Upskilling

NO, it's not the Visayan way of pronouncing the word,"upscaling." It's really a legitimate word, coined recently in view of the many new developments, especially in the digital world. It means "to teach additional skills" or to upgrade one's skills. It is closely related to the word, "reskill," which means "to teach new work skills especially to those who are unemployed.

I suppose these are nowadays the 'in' words in the laborworld. Let's hope that many people, young and old, take up the challenge of upskilling and reskilling. It's never too late to do these things.

But more than just upgrading and learning new work or technical skills, we need to upgrade our skills in the spiritual and moral aspects of our life.These are the more necessary things to learn,given the way the world is developing today which, while giving us many good and beneficial things, also occasion many worse evils. It's in the spiritual and moral sphere of our life that give meaning and direction to all the practical skills we have tolearn.

For example, we have to upskill or reskill our ability to pray such that we can keep an abiding conversation with God while immersed in the things of  the world. We must learn to see God in all things and to turn all worldly and temporal things into means and occasions, not obstacles, in our loving dialogue with God.

We have to remind ourselves that God is actually in everything because He is the giver and maintainer of the very existence of these things. We must overcome the myth of  thinking that there are things where God is not present.

This can happen when we think that our new inventions are just ours, and that God has nothing to do with them. That's wrong simply because the very material and laws that allow us to discover and invent new things come from God, who is right at the very core of all things we work on or discover and invent.

We certainly would be confused and lost if we fail to pray while handling the things of the world. When we pray we avoid what St.Paul once warned us about: "We will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming." (Eph 4,14)

Another area to up skill and reskill is in our moral struggle against the subtle evils of the modern world. These modern evils are usually dressed as good,charming, practical and the like. We must upgrade our combat skills, including the ability to smell dangerous occasions that can lead us to big sins, the strength to say no to temptations,etc.

In this regard, we must upskill the different virtues we always need. Order is one of the more urgent virtues to upgrade, since we must have a strong sense of priorities, given the many competing options posed before us.

Besides, nowadays we are always pressured to do multi-tasking since there are so many things to attend to and orchestrate, and there are only 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week. We are in an age of urgency, and we must learn to cope with it. So, there's no choice but to upskill and reskill. [email protected]