Between Skills and Success: Developing Workers’ Dispositions for Applying Skills in an Uncertain, Disruptive World

. Dispositions—what people tend to do with their skills when the occasion calls for it and how—are a vital link between having a skill and effectively applying it in real life. During the pandemic, we saw that inculcating skills for a particular role was not enough to prepare workers for economic inclusion under turbulent workforce conditions, as the individual’s dispositions oftentimes determined that person’s response to the disruptions. Adding dispositions to current models of capacity building may make a crucial difference in workers’ responses to this turbulence. To this end, immersive technologies can potentially improve dispositional training efforts and assessments. The simulated settings can vary in context and complexity to more closely depict the diversity experienced in real life, allowing learners to perform and be evaluated under wide-ranging circumstances. The current use of immersive media in resilience training for military and healthcare personnel serve as potential paradigms for application in education and workforce development. To verify these potentialities, we recommend additional research in the development and testing of scalable curriculum and measurement strategies for dispositions related to vulnerability and turbulence.