Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Over the past several months, I have worked on the soft skill of kindness. Esther Wojcicki, a gifted educator, advisor to our company, and author of How to Raise Successful People, defines kindness as one of five fundamental values, along with trust, respect, independence, and collaboration. Within the business world, kindness supports a culture in which people feel valued and respected.

It is becoming increasingly clear that for most working people, a proportion of the working tasks they currently perform will be either completely replaced by machines (AI if the tasks are cognitive, robots if they are manual) or augmented by a human-machine interface.

While there is less clarity about the types of tasks that will remain within the human domain, we can make some predictions. We know that, right now and in the foreseeable future, machines are generally poor at understanding a person’s mood, at sensing the situation around them, and at developing trusting relationships. So as the World Economic Forum report on future skills argued, it is human “soft skills” that will become increasingly valuable — skills such as empathy, context sensing, collaboration, and creative thinking.

That means that millions of people across the world will have to make the transition toward becoming a great deal better versed in these soft skills.