What are the skills?

In layman’s terms, skill is anything that you learn to efficiently perform a task. Cooking, driving, painting, even responsibility is a skill. Having a certain skill helps to make tasks easier for you to do. Every experience gears you up with a new kind of skill or improve your current ones; and here we will talk about the need for skills that can, and will, assist you in building a successful career.

Why are skills important? Are they even required to build a career of one’s choice?

There are certain transferable or employability skills that you need to build or you might already be maintaining. These include simple know-how of everyday tasks like communication, team-work, organizational work etcetera. Aside from these, certain job-specific skills allow you to excel in a particular job. These kinds of skills may be unimportant for all jobs, except one which will play a crucial role in. For example, you may want to apply for the job of an Editor; in this case, you will need critical language proficiency. However, you may not need the same level of proficiency to apply for a job of, say, a graphic designer. In other words, it is, in fact, fundamental to procure certain job-specific skills.

How do we efficiently develop these skills? Are these skills really useful?

Highlighting the education system of India in this scenario, the first step in acquiring skills is learning through higher studies, for example going through college will give you a glimpse of what skills are needed for a job of your choice. Although, there seems to be a huge gap between what is being taught and what is bombarded on you when you are on your first day in office. Higher education institutes, now, are not doing a very good job at teaching students the critical skills they need for the real world; but not all students are aware of this difference. For example, this upcoming generation is one that is required to think creatively, instead, they are taught about what to write in an exam to score a good 95%. This is where our education system is lacking.

What skill is being learned by students is how to cram words, truly; only keeping those words inside the brain until the next day when they leave the examination hall. Scoring 100% in CBSE exams has become a trend rather than just a possibility; as has been witnessed this year. You’ll be forgiven if you thought this is a good thing because while it is important to have book-ish knowledge, it is also crucial for higher education institutes to acknowledge the fact that students are being educated for a successful future; that is not simply focused on ‘mitochondria is the powerhouse of a cell’, by the way.

The definition of ‘education’ nowhere involves mugging up formulas or theorems and scoring a 99 the next day. Looking into statistics, 87% of graduates believe they will not encounter any issues in finding proper jobs; yet only 50% of employers believe the same. The numbers only prove further that the education system is not focusing on general skills. Keeping this in mind, teaching contents have to be updated and this educational gap needs to be bridged.

Today’s generation is storing a lot of potential in their minds which is not being put to proper use and the education system is proving to be of no help. Our education is full of theory and this generation is being badly affected by it. The critical minds that are up to something or the other every second day are not able to perform up to their capabilities, as what they are being taught are the technicalities when all they need is output for their inner creativity. Any person can be taught basic JavaScript in a few weeks but an employer’s headache is to teach soft skills like critical thinking or, simply, being creative.