Educators Emphasize Soft Skills, Learning

As the global community moves into the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, educators have to find new, innovative methods for imparting information to today's youth. Technology has definitely played a major role in facilitating learning in a day and age when students must prepare to work in a digitized world. However, trends in 2022 are not only focusing on technology as a way to improve learning.

Many trends around the country show educators are focusing on soft skills and life-long learning. Increasingly, educators recognize that skills learned in the classroom segue into ones they need as they transition into the workforce. While technology is a very integral part of learning, it is not the only important part.

For example, one of the trends seen across the educational platform relates to teaching students the soft skills needed to get along in the world, much less the workplace. In higher education, especially, educators are teaching skills related to problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and people management.

Further, by focusing on these skill areas, higher education institutions will find their students more prepared to get hired and work with diverse groups of people. As a result, many of these institutions will find themselves more competitive as alumni success rate becomes a reflection of their efforts to prepare students for work after college.

In addition to helping students learn soft skills, teachers have evolved into becoming facilitators where the instructor focuses on student learning. In this era of education, many educators have abandoned the top-down delivery method of teaching with the teacher standing at the head of the classroom and imparting information to students, some who are engaged and some who are not.

Instead, today's teachers are helping students to love learning, understand learning, and digest the information they uncover. Ultimately, in focusing on helping students learn, educators encourage students to take ownership of their education, which results in deeper student development over time compared with a knowledge delivery format of educating students.

Finally, life-long learning has been a big trend not only in 2022 but in the last few years. As is the case with shifts in industry and business, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has required many to re-skill because some experts estimate that this revolution has impacted 50 percent of jobs. Re-skilling has been the result of technological processes moving at lightning speed and changing the way everyone works and does business.

Moreover, while a vocational or university degree is important, professionals who wish to remain competitive cannot simply rely on the knowledge and skills they learned in the first half of their careers. For this reason, educators are teaching students self-development skills that show them how to take the initiative to improve their skills.

As it stands, the environment is rife with various platforms designed to teach new skills and help people improve on existing ones. For example, the $3.25 billion Udemy is an online educational platform designed to assist people who want to improve their skills. The platform offers numerous courses across diverse topics.

Masterclass is another major player in the continuing education and self-improvement online educational platform. As opposed to hiring the average educator skilled in the subject matter being taught, practitioners (often celebrities) in the field teach the courses on Masterclass. The platform has become so popular that the company raised $225 million after being valued at $2.75 billion.