[00:00:00] Alicia Boddy: Why are durable skills an advantage for individual learners, communities across our nation, and businesses in every industry?
[00:00:08] That’s what we’ll explore in this first episode of our three part series, The Durable Skills Advantage.
[00:00:14] Welcome, I’m Alicia Boddy, Vice President of Partnerships at America Succeeds.
[00:00:20] america Succeeds is a nonprofit organization committed to engaging business leaders and modernizing education systems. We’ve positioned our team between business and the education policy sector, acting as an education voice to business, nationally, and a business voice for education at the state level.
[00:00:42] our advocacy work and policy efforts aim at larger culture change, bridging these two distinct constituencies. And our vision is preparing every student to succeed in the competitive global economy and contribute to their local communities. We believe identifying durable skills, clarifying these competencies, And articulating their value for employers, educators, and learners of all ages are ways to realize this vision. .
[00:01:11] Thanks for joining us for this first conversation So, what are durable skills? We’ll discuss the meaning of that term in our next episode.
[00:01:22] First, let’s talk about why individual learners need to develop durable skills, why schools in their communities should help learners do that work, and why businesses of all sizes and types will benefit from this process.
[00:01:36] listen now to a conversation between Stephanie Short, my predecessor here, and Tim Taylor, co founder and president of America Succeeds. Tim starts the discussion by sharing his own journey discovering durable skills and how he came to consider building a framework for them a labor of love and intellect.
[00:01:57] Tim Taylor: I began my career on Capitol Hill working for two different members of Congress before relocating to Colorado. And when we did relocate to Colorado, I spent the first couple of years starting a nonprofit organization that worked with abused and neglected kids through the game of golf, teaching them life skills, honor, etiquette, respect skills that you could take from the golf course into life which were far more important than being able to swing a golf club.
[00:02:23] Then about 20 years ago I was approached by a gentleman named Zach Neumeyer, my co founder at Colorado Succeeds and America Succeeds, to work on improving the school to work pipeline. The idea was… to have business leaders put their finger on the scale and help represent the demand side of the equation, the types of skills that they needed for learners to be successful in their companies and to be able to be successful in the world of work. And by doing so, they would work directly on the supply side of the equation.
[00:02:54] Our school system, the K 12 school system in particular. To prepare more kids for success, to have economic mobility, and to be able to contribute to their local communities. We, We worked at Colorado Succeeds for about 10 years when we were approached uh, at the end portion of that time, by a number of other states who said, Hey, would you be willing to share what you’ve learned by working with these employers in other states?
[00:03:18] Would you take the Colorado Succeeds model and help us spin something off into our respective states? And so we launched America Succeeds almost 10 years ago to do just that. And we had a really great run where we were working with a number of other states to show them the secret sauce that went into creating Colorado succeeds and how they could do the same thing.
[00:03:38] And over time, and particularly as a result of pandemic the mission and the way we went about our mission morphed just slightly in terms of working directly with. States and particularly affiliates in those states to working more generally with employers and partners across the country, again, in that same, very important aspect of bringing business leaders to the table who have a vested interest in making sure that kids are prepared for the workforce. their interests are aligned,
[00:04:06] Stephanie Short: Tim, as a business voice for education, we have heard… Business leaders and employers and hiring managers for years and years talk about the importance of durable skills. Let’s start with first, what are durable skills? And second, why are durable skills so important for driving success in the world of work?
[00:04:31] Tim Taylor: Durable Skills is an America Succeeds term That we came up with to describe soft skills. Nobody likes that term soft skills. There’s other terms that folks are equally uninterested in that try to describe them They can mean a lot of different things.
[00:04:45] So durable skills was our way to bring employers to the table to talk about the types of skills that last a lifetime. They power entire careers. A Much like you just said, I mean, we’ve all heard an employer say, give me somebody who can think critically or collaborate or has a growth mindset. And I’ll teach them what they need to know for the job. A lot of times in our work, we talk about durable skills being the second rung on the career ladder. If you don’t have these skills, the options to have a successful career are really low.
[00:05:15] And we know, in fact, that if you’re between the ages of 18 and 24, the number one reason you lose a job is because a lack of durable skills, not technical skills. And so, we identified these skills and the importance of these skills in particular from hundreds of conversations with employers that say over and over again, that this is the foundation to the world of work and what every.
[00:05:36] Individual will need to be successful. So before you decide whether or not you’ll study STEM or healthcare career or, anything You’ve got to have these durable skills at the base and what we found by doing a little bit of research with that, they were in very high demand across all industries, across all geographies, and regardless of what your education attainment level is.
[00:05:57] Stephanie Short: Building on that background… Durable skills we define as how you use what you know, skills like critical thinking, communication, and collaboration, and how you show up in the world. Your resilience, your leadership, your self, and cultural awareness. And we took everything we knew about the universe of those skills and created a framework.
[00:06:25] Ten competencies and ten subskills each. In partnership with LightCast and ran it through more than 80 million job postings to unequivocally prove what we had known all along. Durable skills are 7 of the top 10 most requested skills in the workforce and they show up regardless of industry, occupation, geography, or educational attainment level.
