Science and Tech

Five key skills to develop in youth

July 31, 2024
4 Min Read
Five key skills to develop in youth

World Youth Skills Day was celebrated in July, a day to highlight the importance of equipping young people with essential skills to adapt and thrive in the modern world.

This date thus underlines the need for governments to invest in educational and training programmes that boost the potential of young people as drivers of change and innovation.

And ultimately, this date takes on even more relevance in a context like the current one, where the global educational level has been affected. This was demonstrated by the average scores obtained during the latest PISA tests, which had an unprecedented drop compared to the previous results of 2018. As for Colombia, the country was even below the average of participating nations, with a score of 411 points in mathematics, 413 points in reading and 408 points in science.

However, you cannot make an impact on academics if you do not work on health and well-being first, especially when children today face internal struggles in which they are constantly seeking to be accepted, to belong and to fit in. As a result, they are stressed and pressured by this, and do not always make the best decisions or consider the dimensions and impact of these decisions.

“Children live in a competitive world where the desire to be the best makes them lose sight of small but invaluable details that have been present in their history for generations. Most likely, if they slowed down their daily lives, they could use the tools that have been provided to them throughout their lives by all those who are part of their support network and who have contributed to their education. This is why, from educational environments, we must take a look back to take advantage of the scaffolding we have and build on those foundations, knowing that the future is not only in our hands, the future is built collaboratively every day,” added Sandra Patricia Martínez, Coordinator of Wellbeing and Learning Support for Early Years and Primary at The English School.

This is why Martínez shared 5 key skills that schools should foster in young people so that they can face today’s challenges in a more successful way:

1

Expression of emotions: Emotions are ways of adapting to certain stimuli, moments, people or situations. It is important that schools, in a responsible and collaborative manner, together with families, accompany children in the expression of their emotions, teaching them to name them, to locate them in a part of their body and to understand that emotions are neither good nor bad, they just are.

2

Empathy: the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes. This path is not taken before knowing oneself; this is why children must go through learning experiences aimed at self-knowledge. Later, these teachings are internalized to apply them organically in different situations. Words are used as a means to solve everyday life scenarios and reflection is used to mediate, to think before speaking and breathe before shouting.

3

Decision making: It is the process by which a choice is made between different options. These alternatives must be informed and responsible, focused on choosing between several options and assuming the consequences. Children must receive support in this regard through the implementation of promotion and prevention programs that, among others, aim to help them plan, execute, maintain and complete a task.

4

Critical thinking: Developing critical thinking provides young people with the skills to analyze and evaluate, thus facilitating the identification of problems and the generation of creative and viable solutions.

5

Resilience: adapting to the demands of the world to fall and get up again, to see mistakes as windows of opportunity or to interact with different cultures, learning that, in everyday life, there are no differences that separate us, but rather, there are differences that enrich and form better human beings.

“Young people are the greatest cultural wealth we can have. We must invest in them, as in children, and respect them and support them closely, but from afar, if that makes sense. We must let them know that we believe in them and that we are there when they need us.”Martinez concluded.

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