The job market increasingly demands diverse skill sets from prospective hires. But how can tomorrow’s workers builder those skills?
Not only should tomorrow’s workers gain a diverse set of work experiences, perhaps with growth opportunities like internships, but also, youth should aim to acquire a variety of experiences within any number of separate opportunities.
Internships can be hard to attain, for example, but if a student does gain one internship experience before entering the workforce, they may gain a wide range of benefits from that one experience.
Ultimately, “diverse experience” means learning key workplace knowledge.
Professional identity
Youth can discover their professional identity through diverse work experiences, meaning that they explore their role within the workplace.
Discovering one’s professional identity means discovering such things as personal strengths and weaknesses, goals, work habits, learning styles, and more.
These characteristics are integral to understanding one’s own identity within the workforce, which can then foster better work performance and productivity as the learner fully grows into their identity.
Personal identity
A young person’s personal identity can also be discovered through diverse work experiences and is still essential to their professional identity and future workplace performance.
As the young person learns more about themselves personally, they acquire a deeper understanding and appreciation of themselves, their strengths, their passions, and their place in the world.
Personal identity also pertains to the individual’s self-confidence. Increased self-confidence and confidence in their abilities will help them more effectively demonstrate their abilities in a work environment.
Thus, overall personal identity contributes to workforce readiness, as youth grow into themselves and transition into the workforce at the same time.
Hard and soft skills
Youth should gain a variety of hard and soft skills through diverse work experiences in order to perform in the professional workforce in the field of their choice.
Ideally, youth should strive for the most in-demand skills of today and tomorrow.
Some of the most in-demand hard and soft skills today include blockchain technology, cloud computing, emotional intelligence, creativity, and collaboration skills.
Collaboration experiences
Valuable diverse work experience includes collaboration experiences as a necessity. Collaboration is one of the most basic but essential skills — still in high demand today — and requires real-world experience.
Collaborating with a group of peers on a project nurtures a variety of related soft skills, and team members are able to teach one another throughout the process.
It is also important to note that collaboration, as a skill, is a muscle that continues to be worked and improved with every collaboration experience one has. Which is to say that people are diverse and unpredictable, making for a different collaborative experience every time.
New experiences
An obvious understanding of “diverse work experiences” includes the young worker’s benefit of gaining new experiences.
Naturally, new experiences give youth a more diverse range of experience. Ideally, youth and students should gain new experiences as much as possible.
This can mean pursuing multiple internships during post-secondary education, but it can also mean exploring a number of different roles and responsibilities in one job.
Workforce readiness is ultimately about the preparation of youth for work, and with more new experiences and growth opportunities under their belt, young people can tackle the transition to the workforce more smoothly.
In Summary
Ideally, youth prepare themselves for work with diverse work experiences that demonstrate their skills to potential employers.
But whether students gain diverse experience from several different internships or from one position that allows them to wear many different hats, what ultimately matters most is the concrete experience gained — learning one’s own personal and professional identity, gaining hard and soft skills for the field, collaborating with colleagues, and overall, enjoying new work experiences that are fulfilling and educational.