Training trainers for the skills of the future

In an essay recently published in bookshops, La società signorile di massa, sociologist Luca Ricolfi, president of the David Hume Foundation, paints a truly uninspiring picture of our country, where the number of people not working has surpassed that of those working, within a stagnant system, with no more drive towards the future. A society, however, still capable of consumption defined as ‘opulent’, because it is able to draw on the wealth accumulated by previous generations.

Ricolfi’s analysis identifies among the main causes of this decline: “The destruction of the school and university: a formidable generator of voluntary unemployment and related disillusionment. In short, a school system that, out of a misunderstood sense of benevolence towards students, certifies skills that are not there, effectively confirming a heartfelt appeal drawn up in 2017 by six hundred academics, who denounced language deficiencies on the part of university students that were barely tolerable in third grade”.

These are thought-provoking figures, but they should also convince us of how important and strategic the value ofeducation is in order to develop, regardless of who is in charge of it, the skills that are indispensable to face the future that awaits us. The World Economic Forum in Davos made a decisive contribution in this regard, defining the ten skills that will be most in demand on the labour market in 2020. Those who, like us, deal with soft skills, and in particular emotional skills, can only be pleased to note in this list, precisely between the third and sixth boxes, skills such as: Creativity; People management; Ability to coordinate with others; Emotional intelligence. A comparison with the same list drawn up in 2015 also sees Creativity rise in importance and Emotional Intelligence appear for the first time.

For a number of years now, there has been debate, in the world of training but not only, about the strategies to be adopted in the search for and development of the skills needed to make a difference in the near future; it is also an essential topic for selection processes and talent identification. A careful scanning of the list of competences drawn up by the World Economic Forum reveals a positive sign, which seems to be oriented towards recomposing that age-old divide, typical of our culture, between theoretical knowledge and experiential and operational skills, which are more difficult to define but essential for the effectiveness of a job performance.

The misalignment between these two aspects of knowledge, which have always been more akin to Anglo-Saxon culture under the name of Knowledge, Skills and Abilities, has become increasingly evident since the concept of Competence has imposed itself in the world of work. Studies in this regard date back to the early 1970s: it was the psychologist David McClelland who first theorised about this concept and stated in his famous 1973 article that school knowledge and qualifications do not predict professional success. In McClelland’s definition, knowledge and skills, which are placed in a more external and visible sphere, are linked to deeper traits of the individual: self-image, values and motivations.

It is really interesting then, by virtue of these considerations, to see how the entry into the so-called fourth industrial revolution, characterised by the use of increasingly powerful and interconnected technologies, which will see in the future the increasingly widespread use of systems based on artificial intelligence, coincides with a renewed attention and sensitivity to the human factor. In fact, the skills we have previously emphasised belong to those components of intelligence that in a hypothetical challenge between man and machine see people as non-replaceable.

The world of training is therefore faced with an epochal challenge, on which much of what will happen in the evolution of work in the coming years depends. Having identified the skills that will be crucial for effectively tackling this transition is certainly an important aspect. However, the particular nature of the skills at stake will also require a major effort to train people capable of leading these processes. This is a fascinating challenge, a kind of new humanism in the age of artificial intelligence, called upon to draw on the highest values of human intelligence.