Teaching life skills

By Jainarine Deonauth

It is a fact that youths today make up the larger part of the population of almost every country in the world. This presents certain challenges for policymakers to develop, implement, and maintain programmes and activities which must be economically and socially oriented to satisfy their (youths’) desires. It is also well known that the absence of well-thought-out programmes with respect to youth development impacts negatively on our young people, and sometimes even lead to them resigning themselves to lawlessness and other anti-social behaviours that are damaging to society.
According to a recent report by the Inter-American Development Bank, there are 32 million young people in Latin America and the Caribbean – one in every five youth aged 15- 29 – that neither work nor study. Now, this is surely reason to be concerned, as right away, one would begin to worry about the kind of future these persons would have, and the contribution they would make to their societies, if any at all. Certainly, this is enough reason to cause governments and policymakers to take a closer look at what is happening in their individual countries and take steps to remedy the situation.
The IDB report titled, “Give Youth a Chance: An Agenda for Action”, which was published by the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), presents some excellent ideas as to the kind of approaches which local stakeholders, including the ministries of education, and youth, sport and culture could find useful, as part of their strategy for youth development and education.
The report looks back on the most important lessons learned from the MIF’s portfolio of over 120 youth employment and entrepreneurship training projects around the region, and sets out priorities for its work with the next generation of young people in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In particular, the report recommends that in order to prepare young people for workplace success, job training programmes need to go beyond technical instruction and also teach “life skills”, such as communication, reliability, and teamwork.
A distinctive feature of all MIF youth employment projects is their life skills component. This push for teaching youth life skills has been validated by employers participating in MIF programmes. They have consistently reported that, above all, they want to hire employees who possess workplace-ready skills, such as communication, teamwork, motivation, and responsibility. Technical skills, they say, can be learned on the job.
Likewise, a 2010 IDB survey shows that about 80 per cent of employers in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile indicated that positive socio-emotional attitudes, or life skills, such as empathy, adaptability, and responsibility, among others, are the most difficult capacities to find among workers.
In addition to teaching youths the life skills employers want, many projects also introduce complementary life planning activities in this component. These activities help youths in assessing who they are, their aspirations for the future, and define realistic steps toward achieving these goals.
Guyana has a number of programmes geared towards equipping young people with various skills for the world of work, etc. This is excellent, but more focus needs to be placed on combining teaching life skills with the various academic or technical subjects. Meaning, these programmes should include assessment and identification of ways to build competency and skills supportive of healthy behaviours to help young people as they mature into adulthood.
Such programmes need to be engaging and interesting, and should have elements of excitement and challenge to retain participants’ interest.
Additionally, institutions such as the family and religious bodies would need to take up their roles more seriously as happened before. Historically, the older generation had managed to transmit their beliefs, values, traditions, customs, and institutions to the younger members of their societies. This was achieved largely because of the impact of agencies of socialisation, such as the family, religion, and the schools.
Today, the impact of these institutions has been challenged and undermined by new forces, particularly television and the Internet, and pop culture as a whole. It is true that if our young people are to make more mature and responsible judgments and engage in activities that are the hallmark of a socially productive adulthood, certain support systems for development must be present in the environment; teaching life skills is a good way to start.