Cognitive Capacities and Competencies

The focus of this chapter is on identifying those competencies that will be of importance in the future workforce. As employers will need to assess required competencies, our emphasis is on those that can be accurately measured and differentiated from strong to weak. We identified ten critical competencies that fit these criteria. They represent the key skills that the next generation of employers will require to succeed in the digital economy hence those the next generation of employees need to bring to the workplace. Most are linked to the P21 21st Century skills presented in Chap. 3 , however, our research identified an additional area of skill development that is occurring outside of the classroom: digitally connected young peoples’ propensity for multi-tasking. We concluded that digital and media literacies are likely to be the most critical for employers into the future but also highlight that those with these competencies will also put pressure on organizations as individuals will also be using their capacity to find and create new ideas to push their employers to update or amend their policies, procedures and processes.