- [Narrator] IQ:smartparent is made possible by The Grable Foundation - on this episode of IQ:smartparent, we'll tell you all about soft skills, what they are and why your kids need them to succeed.

Experts say many kids today lack the ability to interact with others.

And the employers say it's a problem that's reached epidemic proportions.

We're talking about soft skills, so stay with us.

IQ:smartparent starts right now.

(soft upbeat music) Welcome to IQ:smartparent.

I'm your host, Lisa Washington.

Whether young people are applying to college, searching for jobs or collaborating on projects and teams, they need to know how to work well with other people.

Our guest today will help you fill your kids tool kits with these crucial soft skills.

So let's get right to it with our first guest, Dr. Lisa Abel-Palmieri and Emily Donato, both of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania.

Welcome two both of you.

So let's talk about defining these soft skills.

What are soft skills?

- Soft skills make up a variety of professional skills.

Anything from critical thinking to problem solving to what you might call executive presence.

- And you were going to add, Emily.

- Yes, it also includes, considering how resilient a student can be when they're faced with a problem.

How well they bounce back and are willing to take on a challenge that they might not have otherwise been prepared for.

- So it's teamwork and it's communicating.

How are employers telling you their concerns about young people not having these crucial skills?

- We have talked to hundreds of employers and there's a common theme among many of them and that is we might be able to teach them a technical skill, a hard skill and occupational skill, but we need them prepared with the soft skills.

And so they struggle, especially as work becomes more team focused and more collaborative that you could be one of the smartest, most academic students, but if you don't know how to be a problem solver, collaborate on a team and bounce back from failure, you will struggle when you enter this new world of work.

- Is there any particular area?

Is it just the communicating?

Or are the interpersonal skills working with the employers what they're saying?

- I would say also technology skills.

I think sometimes we assume that young people know how to use technology, maybe better than people who've been in the workplace for a while.

But it's really about that idea of not just consuming technology, but actually being able to use it to create.

- I know a lot of my students don't even have typing class anymore.

They tell me that they will write their papers on their phones.

So that's going to be an interesting development.

- So then you're talking about just the simple, basic skill of typing is also a problem.

Okay, so then let's talk about hard skills.

- Yeah.

So hard skills are more what we refer to as occupational skills.

And so on our programming, our career works program that we have, all of our students learn about soft skills, but then they move into this idea of occupational or hard skills.

Those are skills that might be particular to a certain career.

So, do you want to talk about some of them?

- So, for instance, in information technology, having an awareness of both the hardware and the software of the computer.

Or in medicine, having the ability to administer medications and understanding of anatomy.

So it's, like Lisa said, knowledge that's specific to a certain occupation.

- So then if one has strong hard skills, wouldn't that be enough to satisfy the employer?

- No, it's really not.

Because the thing is, you could be the strongest coder and programmer, and let's say you design some new app or you design some new tech, but you don't actually understand how people are going to use it, nor do you maybe get their opinion before you design it.

That's gonna be a problem.

So really understanding how to build empathy for others, how to, sort of what we call fail fast, design something, figure it out, iterate that design.

Those are things that are not considered hard skills.

You have to learn how to do those sorts of things by building and practicing your soft skills.

- And you might be able to get along well and in entry level position.

But in order to advance, you really need to be able to collaborate and think outside of what you know as your hard skill training.

- So you have to have those interpersonal skills because you're working with coworkers, you're part of a team and that's so important to getting your work done successfully.

- Absolutely.

- Why do you think that the young people are struggling with these soft skills?

- I'll take a stab at answering that to start.

I think schools especially, we need schools as partners and afterschool programs like Boys and Girls Clubs I think can enrich and supplement what schools are doing.

And we do that for several school districts.

I think the challenge that school sometimes have is that they have a curriculum they're supposed to cover, they have to prepare students for standardized testing.

And unfortunately though we know that the world is not standardized because what employers are asking for is actually non-standardization.

It's creativity, it's innovation.

And so when we're teaching kids in a very standardized way, sometimes this is why they're missing out on real world learning because they're sort of stuck with this traditional type of teaching.

So I really believe that it's like an ecosystem that needs to come together to prepare young people for the future of work.

It's parents, it's schools, it's out of school time programs.

And until the sort of model of school changes where it's not as focused on standardization, we're gonna need other programs and other opportunities for our kids to learn these skills.

- What about technology?

Kids have access to a lot of technology now and we think that that's what they need to be successful.

Is that a big factor do you think?

- I do think so.

Speaking as a millennial myself, I know that there are some biases against certain generations.

And I think that as time goes on, we're going to see just an increased value in having the ability to have that face to face conversation and putting your phone down.

It's of course important to be able to type up a professional email, but also to be able to approach your boss and say the same thing in person and be confident in your presence.

- And so it seems that it would be pretty easy to measure proficiency with the hard skills.

How do you measure the soft skills to determine where kids are lacking?

- It's really hardly.

So there's not a lot of standardized instruments or tools out there that are sort of been vetted that organizations are using.

