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For a full report, see the work done by Apollo Research Institute (formerly the University of Phoenix Research Institute) looking at the Skills Needed by 2020. A summery of the report and detailed findings about each of the skills are also available.

Shape of Jobs to Come: Possible New Careers Emerging from Advances in Science and Technology (2010 – 2030) full study from FastFuture is also very insightful (summary of study).

Without great employees, no amount of focus on goals and targets will ever pay off. Employees can only achieve what they are capable of achieving, so it’s your job to help all your employees be more capable so they—and your business—can achieve more.

Progress, improvement, and personal achievement.

So don’t worry about reaching performance goals. Spend the bulk of your time developing the skills of your employees and achieving goals will be a natural outcome.

Even some high school valedictorians are taking remedial courses in college. Too many students are completely unprepared for the future.

Last year, the unemployment rate for Americans without a high school diploma was 14.1 percent. For those with a Bachelor's degree, it was 4.9 percent.

Common Core State Standards, orient instruction around critical thinking and problem solving, requiring students to demonstrate a deep understanding of concepts and then apply them to new situations.

I'll be blunt here. It's going to be hard for you to be heard as a credible advocate if you don't first lay down the gauntlet. That happens when you own key educational responsibilities and make the demand that if you fulfill these, you expect your claim to your core educational rights to be taken seriously. Simply put, your doing so could change the conversation completely—to one that is more literally and figuratively constructive

Knowing your larger purpose enables you to do what comes next.

Engagement means literally transforming the way you think and committing yourself to building those skill-sets you don't currently possess.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

“More students are arriving on campus with problems, needing support, and today’s economic factors are putting a lot of extra stress on college students, as they look at their loans and wonder if there will be a career waiting for them on the other side.”

“Students know their generation is likely to be less successful than their parents’, so they feel more pressure to succeed than in the past,” said Jason Ebbeling, director of residential education at Southern Oregon University. “These days, students worry that even with a college degree they won’t find a job that pays more than minimum wage, so even at 15 or 16 they’re thinking they’ll need to get into an M.B.A. program or Ph.D. program.”

Now consider that, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, about half of all freshmen and sophomores are enrolled at the nation's 1,300 two-year colleges, and many of those students transfer to four-year institutions. For a large percentage of people who earn bachelor's degrees, then, the liberal-arts portion of their education was acquired at a two-year college. Next, factor in all of the community-college students who enter the work force after earning two-year degrees or certificates, and whose only exposure to the liberal arts occurred in whatever core courses their programs required. The conclusion becomes obvious: Two-year colleges are among the country's leading providers of liberal-arts education, although they seldom get credit for that role.

Employers rank communication and analytical skills among the most important attributes they seek in new hires, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Perhaps those of us who teach those very skills at community colleges should embrace the integral role we play in preparing the nation's workers rather than rejecting the idea of work-force development as somehow beneath us.

More important, this new perspective could have a positive effect on student success. If we come to see ourselves as preparing students not just for transfer but ultimately for the work force, students may be more likely to understand the relevance of the skills that we teach them and better able to use those skills for some purpose other than just getting a passing grade.

Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle by Scott Edinger  |   9:00 AM January 17, 2013 Comments (78)         In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most