[00:06:51] And so Tim, we’ve identified through our work that there remains a durable skills gap. Clearly, employers highly demand these skills. . However, not every learner has the opportunity to develop those skills.
[00:07:09] So why is it so important? Why, in America Succeeds view, is closing that gap truly at the heart of this work?
[00:07:18] , lot of folks just fundamentally get that these skills are super important to success in the workplace. And that’s largely due to the fact that they’ve worked with somebody who didn’t have these skills and realized how important they were.
[00:07:31] Tim Taylor: So one these are enduring skills. These skills last a lifetime. They’re never mastered. You practice these across your entire career. And if you’re to switch industries or sectors or even within certain jobs you will not use the same technical skills, but you will use the same durable skills.
[00:07:49] But unfortunately, they’re not part of today’s education system. They’re not embedded into everyday coursework. Most students get a lot of these skills by afterschool activities which favors students who have means low income or rural kids tend to have less exposure and access to some of those opportunities.
[00:08:08] But think about sports or music and art travel being engaged in a church, right? There’s dinner table conversations where students practice these skills often, more often than they’re practicing, in the classroom.
[00:08:19] things that educators need that they don’t have in terms of tools and access and the ability to talk about these. First and foremost is a common lexicon. Do we all mean the same thing when we say that somebody should think critically? Or collaborate. So one is getting our heads around , what these mean and how students are able to demonstrate those skills.
[00:08:41] And the second piece of that, is that even if teachers and the classroom experience is inclined To teach these skills, they’re not sure how to embed them in the various curriculums that we have around the country. So a lot of the work that we’re doing is around what we refer to as prompts.
[00:08:57] Trying to get teachers to use prompts in the classroom that will practice these skills. But don’t change the curriculum or the content that they’re teaching. So a great example of that would be a math teacher, for example, that would ask their students to get in groups of three.
[00:09:12] They’d assign that group a certain set of problems, and they’d ask those students to solve those problems using various problem solving techniques. And then go to the front of the class and present how they solve those problems back to their classmates. So in this example, the students are practicing collaboration skills, critical thinking, problem solving, presentation, public speaking skills.
[00:09:35] So five durable skills in one simple prompt. And the kids are still learning the math that they need to learn. The beauty of these prompts is they work across different grade levels. So let’s say you put that prompt into a 4th grade class where the kids are practicing fractions. That works. If you did the same thing and you gave it to a group of 10th graders…
[00:09:56] That are learning geometry, that prompt works just as well
[00:09:59] this doesn’t exist as a critical thinking course or as a collaboration course. That’s just not the way that, that humans learn and practice these skills.
[00:10:09] Stephanie Short: I like to think of them like the vitamins in applesauce. There are lots of places where these skills are embedded into the classroom, but we have only told the students that they are getting to eat a really sweet treat, and forgot to tell them that there is vitamin A and C and E. Packed inside. And so, they may be getting some critical thinking skills.
[00:10:34] They may be getting some collaboration skills. But we haven’t been really intentional about describing those skills to them in a common language. And been intentional, about surfacing those skills for the students that help them advance in their college or career pathways.
[00:10:53] Tim Taylor: Yeah, I love that.
[00:10:55] Stephanie Short: These skills and the common language are a key part of unlocking opportunities into jobs. this work started with the demand side of the equation, the labor market side of this equation. We see over and over again that employers are hungry to identify and develop these skills within their workforce.
[00:11:18] However, that’s a really difficult task. Traditionally and historically, these skills have been identified through the lens of a bachelor’s degree or some kind of post secondary credential. In a lot of cases, because there’s a lack of alternatives, that college degree is a proxy, but not necessarily a really great…
[00:11:45] So can you talk a little bit more about the opportunity that exists there, that some of this work is on the K 12 side, but some of this work is on the employer side, giving them new ways to identify talent and open up the workforce to more of the people in our communities.
[00:12:05] Tim Taylor: Yeah, that’s a great question, calls out a big issue in education, school to work pipeline issues and that’s that there’s a call to blur the lines between each of those K 12, higher ed post secondary, and workforce, but there are things that actually are important across all of those and durable skills are such a great example of those.
[00:12:28] You practice those for all of the years that you’re in school and and you use them for the rest of your life. there’s work to do on both sides the school side which we just talked about and the employer side which your question gets to. 15 states now, I think it’s 15. This changes almost daily have removed a four year degree from hiring requirements for state jobs that don’t. require a four year degree. And they’re doing that in large part because of , the shifts in the workforce, right?
[00:12:52] They need more applicants. I think it was Georgia that had 25 percent turnover in all of their state jobs in one year alone. So they’re, hungry to get more. And if they require a four year degree for all of those jobs, they’ll never get there. We’re seeing a lot of private employers, IBM, Bank of America and others who are removing a four year degree requirement from hiring as well.
