The Competencies for Life team has created a comprehensive library of tools that you can access directly from our website. These tools were created to help Talent Seekers, Talent Developers and Individual Learners understand the Competencies for Life model and create ease when implementing this model into program descriptions, hiring processes and personal development. You can find all these tools in the Additional Resources section at the bottom of the homepage on the website, or in your audience’s page in the Resource Hub. Here you can find a collection of short videos to help you learn the Competencies for Life, quizzes to test your knowledge on the competencies, sample job descriptions, career guides and more.
Today we want to feature our Competencies for Life podcast. This podcast series connects with community leaders in the City of Calgary to discuss how we can create a more adaptable and agile workforce based on the Competencies for Life framework. Each guest adds their own unique lens on the nature of building a career in Calgary by talking about their professional background, as well as providing insight on how to be more adaptable through implementing competencies in their own lives. These success stories dive deep into how the Competencies for Life helped guide their personal and professional paths. Below we highlight the first 3 interviews on the Competencies for Life podcast with Janet Lane, Mayor Nenshi and Jim Gibson.
Janet Lane is the Director of the Human Capital Centre at the Canada West Foundation. Her work focuses on the need to understand and build the competencies required for new jobs and the changing work environment. Janet talks about her experience being in the workforce for over 45 years and how her career shifted from banking and money markets to the world of literacy and essential skills. Janet has since devoted the last 6 years of her time to competencies and pushing a competency-based approach to understand what competencies are needed in different workforces. She says that nowadays employers are having trouble finding the right people with the right competencies because they aren’t looking to hire people based on credentials, but rather based on competencies. Janet says the competencies you need aren’t just for work but for living and learning as well.
Janet touches on the Problem Solving and Core Literacy clusters in the Competencies for Life model and speaks to adaptability being the number one competency that people need right now because the world is changing so quickly. From the kinds of jobs to work environments changing, she says if you don’t have the skills to be adaptable and resilient, the changing world will wear you down. It is key if you want to thrive, grow and add value to your organization. She also talks about the need for having the ability to think differently to solve problems, make decisions and bring information together to find an answer. The advice Janet gives is that in order to be successful in life and in learning, people need a minimum level of all of these competencies. You need to be able to name them and show how you are building them in every activity of your life. She says, start to be aware of the competencies you are using and building so you can articulate these competencies to future employers. Being aware is so important.
Our second guest on the Competencies for Life podcast series is Naheed Nenshi, the Mayor of the City of Calgary. Mayor Nenshi was sworn in as Calgary's 36th mayor on October 25, 2010 and was re-elected in 2013 and 2017. Prior to being elected, Mayor Nenshi was with McKinsey and Company, later forming his own business to help public, private and non-profit organizations grow. Early on in his career, Nenshi was engaged in corporate strategy and helping companies grow. He then later entered academia, where he was Canada's first tenured professor in the field of non-profit management, at Mount Royal University's Bissett School of Business. His research focused on civic engagement surrounding how people live in communities and how cities can run better through influencing policy and practice in the non-profit sectors and laterally in the public sectors. Through this he learned that you can’t be a bystander, if you have the ideas and the skills you have to put yourself forward.
Through his role as mayor, Naheed Nenshi performs many different jobs from political and legislative work to managerial and leadership roles. He’s learned the importance of the competencies you need and how to take the skills you currently have to make them work in the job-specific role you are in. Mayor Nenshi says we’re seeing a lot of change in economies and the climate right now, so we need to remind people that they aren’t just one thing. You can change and grow and adapt into new and different professions. He talks about the need for problem solving and taking a systems wide view to understand what the big picture is. He says we need to put the person at the centre of the system and for that to work, you need analytical thinking, creativity and curiosity. He says the most important thing he’s ever done for his career is being involved in debate and public speaking when he was younger. It taught him the need to prepare and understand both sides in a debate to be able to see the world in different ways. Competencies in problem solving are the base in which we are able to build on the other competencies. His advice? It’s never too late. There’s always something you can work on, and we need to make sure we are continuing that lifelong learning. His second piece of advice is you have to be rigorous with your continuous learning. We need to be deliberate about building the skills we need, starting with competencies.
Finally, for our third Competencies for Life podcast guest, we spoke to Jim Gibson. Jim is the Chief Catalyst at the School of Advanced Digital Technology at SAIT. As a lifetime entrepreneur and spending 30 years growing technology companies since his early 20’s, Jim co-founded Thin Air Labs which funds early stage, entrepreneur-led technology ventures and networks. Jim says he spent the first part of his career building companies as a serial entrepreneur and later found himself in the finance world. Nowadays, Jim is more involved in the innovation ecosystem that works and activates companies through the transformations happening in the digital economy. He says in his experience, starting in the entrepreneurial world, it’s so important to find the right people who share similar world views and passions. Jim explains how the most successful companies he has been involved in has been the result of finding a team that compliments each other and having someone on your side. His advice is to find people who are interested in the things you’re interested in. He says entrepreneurship is about execution, commitment and delivering what you’re going to say you do. On the digital transformation side it's about making people see what the future is going to look like and making people see that they have a role in their future. What skills they need, what future jobs there are and where they need to invest their time and energy.
Jim resonates with the C4L framework and says the 6 clusters are tremendous in the way they all can be applied, but the one that jumped out at him was the Core Literacies cluster. This is because the literacy concepts are hugely important, as well as the understanding of critical thinking, which has helped him throughout his career. Jim encourages people to invest in those core literacies and he argues that you will need them even more so in the future as a lot of jobs are subject to automation, which means it will be the creative minds that prevail. His advice on developing these core literacies? Curiosity. Jim says curiosity is the number one skill of the future of entrepreneurship and if you’re not curious, you won’t actively seek the opportunities or experiences that require the other competencies. Curiosity gives you the ability to stay calm and focus on new ideas while continuing to feel like you’re progressing forward. Same with numeracy and creating a story with numbers. He says the best entrepreneurs and leaders are curious about the world and other fellow human beings. Jim encourages people to slow down in order to move fast and take the time to find peace, time and space rather than trying to jump to the end. Sometimes you need to step back to spend more time in the moment, in order to step forward and continue your curiosity about culture and the world, as well as human beings. Be inquisitive. Speak less to be heard more. Be empathetic to the way the world is moving. That way we can be explicit about what the competencies we need through the ways in which we can learn.
We have many more guests who are a part of the Competencies for Life podcast series, with new recordings being added each week. Be sure to check out the podcast in the Additional Resources sections of the Competencies for Life website at www.CompetenciesforLife.ca/podcasts.
