|
 |
Education Dive
With badges, colleges take a hard look at teaching soft skills
Employer demand for new hires with skills like critical thinking and
communication has pushed colleges to find ways to show that students
have those abilities.
Shailaja Neelakantan
July 26, 2019
Rolando Sanchez gave his students at Northwest Vista College (NVC) a
challenge: record a minute-long speech pitching an idea to a
hypothetical senior executive and then a second one pitching the same
idea to that person's teammates.
"Sell the idea to the senior executive, and persuade the teammates to
have them agree to work together to bring the idea to fruition,”
explained Sanchez, who teaches economics at one of five community
colleges in the Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio, in an interview
with Education Dive.
Over three months, Sanchez guided the 51 students through that and
other exercises designed to teach them the real-world skills needed to
earn an "Initiative badge" — a microcredential akin to a mini
specialization.
"It's one thing to say you're a self-starter and another to actually
pull out an Initiative badge; or to say 'I'm a great communicator'
versus possessing an Oral Communication badge," Sanchez said. He
teaches both badges to NVC business and economics students.
Microcredentials are a trend du jour in U.S. higher education, and
while tech-related ones are still the most popular, those pertaining to
so-called "soft" skills — such as initiative, oral communication,
resilience, empathy and critical thinking — form a considerable
share of the offerings.
That's at least in part because multiple recent studies cite company
executives lamenting the lack of such skills in the recent college
graduates they hire. Many colleges around the country have begun to
offer soft skills badges, either as new courses or by embedding them
into existing curricula.
"I don't like to use the phrase 'soft skills' because that makes them
sound less important, while in fact, they are the most important skills
cited by employers," said Kathleen deLaski, founder and president of
Education Design Lab (EDL), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that
created the Initiative and Oral Communication badges used by NVC.
'The workplace is changing'
DeLaski is on the money.
Several recent surveys suggest employers aren’t finding employees with strong soft skills at the rates they’d like.
Four out of five employers said written communication skills were what
they wanted to see most on students' resumes, according to the National
Association of Colleges and Employers' 2019 Job Outlook survey.
Meanwhile, 40% of recruiters found job candidates lacked communication
skills, while 30% said the same of critical thinking skills, software
firm Ellucian reported in a survey of students and recruiters this
year. Students polled said they were seeking these two skills at the
highest rates, however.
Other skills employers want to see include problem-solving,
adaptability and time management, per 2017 research by recruiting
provider iCIMS.
|
|
|
|
