As central Illinois transitions into the 21st century knowledge economy, competitive success for businesses, communities, and individuals will depend on the ability to produce new ideas, develop and incorporate new technologies, and constantly transform products and processes. Continuing advances in manufacturing technology, information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and geospatial technology will also offer exciting new opportunities for businesses and individuals. However, these newly emerging industries and resulting occupations will require increasing levels of education and skills.
In fact, recent research indicates tomorrow’s jobs will require increased skill levels in the areas of applied mathematics, applied technology, listening, location information, observing, reading for information, teamwork, and writing. The share of tomorrow’s occupations requiring education beyond high school will increase.
There will also be a need to re-educate and retrain workers at all levels of education. Our "21st Century Workforce" research indicates workers will also need a set of personal qualities and attitudes, basic tools, and thinking skills to be successful in the knowledge economy.
Personal qualities and attitudes include:
- Integrity and honesty.
- Personal responsibility and self-discipline.
- Sociability, including understanding of others, friendliness, empathy, and teamwork skills.
- Curiosity-the desire to understand and learn.
- Flexibility and adaptability-a positive attitude toward change.
- Self-motivation, initiative, and self-management.
Basic tools include:
- Communication skills including language proficiency, reading, writing, and speaking.
- Quantitative skills-mastery of arithmetic and a sufficiently solid foundation to learn more mathematics as may be required.
Thinking skills include:
- Knowing how to learn applying what one already knows to learning what one doesn’t know.
- Information search skills-the ability to determine what information is required for a particular task, to locate that information, and use it appropriately.
- Problem solving skills-the ability to diagnose a problem, determine causal linkages, and break big problems down.
- Decision making skills-the ability to conceptualize objectives, identify constraints, elaborate alternative courses of action, and choose well from a set of available options.
- Pattern recognition skills-the ability to discern commonalities, differences, and connections among seemingly disparate phenomena, and to build models of their interrelationships.
- Critical skills-the ability to see possibilities for improvement.
- Creative skills-the ability to think "outside the box."
The challenge of tomorrow’s jobs will require a quality workforce with increased skills and education and the ability to know "how to learn." IBI
