Graduate unemployment is regarded as a global phenomenon that threatens the economic stability in many societies. While there are many factors underlying this phenomenon, many researchers have indicated that inadequate enhancement of 21st century skills is one of the main culprits. In this chapter, the author provides a proposal for a new skill that should be included within our education curriculum. This skill aims to improve students' abilities to predict future career trends in their area of specialization. Forecasting career trends as a new skill is proposed in this chapter. To achieve the desired goal of this skill, the author suggests four sub-skills: perception of career desire; knowledge of specialization changes; recognition of career aspects; and invention of service methods. This chapter concludes with some recommendations and solutions.
TopBackground
Recently, 21st century skills have attracted the attention of educators and policymakers. The varied necessities of these skills, which are still being discovered day by day, provide a feeling that people of different ages and education levels, as well as those in different social strata, have to strengthen their current skill sets.
Occupying a professional job is one of the main motives for enhancing 21st century skills. More recently, careers require higher-level skills to help employees maintain their positions, which have led some experts to describe 21st century skills as “Survival Skills” (Hubert, 2014; Wagner, 2010).
While the positive influences of 21st century skills on job performance have been discussed extensively (Carmeli, Gelbard, & Reiter‐Palmon, 2013; Ejiogu, Yang, Trent, & Rose, 2006), the author addresses the necessity of finding new skills that will ultimately help students predict those changes that will affect their career’s trends, so as to minimize the possibility of being unemployed in the future. Given the rapid changes that currently beset the world, this involves dramatically assessing and evaluating the global financial situation and labor market.
While the cost of education is increasing daily, masses of students are choosing to cover their school expenses by turning to loans. Watson (2013) argued that nowadays, millions of dollars are being spent, particularly since the costs for tuition in colleges and universities around the world have risen by 1,120 percent in the last thirty years. This issue has become a major problem and a matter of worry for students and their parents because of the rising global unemployment rates.