Amal Alliance is a non-governmental non-profit organization that provides displaced and disfranchised children worldwide with social development programs that help cope with the invisible scars of trauma and the learning fundamentals that guarantee them future opportunities to succeed. 

Danielle believes learning can and should take place anywhere and at any time.  

Big Takeaways:  

• (5:50)“Forget about living in a war zone or surviving conflict. Even just in everyday life, you need to really have these bases to be very accepting and just put yourself in other people's shoes and just remove judgment. It really makes for a much better society at large.” 
• (16:15)“Let's look at just self-awareness, I think right now, even just being able to name your emotion is something that a lot of people are unfamiliar with...So naming it and then figuring out different ways that you can manage that I think has been a key to the children.” 
• (26:10)“The COVID pandemic obviously had so many challenges and, we have to make note of that, but I also think it was a real opportunity to re-imagine how we learn and how learning can take place anywhere at any time. And that includes all ages.” 

AmalAlliance.org: Follow on IG, FB, LI, and Twitter 

Follow Danille on LinkedIn @Danielle De La Fuente and Instagram at @dani_delafuente 

 Social-Emotional Learning Graphic

How can we make learning fun? Whether you are in a formal school setting, or in an office, lifelong learning is core to success and that’s why it should be fun! The better curriculum and teachers can be at centring individual human experience in their design, the better learning individuals will be able to do.  

This week, Kelly is joined by Erin Huizenga, a teacher, designer, and co-owner/studio director at DeskLight. She designs to help people learn. She helps organizational leaders connect learner-centred research insights with design thinking to build new programs and tools. 

Erin believes listening well is a key skill not only to design but to business in general.  

Big Takeaways:  

• (13:20) "The mission and vision of DeskLight is really to work with learners across the lifelong learning spectrum. We don't just work in K-12. We don't just work in higher ed. We don't just work in learning and development and trainings... Something that we're thinking about as an insight for early learning could easily be a very cool, thoughtful thing that we can bring to a learning and development project because there's a lot of truth and similarity about how people learn as humans over the course of time as they age.” 
• (21:00) “K-12 schools have a need for problem-based learning and project-based learning. The skills that come from project-based learning and the confidence and the self-actualization and the relevancy of the learning and how students will ultimately remember those things better and more effectively than they would have if they learned it from a textbook or even from their teacher lecturing at them.” 
• (23:00) “Historically learning has been for the sake of some kind of objective that's part of the employee's job description...that's really changing where businesses, employers, big organizations are, starting to think more about how can we embrace and enrich this individual as a human and what they want to do with their lives and with their work. And how can we think about this more as an employee benefit and less of a thing that's about us as a business or organization.” 

LinkedIn @Erin Huizenga 

Desklightlearning.com 

When we shift our hiring and leadership practices to a human-centric model, we see the incredible ways our skills and experiences blend together to problem solve. For leaders, this means celebrating that you are the sum of all your parts. For jobseekers, this means learning how to tell the story of your skills in language your future employer can understand. 

This week, Kelly is joined by the wonderful Cynthia Hansen former World Economic Forum global leadership fellow. Following a career in the private and nonprofit sectors, Cynthia joined the Adecco Group in 2017 to start the new Adecco Group Foundation, and spearhead social innovation. 

Cynthia believes empathy is crucial to collaboration, to consultation, and co-creation. 

Big Takeaways:  

• We need to train leaders to be “the connecter...[To be able]to think about who else might bring something interesting to the table.” 
• The key to success for jobseekers or those changing careers is learning how “you frame what skills you have...in a way that an employer will understand... So whether you're an elite athlete or an elite musician, you know how to be self critical. You know how to listen to or watch your own performance and critique it. You know how to work in a group. You know how to motivate people around you. You know how to get and give feedback, and all these great things that you might think, well, I've never worked in an office. I don't have the skills I need for an office. But you probably do. You just need to think about them differently, and then maybe translate them into slightly different language.” 
• “With the current situation, and with more people working from home, more people going through a career transition, that it's really important that we're all looking at that interconnected nature of what we do, how we relate what we contribute, what we take away. And so if I can encourage people to really be more holistically minded to think in a systemic way. To think not just about what you're doing now, but what you might want to do in the future, and how you would get there, and who you need, then in your circle.” 

Follow Adecco Group 

https://www.instagram.com/adeccogroup/ 

https://twitter.com/adeccogroup 

adeccogroupfoundation.org 

In order to center people in our hiring practices, we must change the way we assess skills. In this episode, Kelly is joined by Omer Molad, the Co-Founder and CEO of Vervoe, a recruitment platform that helps companies hire the very best by focusing on who can do the job, not just who looks good on paper. Vervoe predicts job performance using skills assessments that showcase the talent of every candidate. 

Omer believes the key to hiring is that "context matters. When you do it in context, you bring out not just the functional or job-specific skills, but how they're going to contribute. How are they going to apply themselves? How are they going to learn? How are they going to work with others? These things are critically important. It about experiences and performance, not chronological job histories."

Big Takeaways:  

• Grades don't necessarily correlate. If someone got good grades, that's great. But the way we teach in school and in university, in college, doesn't necessarily translate into the way that we do things practically in the workplace. (10:00) 
• Previous employment can be thought of as apprenticeships. They all contribute to your future jobs. You don't have to have worked in the same thing, in the same field, in the same place in order to be good at X. There are other paths. (25:00) 
• What you have done in your life, no matter how sort of eccentric or weird or unrelated to anything tangible, it counts. It's made you a richer person, it's made you a better person, it's who you are. And whether you are doing it consciously or not, you are applying it in your current role. (47:00) 

Books mentioned:

David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Mastery by Robert Greene

Follow Omer on LinkedIn @Omer Molad

Vervoe

A wicked problem is one that can’t be solved because as you work with it, it continues to change. It is said that you can’t solve a wicked problem, you just run out of resources. The problem is, we have all been trained to solve problems that are solvable. We are naturally inclined to search for a solution. What happens when we accept that some problems can’t be solved, but that our mindsets around them are what need to be changed?  

