 Hi everybody. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the Director of P20 Initiatives at Northern Illinois University, and today I'm here to talk to you about the essential skills. Oftentimes the essential skills are referred to as the soft skills, but there's nothing soft about them. As a matter of fact, they're very hard, they're very challenging, they're very important. That's why we're referring to them as the essential skills. So in schools traditionally, we get a report card at the end of a term at the end of a semester, or a trimester, or a year, and that report card is traditionally defined by having each course receive a single mark, whether that's a letter or a number so you have math and literacy, which could be reading and writing together separately of science, social science, music, physical education, art, they're all listed, and you get a single, again, letter or number for each of them. Within that letter or number, in most classrooms at all age levels, the following things are being described. Your knowledge, your skills, possibly your growth in knowledge or skills from the beginning of the term to the end of the term when the report card is issued. Other skills, like did you turn your work in at all? Was it turned in on time? Were you respectful to other students as well as to the teacher or teachers? How hard did you work? Did you participate in class? All of these can be included in that single mark. The problem with that is, it doesn't pull apart where a student might be doing well and where a student might not be doing well. And the reality is that to be successful in the workplace, you've got to be able to do all of that stuff to be successful living in a community as a neighbor. You've got to be able to do all of that stuff, particularly the essential skills. So for example, let's say we've got a student, a young adult who's outstanding mathematician, great at computer programming, very scientific, has a strong background science knowledge. This student reads, writes, speaks very, very well and has a good grasp of the social sciences of history, political science, economics, geography. So with all that said, that student's report card might demonstrate that they've got all this knowledge and all these skills. The reality is, if they don't have the essential skills, that while they may get a job because of their good grades, they're not going to keep that job. And if they really don't have these essential skills, their grades probably aren't going to be very good no matter how strong their math knowledge and their science knowledge and their math skills and their science skills are. But given that example, we really need to dive in to these. These are the cross sector essential employability skills. And in Illinois, these come from the post secondary and workforce readiness act that was passed into law in 2016. So within the cross sector essential employability skills, that's a mouthful that's a long title. And so let's look at what that means. First of all, what does cross sector mean. Cross sector refers to across all different kinds of occupations, all different kinds of professions, all seven of the career pathways. So whether pursuing an occupation a job in agriculture food and natural resources, or finance and business services, human services, or health and technology health sciences and technology, these skills are going to apply in all of them. They are going to be very important. They're essential. I just the last words I said moments ago where that they're going to be very important. They are essential. You will not have success in the workplace as a community member without these skills. So we need to teach these to all students, we need to give all students the opportunity to practice these, we need to give all students the opportunity to reflect on their progress with these and we need to provide feedback to all students, whether that's part of a formal assessment system, or whether that feedback is critical. And these are referred to as the employability skills, because these will make you more likely to have a wide range of options in the workplace in terms of jobs you can do and be successful in. So on this page, there was often the right side by these entrepreneurial competencies, these are very important as well the principles of entrepreneurship, we're not going to go into these in great detail right now, innovation and invention the more creative, all of us can be the more entrepreneurial we can be and whatever jobs we're doing, the more problems we can frankly solve, and then having a growth mindset. We are going to make mistakes as we do things, we need to own those mistakes, reflect on those mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and try and put new new practices in place and how we do work how we approach problems. To try and grow from that and having a growth mindset is critical to long term success. And then the core of that, that last screen. Yeah, are these 10 cross sector essential employability competency statements. So we've, we've referred to these as the essential skills. And we can look at these while there's 10 of them, they really fall into three categories, working with others, thought processes, and self regulations. So the ones that fall in the working with others category or team teamwork and conflict resolution communication, then lower down on the page in the middle adaptability and flexibility, and near the bottom, but very very important cultural competence, even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we lived in a small world in which we interacted with people from around the world on a daily basis, both as a result of people migrating and moving and living in new places, and through the magic of technology, where we were collaborating across time zones and across cultures and countries and geographies. So this is really really important, all four of these are critical skills, they are essential in the workplace to be successful. The next set of essential skills are the thought process skills, and these are problem solving decision making and critical thinking. The first century sees us having to solve really complex problems, and while technology does all kinds of work that humans once had to do. There's a whole new layer of problem solving that's required to manage that technology and in all industries and all, all occupations and thought process skills are very, very important. We need students to have opportunities to learn how to really, really problem solve and think critically while they're students, so they can be very proficient at those things as they move into the workplace and our communities as adults. And then the self regulation essential skills. Initiative and self drive reliability and accountability and planning and organizing. There is a lot of information in most or in most occupations, moving very, very quickly. And without these, it is very, very hard to determine what's important to internalize that information to synthesize information from multiple sources and to act upon that information. So these are the essential skills, having opportunities to work with these skills from our earliest school experiences throughout elementary school and middle school high school post secondary educational opportunities in work based learning experiences, even in our own families are really, really important. The essential skills are the keys to success in both the workplace and the community for adults in the 21st century. Thanks for watching.