School and the World of Work

School Science and Mathematics, Mar 2004 by Flick, Lawrence B, Lederman, Norman G

Are these expectations radically different from what is required in the workplace? If all we do is focus on fast food jobs, then the traditional view of workplace skills as the three R's, punctuality, and following directions are sufficient. However, this is not the kind of employment to which youth aspire, nor do we as adults and educators value as long term and rewarding. Whether high school graduates continue in an apprenticeship, the armed services, or two- or four-year colleges, they are seeking success in a career that will support their personal development. Reports that analyze the contemporary workplace skills reflect in large part skills and knowledge similar to educational reformers.

The driving force behind this new conception of workplace skills is the rapidly evolving nature of jobs. New technologies have changed the nature of jobs and made business less local and more global. This translates into a greater need for communication skills and the ability to work with a wide variety of people. Machines have become "smarter" and have replaced many low-skilled jobs. Competitive pressures to make higher quality products more responsive to rapidly changing markets have resulted in far fewer low-skilled jobs and many more high-performance jobs. The appearance of high-performance tasks parallels the emphasis on complex problem-solving as goals in contemporary science and mathematics reform.

Over a decade ago the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS, 1991) issued a report that remains today a statement of the reformed view of workplace skills. These skills and knowledge are a close parallel to goals of educational reform. This report identifies both foundational skills and competencies.

The foundational skills include basic skills, thinking skills, and personal qualities. These skills embody the need for students to be able to locate, understand, and interpret information in a variety of formats and documents. Students need to be able to communicate thoughts, ideas, and information through writing and speaking and to be able to listen to others interpret their meaning and maintain a critical stance with respect to ideas and information. This information will be used creatively to generate new ideas, make decisions, and pose and solve problems. Students will need to be able to see things in the mind's eye and process and organize information in the form of symbols, pictures, graphs, and objects, as well as prose. They will be presented with unfamiliar tasks that will require them to know how to marshal cognitive and external resources to figure out how to learn what is needed. To do this they will need to employ reasoning skills and practical knowledge, while maintaining a metacognitive awareness of their progress toward the goal. The personal qualities the student must develop in order to employ these skills successfully include integrity, honesty, and responsibility in order to choose among varying courses of action and maintain perseverance towards a goal. They will need social skills to operate effectively in group settings and to make effective use of knowledge within an increasingly diverse group of people. Complex tasks will require self-management not only of personal and cognitive resources but also of external resources, including the time of others.