Title: Interaction skills as employability and performance criteria

Name of presenter: Pia Lappalainen

Affiliation and academic title: Lecturer, Docent Aalto University Email address: pia.lappalainen@aalto.fi

 

Keywords: meta-skills, employability, communication and interaction, contextual performance, working life

 

Abstract:

Recent trends in society are calling for a broader pedagogical approach optimizing student potential for working life. In industry, work processes increasingly demand both technical and social competences, which is why examining the interaction of technology, tasks, social structures and people-related factors would yield advantages for graduates’ holistic development and career outcomes.

Productivity concerns have traditionally motivated organizations to consider what and how much employees can do technically, but today attention is shifting towards what they will do. Where the role of sentiments and emotions has for long been acknowledged, current findings establish the role of psychological needs for individual performance. Scientific evidence is pointing towards human mechanisms driving contextual performance, eliciting enthusiasm about positive behaviors enhancing team dynamics and psychological safety.

To equip university students with capabilities for teamwork and collaboration, a number of meta-skills need to be more effectively integrated into curricula. Traditionally, presentation and negotiations skills have dominated communication studies, ignoring such elements of interaction as authenticity, psychological safety, vulnerability and conflict dialogue. Similarly, intrapersonal skilling has been largely ignored as a systematic study, despite its implications for employee well-being and exchange.

This presentation reviews recent literature on the requirements for communication and interaction competences in working life, highlighting emerging employability criteria. Eventually, these will also serve as work performance criteria and predictors of career advancement. Accordingly, this presentation advocates a multi-disciplinary base of dialogical tools supporting multivocality in work teams. To model dialogical employeeship in practice, university teachers need to consistently found their classroom pedagogics on the three core elements of dialogical teachership: perceived caring, teacher immediacy and psychological safety. The overall objective of this commentary is to motivate for the expansion of communication education into personal skilling, which is associated with cognitive, work performance and physical health outcomes.