Most education is currently suffering from what is known as curriculum creep. That is more and more subjects have to be covered by young people in school or at university due to rising amounts of knowledge.

However if one looks at many jobs in society, have their roles changed? An engineer is still responsible for designing and building things, a doctor for treating patients. In fact their names still mean the same. Why is that? Well it is due to the fact that the requirements of these jobs are underpinned by a stable set of high level skills.

So what is changing? Knowledge is associated with the context or the technology the role is concerned with. 100 years ago steam technology was an important  area of knowledge. Today it is much less so compared with say electronics. Thus a modern engineer needs to spend very little time learning about steam technology and a lot more on more modern technologies. Similarly in many other professions and jobs.

The difference today is that new technologies are being invented more frequently and a person has to learn about these several times in a career. What only has to be learnt once and then  continually developed through life are the skills of being able to apply and use the knowledge in an engineering or medical or another context.

Why then are skills not seen as being fundamental to the whole education process? There is a lot of emphasis on basic skills such as numeracy and literacy but higher level skills such as design, problem solving, creativity and management have been less well developed. In part, this is may be due to history and the scarcity of knowledge sources until school and universities came along, secondly due to the value and patentability of new knowledge and finally that skill development and measurement was not what universities and other higher education schools were about. Particularly as skills have been more commonally associated with manual skills and tradesmen level roles.