2023 EPALE Ambassadors Event - Skills and challenges - how to cope with the changes in today's society?
At the Epale ambassadors event held in Brussels on May 25th 2023, I attended a workshop called Skills and Challenges - How to cope with the changes in today's society?
During the workshop, we thought about the skills that we consider necessary for the future. The workshop was interactive. In the first part, the participants listed the skills that they believe will make life and work easier in the future, and in the second, they elaborated on those that they had listed themselves or they found interesting in any way.
A skill that had me puzzled and interested was a skill that was nominated by one of the participants - design thinking. It is a skill/method that has been studied and used for some time, but it is new to me in the context of thinking. I consider it extremely important and I would definitely like to master it.
For those who find design thinking a relatively new method (not necessarily a new term), I will say that the term itself is defined as a non-linear, frequent process that teams use to understand users, derive assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions. It is more than a process or a method; it opens up a whole new way of thinking and offers a collection of practical methods that can help apply new ways of thinking. The method itself contains five phases: empathy, definition, idea, prototype and test. These phases can be performed in parallel, can be repeated and/or looped back to the previous phase at any point in the process. The main purpose of the process is to enable work in a dynamic way on the development and launch innovative ideas.
What is really interesting is that this way of thinking can be used in all fields, and for me it is particularly interesting in the field of education. One of the texts that can help shed some light on this topic is published on the official website of the Agency for Preschool, Primary and Secondary Education, and you can find it here. As the title informs us, it is a guide for beginners in this field, and therefore it is an excellent start for elucidating the topic.