[00:13:15] But then it calls into question how employers are going to hire, When we know that almost everybody who’s ever been hired in the history of the world has been hired for a combination of technical skills and their durable skills. And so how are employers going to solve this if they’re removing a four year degree, which is largely been seen as the proxy for these skills.
[00:13:34] It’s not a perfect proxy, but I think it’s one that employers have gotten used to that suggests that somebody who has been through four years of school has learned some critical thinking skills. They’ve probably had to collaborate. would assume that they have a growth mindset, but it’s not.
[00:13:48] solid evidence in terms of those particular skills across the board.
[00:13:52] And that’s a big opportunity that America Succeeds sees and is trying to work on with partners across the country to try to figure out how to assess and validate those skills so that we create More meaningful pass to high wage high skilled jobs. And ultimately pass for economic mobility giving people a chance to experience the American dream.
[00:14:13] Stephanie Short: I think it’s important to note that there’s an urgency around this as well. From our view, will say, and being biased, that we’ve seen the urgency in reimagining and reforming and improving K 12 education systems for a long time, but there seems to be a shift, in particular post pandemic, we’re seeing demographic drought or demographic decline, that there’s simply just less people in the workforce today because of Retiring because of declining birth rates because of ongoing impacts of the economy.
[00:14:49] We’re seeing declining post secondary enrollment more and more people choosing alternative pathways, and an explosion of credentials that employers have to sort their way through. And so, something has clicked, right? Employers are desperately in need of skilled talent. Learners and workers are desperately in search of the skills that will give them access to those economically mobile jobs.
[00:15:15] And there’s an opportunity now to think about that combination of technical skills and durable skills in new and interesting ways. Tim, can you share a little bit more about the progress that we have made in partnership with CompTIA in closing that gap?
[00:15:34] Tim Taylor: CompTIA uh, was, our earliest partner in this work and they’ve been extraordinary. And for anybody who’s not familiar with CompTIA, they’re the Computer Technology Industry Association. and they are the second largest credentialer of technical skills behind Microsoft. A Python certificate or a cybersecurity certificate that’s issued by CompTIA is considered the gold standard among employers and others who are looking for validation and certification of technical skills.
[00:16:01] And CompTIA early on when we approached them about this work immediately understood the scale and the importance of, working and identifying and validating these durable skills because the employers that their folks are going to, who have the technical credentials, are also being asked if they have the durable skills to go along with it.
[00:16:18] These aren’t folks who are coding in a dark room These are folks who are working with other coders or working with clients or have front facing positions where they’ve got to figure out a lot of the types of things that require these durable skills.
[00:16:31] And CompTIA has been amazing in helping us develop a common lexicon that I talked about a little bit earlier and then validating that with employers. And also coming up with rubric we now have a tool that is going to allow us to help assess applicants and workers that are in the first couple of years of their employment.
[00:16:50] Career. And the goal of that is to see whether or not they have these types of skills also for the opportunity to upskill them and to be able to help with their own professional development. So once they’re inside of a company, a company might be able to assess the skills that they need some support in so that they can continue their personal growth and that they can develop into the types of employees that the employer is looking for.
[00:17:13] Stephanie Short: I think that points to a question we hear all the time in this work. Does someone need all 10 durable skills or is this more of an opportunity of building like a strengths finder that helps someone identify what they’re good at and identify where they have opportunities for growth?
[00:17:33] Tim Taylor: What makes the world go around is that different people are good at different combinations of these skills. And what we’re even finding is that there are certain industries or, or even jobs within industries they require more durable skills in one area than another.
[00:17:47] Being able to assess durable skills is far more about. Finding your strengths and being aware of your weaknesses, then it is being perfect at all of the durable skills all at once. And in fact, I don’t think anybody ever gets to master any of the durable skills.
[00:18:02] We would like to continue somebody’s professional development and growth in, in these areas while they’re employed. I think that’s a really important distinction. And there’s another piece that it makes me think of Harvard Business Review did a study , that showed that when employers are removing a four year degree requirement from any particular job description, what tends to happen is they put more of the durable skills into the job description to offset the need for the four year degree.
[00:18:31] Everything keeps pointing back to the opportunity for young people to learn and grow in these durable skills, to demonstrate to employers that they have them, and then for employers to continue to help an individual develop them over the course of their career.
[00:18:46] Stephanie Short: I think that’s a great place to bring this full circle about why we care so deeply about the opportunities to close this gap. Why it’s so important for learners today to develop durable skills. When you think about durable skills being like a strengths finder, durable skills locking into place with different career pathways for adult learners, the real opportunity with young learners and with K 12 students is helping them build a solid foundation of durable skills so it opens up their future opportunities.
[00:19:22] Regardless of how the workforce changes, regardless of the jobs that we likely can’t even predict, That foundation of durable skills will set them up for success regardless of the pathway they choose. On that note, thanks for joining me, Tim. That’s all we have time for during this first episode of our three part series, Durable Skills, America’s Enduring Advantage. What are some examples of durable skills? And what is the Durable Skills Advantage Confidency Framework? We’ll answer those questions for you in our next conversation.
[00:19:56] Please join us again.
