Viewpoint | Is Your Degree Sufficient? Why Foundational Meta-Skills Must Be Prioritized in Universities

The Future of Work study from Dell Technologies states that 85% of the employment that will exist in 2030 hasn’t even been conceived yet. Universities must quickly adapt their curricula to better educate students for occupations that may not yet exist as automation, artificial intelligence, and globalization transform the labor market.

Teaching specific job skills is inadequate in an environment of constant disruption. Universities should instead place a higher priority on developing the fundamental meta-skills that will allow graduates to continuously change and reinvent themselves throughout the course of their careers.

Six key meta-competencies—critical thinking, creative action, social intelligence, cultural awareness, adaptation, and resilience—are the cornerstones of this new paradigm in education. Graduates will be better equipped to succeed in unpredictable times and spur innovation if they can master these transferable skills, which are relevant to a variety of sectors and career types.

With so much data and conflicting stories to choose from, critical thinking—the capacity to evaluate information impartially and arrive at well-reasoned conclusions—is becoming more important. Graduates with strong critical thinking skills are useful in any industry because they can navigate complicated situations, tell reality from fiction, and make well-informed judgments. Innovation and the ability to be creative are essential in a market that is changing quickly and where disruption is the norm. Thinkers who can break through barriers, question conventional wisdom, and come up with original ideas will be trailblazers and leaders in their fields.

Our globe is becoming more linked every day, making social and cultural awareness essential. Graduates who are skilled in reading social signs, recognizing other points of view, and communicating across cultural boundaries will be well-positioned to succeed in international teamwork settings. Perhaps the most important meta-skills are resilience and adaptability, or the capacity to alter course when faced with difficulties and to overcome them. Those who can accept uncertainty, pick things up quickly, and recover from failures will be in the best position to take advantage of new possibilities in a period of unparalleled volatility.

However, not many colleges have made this conceptual shift, elevating meta-skills over specific professional abilities. The goal of higher education must be audaciously reframed such that it is no longer limited to selecting information that is easily accessible and instead develops thinkers and doers who are flexible and enlightened for the massive challenges that lie ahead.

It will need a rethinking of institutional cultures, teaching methodologies, and evaluation techniques to achieve this change in educational emphasis, which will not be simple. But there are enormous potential benefits as well: a generation of graduates with the adaptability and technological know-how to successfully traverse the contemporary world, spur innovation, and make a lasting impression.

Those who are adept in meta-skills will thrive as technology, business, and human experience continue to grow. As we enter a period of deep and quick disruptions, colleges must be committed to graduating a generation of these problem-solvers who can critically traverse complexity, connect cultures, iterate through impediments, and breathe life into limitless possibilities.

Assessment of some of the suggested developing techniques in higher education, which have far-reaching ramifications, lends more credibility to the significance of the basic meta-skills. According to the PwC research on “Workforce of the Future,” broad types of labor may eventually develop from an industrial standpoint. The necessity for businesses and people to provide consumers with what they want is what drives the various employment categories, leading to innovations that will surpass legal requirements. These innovators will have an unprecedented reach thanks to digital platforms; this is the space where experts and specialized knowledge will thrive. There will be businesses that become larger and more powerful, and brands that might be associated with several industries. The latter two categories might include situations when the greater good supersedes individual preferences, such as when it comes to sharing responsibility for the environment, and situations where the individual is given a lot of attention.

It is anticipated that these new developments will affect the gig economy, the commercial sector, government agencies, and freelance work.

These meta-skills, which are a result of the government’s emphasis on higher education, will be crucial to nation-building and to developing the talent pool that the country needs to achieve its goals. Growing elite talent will be essential for managing our quickly changing environment as India assumes a more significant role in the global order. Because of this, the institutions need to compare these students to their peers throughout the world rather than simply domestically.

It is imperative that Indian students comprehend their position vis-à-vis their international counterparts. The capacity to recognize that their distinctiveness stems from a civilizational background and offers them a meta-skills advantage over their global counterparts is the source of such an appreciation of themselves. This is clearly clear from the fact that many of the worldwide CEOs of the largest multinational corporations are Indian, and they attribute their success to the ethos of cultural understanding that has helped them reach the highest levels of innovation, expansion, and success.

Higher education in India has a rare chance to lead the way in establishing the fundamental components of these meta-skills for its students. Universities and the higher education industry have a strong framework in place thanks to NEP 2020; now, as the article points out, it is up to them to prioritize and innovate in order to face the challenges of the future of work. These are the core meta-skills.