SimWord of the Day: Big Skills

There are a list of skills that could be classified as soft skills, but I prefer the term "Big Skills." These skills have a few attributes:

• These skills are critical to almost any job, but more than vocational, they are truly life skills.
• We practice them, in some form or another, almost every day.
• Schools, self-help book, and enterprise training programs have done a terrible job at facilitating their adoption, although they talk incessantly about them.

I know I have given various lists before, but enough people have emailed me about them that I beg your indulgence in posting them again. These skills include:

• Business Process Improvement and Business Process Reengineering:
• Contracting, Sourcing and Outsourcing :
• Communication.
• Conflict Management
• Cost Benefit Analysis
• Creating and using boards and advisors
• Creating new tools
• Decision-making
• Ethics
• Innovation/adaptation
• Leadership
• Negotiation
• Nurturing/stewardship
• Project Management/ Program Management
• Relationship management
• Researching
• Risk Analysis, Management/Security
• Solutions sales
• Teamwork
• Turning around a bad situation

Some call these 21st century skills, which they are, but they are also 20th century, 19th century, 18th century... and so on.

My premise is that educational simulations will make considerable headway in allowing the formal development of these skills, and that they will be hard to scalably teach without using simulations.