Building Skills Along the Way

When Did We Stop Treating Life as Part of Learning?

I saw a headline recently about rising interest in master’s degrees as graduates face an increasingly difficult labour market. On one level, this makes complete sense. When uncertainty grows, people often seek more education, knowledge, and skills — aiming to ready themselves before whatever crunch they were expecting, hits. Qualifications still matter and, in many professions, they always will.

But I found myself thinking about a wider question.

What exactly are people hoping a qualification will give them?

For years, higher education was largely presented as a fairly linear route — in essence, if you study hard and gain qualifications, you’ll enter a profession and be financially secure. I’m not sure the world works quite so neatly nowadays, though.

For sure, employers still value qualifications. But they also look for adaptability, communication, resilience, collaboration, emotional intelligence, judgement, and the ability to navigate uncertainty. In some industries, technical knowledge becomes outdated unbelievably quickly. In others, AI is already reshaping the nature of work itself.

Qualifications matter. But increasingly, they are insufficient on their own.

Perhaps that raises a more interesting conversation about skills, where they come from, and how we develop them.

I was the first in my family to go to university and when I was a student, I worked because I had to. Rent had to be paid. Food and beer had to be bought. Bills — and this new-found adult life — were a novelty that soon wore off, so alongside my studies, I worked in a variety of roles: hospital cleaner, call-centre operative, barman, shelf-stacker, off-licence assistant, hoarding erector, forklift delivery operative — the list goes on.

Back at that time, I saw work primarily as financial survival, but looking back, I realise it was also an education in life, and a massive opportunity to build a really wide portfolio of skills.

Not in the formal sense. Nobody handed me a certificate for learning how to deal calmly with difficult people, manage competing priorities, communicate professionally under pressure, or turn up reliably when tired. There were no module handbooks on resilience or adaptability either. But those skills were being built, nonetheless.

I sometimes think student work is discussed almost entirely through the lens of hardship now. There are genuine concerns here as many students are working substantial hours simply to remain financially afloat — and that reality should concern us. But I also think something important can get lost if we only view work as an unfortunate distraction from education.

Work can be educational too.

Not all work. Not always positively. But often more than we — as educators — acknowledge.

Part-time jobs frequently expose people to communication challenges, responsibility, teamwork, accountability, time management, emotional regulation, professionalism, conflict, uncertainty, and human behaviour in ways classrooms alone often cannot. For many students, work becomes one of the first environments where they are required to operate consistently in the real world.

We sometimes underestimate how transferable learning can become over time.

I studied for both a degree and a master’s in law. I soon realised that I didn’t want to become a lawyer. But studying law developed ways of thinking that I still use regularly: research, balanced argument, critical analysis, attention to detail, understanding regulation, and learning to examine complexity carefully rather than emotionally.

The same applies to many disciplines.

Psychology, for instance, offers an understanding of how people think, behave, communicate, respond to pressure, form relationships, and make decisions. All of this can prove enormously valuable across leadership, education, and business.

A business degree may help someone understand strategy, finance, leadership, or organisational behaviour long before they formally lead anything.

Arts and humanities subjects often strengthen communication, interpretation, creativity, and empathy.

Scientific disciplines develop rigour, evidence evaluation, and structured problem-solving.

Not every degree leads directly to a profession attached neatly to its title. But that does not make the learning irrelevant.

What concerns me slightly is that many people only recognise growth when it arrives in formal packaging: a qualification, a promotion, a salary increase, a new title, or external recognition.

Life is what happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.

Some of the most important growth happens in difficult conversations, or when things go wrong, or during periods of uncertainty, pressure, frustration, or responsibility. It happens when we’re balancing too many competing demands and somehow finding a way through them.

Some of the most valuable skills people develop rarely feel impressive at the time they are developing them.

And perhaps that is where reflection matters.

I increasingly think one of the most important educational habits we can develop is the ability to step back occasionally and ask questions, such as: What am I learning from this experience? How am I changing? What skills am I actually building here?

Not every lesson arrives in a lecture theatre and not every lesson is delivered — I much prefer the term facilitated — by a teacher.

Sometimes it arrives through work. Or failure. Or parenting. Or through building something. Or through trying something new and being bad at it initially.

Perhaps skills development should not simply be treated as a module, workshop, or employability framework attached to a degree programme. Perhaps it should become a more conscious way of living. Particularly now.

Many people entering the workforce today will have careers that evolve repeatedly across their lifetime. Roles will change. Industries will shift. Technology will continue reshaping professional expectations.

The people who thrive may not necessarily be those with the longest list of qualifications alone, but those who continuously develop skills, such as: self-awareness, adaptability, communication, judgement, curiosity, and the ability to keep learning.

Growth isn’t confined neatly to formal education. Instead, it happens along the way.

So whatever you are doing currently — studying, working, parenting, volunteering, building a business, changing careers, struggling through uncertainty, or simply trying to keep everything afloat — don’t assume you are standing still. You’re not.

Look deeper and reflect properly — particularly during the difficult periods rather than only the successful ones.

You may be developing far more than you realise.