05/03/2022
Addo's Facebook Room on Learning how to learn, survive, and be world/job ready: some summary points from the session.
Many thanks to Aisha J Ali, her colleagues Martha Kefura, Santa Aguti and Lynn, Nana Sarfo Kantanka Anim and all the 10 folks who made time to join us for the conversation.
Take home points:
1. The future is here, and it demands that your non-negotiable skillsets include Technical Competency and Emotional Intelligence. Be technically competent at everything you claim you can do, so that no one will need to babysit you. And be emotionally intelligent in order to succeed in delivering results and contributing to team progress or project progress.
2. The future demands that you KNOW how to constantly redefine yourself, re-learn skills, learn new ones, and be capable of self-led research. This is because almost everything will be available for your knowledge - you will only need to learn how to analyse and apply well enough to develop experience, expertise, and capability. Start developing the ability to innovate like this, now.
3. Manage upwards. This is a term Aisha Ali taught us. You will have superiors, supervisors, managers, and bosses. Learn how they work and tick and build the skills needed to work with them in a way that also enables them to work with you and progress together. Learning how to manage those above you is what it means to manage upwards.
4. Most Africans are at a severe disadvantage in terms of world-readiness and job-readiness. We are often very unprofessional, have little technical competency, can make terrible bosses as well as terrible employees, tend to put emotions into work needs, and become quite burdensome and weak links in the chain. We must begin changing this drastically.
5. Our (Ghana/Africa) education is worsening even as the rest of the world's education improves. Facts exist to prove this. The same governments that are ruining or neglecting our educational systems are the ones who will expect adults and employees of high working standards and deliverables. The same kind of people they never helped to develop is what they expect. And they will not treat your incompetency or incapability with kindness and patience with "We made you this way, so we understand". No. They will give the opportunities to more capable foreign or local entities. You owe yourself a duty to seek your own education, your own development, and concretize your security in the job market of the future.