Margot Cairnes joins Kelly to explain wicked problems, and how widening our perspectives will make our businesses and lives happier and more prosperous. Margot is an international best-selling author with six books on transformational leadership, working as a coach and advisor to boards and top teams in Europe, Asia, the United States, and Australia. Margot has used her compelling approach to strategy development to help leaders widen and deepen their thinking, develop creativity, effectively problem solve and develop stronger, more robust stakeholder relationships. 

Margot believes “Happy consequences [of a mindset shift] are, people feel happy. They grow as human beings. Their marriages improve. Their health improves. They go out and they work in the community. They just have to open their mind to sustainability.” 

Big Takeaways: 

• Building our capacity to solve wicked problems is often more important than solving the problem itself so that whatever problem turns up, you can work with it better next time. (5:00) 
• Business can make the world a better place. It can also make the world a worse place. We need to develop the skills necessary to make the world a better place. (16:00) 
• We can all have companies filled with love that improve the environment, that improve the community, and help people flourish, it just takes a mindset shift. (25:00) 

Follow Margot on LinkedIn @Margot Cairnes 

Her website is https://margotcairnes.com/ 

Books mentioned: 

Peaceful Chaos by Margot Cairnes

Approaching The Corporate Heart by Margot Cairnes

Skillsbaby.com

Retaining key talent mandates more support and encouragement for workers in the minority. So many of our current systems are set up to help men succeed. We must create similar systems for women and people of color so that they are supported in returning to, and remaining in the workforce.  

Diane Flynn; Co-Founder and CEO of Reboot Accel joins Kelly to discuss ways we can better nurture the skills of those who feel like the lonely or the only in the workplace.  

Diane believes; “ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) are a critical piece to creating more inclusive environments. "They are really sessions to embolden people, to give people a majority experience, many of whom never feel it throughout their day. They are the "onlys" or the "lonelies" in a lot of meetings, and all of a sudden, they can show up in a space that is safe, where they can express their full self.” 

Big Takeaways:  

• Informal networks are just as important as formal networks when it comes to landing opportunities and new experiences. (15:00) 
• Women and people of color are so often subject to a minority tax in the workplace. This isn’t just a women's problem or people of color problem. It is all of our problems and we must all be part of the solution. (24:00) 
• Every role today requires constant learning on the job. Lifelong learning is a skill everyone needs no matter how old they are. (35:00) 

Resources mentioned:

McKinsey Report: Women In the Workplace 2020

Ikigai and The Four P’s

Follow Diane on LinkedIn: @Diane Johnson Flynn 

Email Diane: [email protected] 

Follow Reboot Accel on LinkedIn @Reboot Accel 

How can we disrupt our economic model and our education systems to celebrate a diversity of skills, and put joy over profitability? 

Omar Samra is an entrepreneur, adventurer, motivational speaker, and astronaut candidate. Following a career in banking and investing, he founded and lead several companies, including starting a charity in his late wife’s honor. Throughout his educational career, Omar has been fascinated by the correlation between skills and job opportunities, work/life culture, and education structure. He believes we must disrupt our economic model as well as our education model. Helping his daughter through school has shown him the value of individualized learning, and creating systems that prioritize joy and happiness. Omar encourages you to tap into your child-like spirit and marry it with your adult wisdom. 

Omar believes you need to find joy in what you do. You won’t be able to find joy everywhere, especially not by comparison, but if you prioritize joy in what you do and who you work with, it becomes clearer what is meant for you. 

Big Takeaways: 

• Specialization is the way of the past. Now we see the value in mastering many different things and the ability to pivot quickly 
• People want to do the things that they're good at, or that they've achieved success through. It's not necessarily the same thing as what brings you joy, what you should continue to do, or the way you should impact the world. 
• Bottom-line profitability first, putting the shareholder first, is an obsolete model. It satisfies a lot of interest but a new economic model needs to come about that creates a balance between profitability, environmental sustainability, and social impact. Every company should have a responsibility to give back to its own community. 

Follow Omar on Instagram: @omarsamra 

How can employees put their transportable skills to use in times of change? Eva Sage-Gavin, Senior Managing Director of Global Talent & Organization / Human Potential Practice at Accenture joins Kelly to discuss the work she is doing to help businesses reskill their employees to put their transportable skills to use in new roles. Learn about Eva’s wide career in skillifying and skills building, what she feels is important about skills training, and how we can identify the transportable skills we have to apply them to new job tasks.  

Eva believes one of the greatest skills right now is the ability to have a safe, clean environment where there's little risk of infection. 

Big Takeaways: 

• Creating pathways for skill reinvention allows everyone to be employed with a little bit of training and logical support. 
• the wonderful thing about artificial intelligence and the ability to analyze is you can see signals of skills experiences that can be converted into a core skill baseline 
• modern HR should embrace the idea that you have to look at a whole person, not just employability or financial, but relational, wellness, and physical safety 

Eva recommends Super Minds by Professor Tom Malone. 

National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development

Follow Eva on LinkedIn

Follow Eva on Twitter: @sageeva3