Soft skills are the crucial 21st century skills, essential in the workplace and for personal wellbeing. But education and exam systems around the world are almost entirely based on a model devoted to the development and measurement of hard skills – knowledge and technical aptitudes.
“While young people are painfully aware of the importance of getting good grades and under incredible pressure to achieve them, the life and character skills considered key to success in their working lives are at risk of being overlooked.”
Soft skills are developed in a completely different way from hard skills – so old methods designed solely for hard skills aren’t fit for this new purpose. Soft skills require a new approach if they are to be properly managed and measured.
“Teaching kids to embrace the unknown while maintaining their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War.”
Barrier Breakers Methodology for Soft Skills Development and Evaluation (BBM) was designed specifically to address this problem. Based on extensive research, the method was first published in 2002, in a report written and researched for the RSA, “How To Access And Manage Creativity In Organisations.”
Since then BBM has been applied to thousands of individual and organisational change programmes in corporate, public, education, and charity sector settings.
