Adaptability is set to be the key skill for the future

Higher education has long faced pressure to enhance graduate competencies for a fast-changing world of work, and this has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Skills for the Future (S4F) project, coordinated by the Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES), has investigated and narrowed down a set of transversal competencies which are critical in preparing students for the future of work. One skill underlines them all: adaptability.

Although the benefits of cultivating career adaptability have been discussed in career development literature since the 1980s, central tenets of the theory have only recently made the links between the shared future(s) of higher education, work and graduate skills development.

Core to future skills is a foundation of adaptable self-reliance. As Ulf-Daniel Ehlers said in Future Skills: “So-called self-competences such as ... self-directed learning enable individuals to productively perform the necessary adaptation processes in highly emergent contexts.”

These self-dependent skillsets are indispensable in an ever-increasing gig economy. In a 2018 paper, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger found that alternative work arrangements, defined as contract and freelance work, accounted for most job growth in the United States between 1995-2015.

As economies adapt and labour markets are in flux, focusing the curriculum on transferable skills can produce what Patrick O’Donnell et al describe as “adaptable capacities within graduates”. Some universities have taken note – the Tokyo Institute of Technology offers doctoral students a course on the topic of developing career adaptability for global competitiveness.

The responsibility to prepare graduates is often placed on institutions of higher learning. Universities reactively update their curricula, slash programmes or change offerings at an alarming pace to keep up with changes in industry and the world of work.

This approach may be unsustainable, considering the rapid turnover of in-demand technology skills. Instead of blindly following whirlwinds of tech trends, preliminary results from the S4F project indicate that higher education institutions should base foundational curricula on preparing ready-to-learn, adaptable graduates.

Technology skills – including trendy ones – will be part of the mix, but not the foundation upon which programmes are built. Programmes with a base of developing transferable transversal skills will succeed in graduating students capable of navigating uncharted and constantly evolving (employment) territory.

A world of change and uncertainty

The future graduate must be an adaptable graduate. Sustainable employability preparation must be lifelong, life-wide and set against the background of a post-pandemic world characterised by change and uncertainty.

As Sandra Santos et al from the S4F project point out, developing transversal competencies with this goal in mind would “allow students to effectively cope with the rapid pace of change and obsolescence of knowledge and skills; question the consequences of change and ethically analyse science findings and technology innovations; live in the digital era; and be conscious of the perils of growing inequalities and environmental damages”.

The debate over the meaning of, and preparation for, employability in the digital age, and how higher education should adapt, is firmly centred on the idea that higher education must react to changing demands and needs. Core to this is how university graduates can be best prepared to leave higher education with a set of broad yet in-demand skills necessary for thriving in the current economy and in the increasingly digital and globalised future of work.

Identifying those skills is possible, but measurement of them tends to be more of an obstacle. The S4F project seeks to change that by developing a method fit for higher education institutions to assess their graduates’ transversal competencies throughout their learning path.

Measuring employability and future skills

The Skills for the Future project brings together a multidisciplinary research team comprising more than 20 researchers primarily from the Portuguese universities of Porto, Aveiro and Minho.

Portugal, similar to other countries, is using higher education to address systemic inequalities. The massification of higher education in Portugal, however, has compounded challenges to graduate employability and skills relevance, exacerbating inequalities it was intending to combat.

The main focus of the S4F project is to develop a new empirical and-or experimental measurement tool to evaluate non-cognitive transversal competencies relevant to the future of work that can be used by higher education institutions in assessing student progress and graduate skill outcomes.

Considering that the competences for the 21st century are manifold, the S4F framework of competences for the future of work covers a wide set of competences organised according to the profile a graduate should have to succeed in the labour market.

The graduate should: (1) be able to solve complex problems; (2) generate novelty; (3) have an open mindset; (4) learn to learn; (5) have a good attitude at work; (6) be able to work in teams; (7) communicate effectively; (8) lead others; and (9) have a market orientation.

The aim is to assist universities with both identifying and measuring skills needed for the future of work, but also inform the development of learning outcomes for programmes. The final objective is to assess the value of the competencies in the future of work, as measured by higher employability and better pay.

Targeting output (skills) over input (course content) is well-documented in research and practice. The S4F project’s originality stems from its digitised method for measuring skills that is useful for programmes and responsive to student development needs.

Innovative, responsive employability research

Measuring employability is a mammoth undertaking and screening applicants for desirable characteristics is equally challenging. A traditional one-on-one interview is not only ineffective in hiring procedures, as evidenced by many companies moving towards using more innovative formats (for example, assessment centres), but individual interviews are also littered with methodological concerns when used to measure competencies.

