What do soft skills mean to you and to WorldSkills UK?
Often people call these soft skills. I prefer to call them transferable skills. Because I think when you have the word ‘soft’ there is less impact and power behind the meaning and value of the word and actually relating that to the transfer of those skills that you adopt and develop over time, which you can then take into your workplace or into life is far more meaningful.
So for us at WorldSkills UK, it is about developing these skills to equip young people with the right mindset and attitude to maintain a sustained peak performance, whether that is in their personal lives, programmes of study or at work. We are about developing that whole person to ensure a lifelong success of their legacy, of their experience in education and training.
It’s about giving them skills which won’t just help them in the competition but will help them through their employment and their lives?
Absolutely. For us it is about equipping a young person with the best possible infrastructure and environment to enable them to succeed. Part of that is about us developing human potential and supporting an individual’s self-efficacy to sustain and build on learnt skills and behaviours as they progress in life.
How important are these transferable skills in the competition space?
They are incredibly important. In high performance environments there are a set of skills that one would need in order to perform at their optimal performance in a pressurised setting.
The transferable skills we practice are adopted from elite sports methodologies. They include things like mental practice, focus and distraction control. This allows people to self-regulate emotions, giving them mental space to problem solve under pressure. Whilst these skills are important in a competition space, they are equally important in the workplace. It’s not just about competition preparation and performance.
You cannot have the technical skills alone
We have adopted a framework through a partnership with Grey Matters called “The psychological characteristics of developing excellence”. They are a set of ten mental and behavioural skills that we apply to our training programmes, and to competition. We offer them as online learning to everyone in education and training to help develop those skills. They are designed for teachers and trainers and include areas such as planning and self-organisation, to quality of practice, to looking at goal setting and rewards.
How would you rate the importance of these transferable skills next to the technical skills which competitors need as well?
I would say it’s 50/50. You cannot have the technical skills alone and just expect to perform optimally. You really do need to have those transferable skills. So it’s absolutely critical that you’ve got both the technical capability and the higher order competency to be able to perform within your particular environment. You also need to be able to adopt and use those transferable skills to do things like problem solve, perform under pressure, be resilient and manage your time properly. These are all critical skills and you cannot have one without the other.
How does teaching these transferable skills, how does it affect competitors’ outcomes in the competition and their life?
In competition it provides the tools and confidence to succeed. Creating a space to experience and understand the different skills that are required to perform. Not only technically, but also those psychological or behavioural skills that they need. Through the WorldSkills UK training programmes, we give young people the opportunity to test and practice those skills throughout their journey with us. But feedback and self-reflection are also very important. It’s vital to make sure that you are providing a young person with the opportunity to really think about what it is they are doing and how they can improve.
At WorldSkills UK, we equip them with the fundamental skills that they can then build on, to go further and faster in work and in life, resulting in career role models to inspire more young people to consider apprenticeships and technical education.