The assessment of transversal competencies is complex and cannot be fully accomplished through self-report measures or conventional interviews.

For this reason, the S4F project has identified the non-traditional assessment approach of the Mini-Multiple Interviews (MMI) method that not only measures transversal competencies, but also helps graduates learn about, reflect on and change their trajectory through the assessment process.

In order to address the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the S4F team developed a fully remote but synchronous MMI circuit in which students are subject to various scenarios that may include problem-solving tasks, presentations, creative tasks, film clips, discussion around topics and role playing.

The assessment of transversal competences is performed through six scenarios, each focusing on three to four main competences included in the S4F reference framework. Each competence is assessed on a scale from one to 10 (from inadequate to excellent).

This marks one of the first attempts to adapt the MMI method to the assessment of transversal competencies recognised as essential for the future of work, in a way explicitly aimed at its wider applicability to several academic fields and working contexts.

It is expected to respond to the identified need in higher education programmes for a method to ascertain students’ transversal competencies in a reliable and standardised manner.

With this information, higher education institutions will be able to foster initiatives directed at enhancing or closing gaps in their students’ transversal competencies with clear guidelines provided by the project’s framework. Ultimately, the results of such an assessment could inform course design, delivery and evaluation.

The adaptable graduate

Higher education is attempting to reinvent itself at the same time that local and global labour markets are in constant influx. It is debatable whether a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education will continue to guarantee employment or a humanities education will not. In his book Robot-Proof: Higher education in the age of artificial intelligence, Joseph Aoun makes a convincing argument for centring higher education on the “humanics”, or rather, the holistic combination of technical and human literacies.

Although technical skills, especially those dealing with data analytics, will grow in demand, human-centred skills will also increase in value. This is in part due to the rapid depreciation cycle of technical skills.

An employability-driven higher education system need not be solely vocationally oriented. Instead, higher education can be more responsive by preparing students for the one constant: change.

As evidenced by Eric Hanushek et al, smoother transitions to work generated by vocational education may be achieved at the expense of greater adaptability and better employment outcomes later in life. As the value of STEM technical skills changes, those with people management and social skills will be capable of securing high levels of earnings and financial returns to higher education.

Adaptability is therefore key to lifelong employability. Previously, there has been a focus on reskilling, upskilling or lifelong employability. But both the idea of reskilling as something that is episodic, for example, done after a job loss or for a career change, as well as its counterpart lifelong learning, which is more of a mindset than a concrete strategy, have been challenged as being unfit for future work contexts dominated by technology such as artificial intelligence.

Adaptable, ready-to-learn graduates possess skills such as creativity, critical thinking, an open mindset and the ability to learn, to plan, to collaborate and to communicate. Adaptable graduates are aware of and can navigate through the competing demands required by new hybrid forms of work.

Reskilling and upskilling may be part of what an adaptable graduate does, but they are just part of the process and not a means to an end. Trained to be malleable to their circumstances for securing lifelong employability, adaptable graduates know how to stay abreast of skills and labour market trends – and react to them – leading to their success in remaining relevant.

The S4F project has identified the common denominator in employability as the skill of being adaptable. It is both a humanistic skill and a necessary trait of the 21st century employable graduate. This is compounded by the sheer reality that, as labour markets are in constant change, it is unreasonable to expect higher education to be continuously adapting to uncertain circumstances.

Instead of a never-ending cycle of higher education chasing depreciating tech trends, the preliminary results of the S4F show that institutions should instead teach graduates how to continuously mould themselves to ever-changing circumstances. In short, how to be adaptable.

By doing so, the future of employability becomes a joint responsibility of students and institutions.

As Sandra Santos et al argue, a college degree no longer ensures employability and new university graduates will need transversal competencies to stand out in the workplace and handle the challenges it presents.

Developing and measuring those skills is therefore key to the future of higher education and employable graduates.

Hugo Figueiredo is an assistant professor at the department of economics, management, industrial engineering and tourism of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, and a researcher at the Center for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES) and the Research Unit in Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policy. He is the co-principal investigator in the Skills for the Future (S4F) project. E-mail: hugo.figueiredo@ua.pt Twitter: @hcfigueiredo. Jessica Schueller is a research assistant at CIPES in the S4F project, and a graduate student in the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Research and Innovation in Higher Education (MARIHE) programme. E-mail: jessica.schuller@tuni.fi Twitter: @JessSchueller. The S4F project is funded by the Portuguese national public agency Foundation for Science and Technology, which supports research in science, technology and innovation, and is overseen by the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education. Further information about the project can be found on the project website.