For us, what we do is we use a combination of sort of self-reflection, peer to peer observation.

And then we do have some tools through some curriculum providers that we have that we've been able to leverage.

But there really isn't a hard cut way to measure soft skills.

I think at the end of the day it's connecting it sorta to those competencies we talked about before and defining what does good problem solving look like?

What does good teamwork look like?

And then really this combination of methods to evaluate.

But is it really a true and fast way at this point to sort of put a quantitative number on a students or a young person's soft skill abilities?

- To say just how strong you are in that.

Now Emily, you are a career development coordinator.

So how do you work with young people?

One, in determining their careers and then also working on building those soft skills.

- So it's funny, on the first day of programming for our career development with teens, I said, "When do you think that your career begins?"

And they said, "Well, after college."

And I said, "That's not true, it can begin today."

- [Lisa] Right.

- It's a matter of, first of all knowing what your goals are and thinking about how to get there, but also developing in the real world experiences that we granted them.

Those competencies and those skills that can be transferable no matter what occupation they decide to go into.

Because we know that no matter what industry you're in, you're going to need to use some level of technology, especially as time goes by.

And our technology is advancing and you're going to need to be able to talk to people and be resilient.

Because in the real world problems come up all the time that you might not have been able to have a class on how to address that problem.

And so it's both for us, a combination of helping those students, work towards their goals and putting them in environments where they can try hands-on experience.

- So then what does that stake if the kids are lacking and they don't get these skills?

- For me, I think it gets to a much bigger perspective and it really almost even relates to the workforce.

And I think we have a lot of education to skill employment gaps across this country where there are jobs and jobs that we don't even really know whether they're going to be yet.

And we need a workforce to fill those jobs.

And so if we don't start to explore what those workforce gaps are, and a lot of them are around these soft skills, problem solving type of area, we're gonna have these workforce gaps.

And ultimately, we don't want companies leaving our regions, we don't want employers to not be able to fill them.

And so it's a much bigger thing than just the kids themselves, but really the whole community.

- So it has to be a collaborative effort?

- [Dr. Lisa] Yeah, yeah.

- All right, well ladies, thank you so much.

I appreciate you being with us.

Coming up, you can discover how mental health factors into a person's soft skills, but first, check this out.

(soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] Learn more about soft skills by searching these key phrases, intangible skill sets, emotional intelligence quotient, people skills, workplace competencies, and essential skills for the workplace.

(soft upbeat music) - our next guest is here to explain how mental health is intertwined with career development and academic success.

Welcome Wesley Jackson Wade, thanks for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- You've counseled college students at North Carolina State University.

Tell us about the spike in mental health issues among college students that we've seen in recent years.

- Right.

I'm a career counselor at NC State University.

I have a private practice where I do some mental health and substances abuse counseling.

And you can see this spike in all of those areas, right?

And there's a few different ideas about why this spike exist.

I'm of the belief that this is, it's not an issue of resilience with the students.

This is just, we're more aware of it, right?

And so we're more intentional about finding these things, which is a good thing.

But also college is more expensive than it's ever been.

College is more competitive than it's ever been before.

So these students are already coming into a college environment with stress, like they've done all these extracurriculars, all these sorts of things.

And it's already put a layer of stress onto that.

It can really cause them to just like look inward, not really get engaged as much because they're having this level of stress and anxiety.

- So then that overlaps with their soft skills or lack thereof?

- Yes, definitely.

Well, let's do like a profile of a student.

So they're coming in and they have this expectation that they're gonna be in X major, microbiology or something along these lines.

And they've taken all these AP classes and all this stuff and they are only focused on this thing, right?

They are not focused on anything else.

I'm not getting any adjacent experience.

They're only gonna do research, they're only gonna do things that goes with microbiology.

And they're not learning more about their interests, their skills, developing those, I call them critical skills sometimes in addition, because that soft skills can be kind of limiting when we put it like that.

And they're just not getting this collaborative experience as much, sometimes not at all time though.

- And then also if we talk about maybe with the interpersonal skills, they aren't, as you said, learning what their interests are because they aren't really talking to people.

- Right, right.

They're in science curriculum.

So I mainly work with college of sciences students.

So biology, chemistry, physics, math, statistics.

And again, they're doubling down on what they want to do with this degree.

They're not always thinking about these other areas.

So I had a student who was a math, applied math, very hard degree.

There's a lot of different areas they can get into and they liked it and they were okay at it.

But that student really loved psychology.

And because of that, he just didn't really look at all these other experiences and kind of limited himself a little bit.

But then he started getting outside of his comfort zone and getting involved in leadership opportunities where he was getting that interpersonal experience.

But that doesn't always happen, right?

You tell these students, we have to do STEM, we have to do STEM, we have to do this, you gotta come to college and get a great career.

And certainly there's truth to that, right?

But it's not the whole truth, right?

We're developing the whole student, not just this one academic lane.

- So then what soft or crucial skills would you expect college students to have that they may be lacking?

- That's a good question.

We've generation, like Z students where we're at now who are coming on campus, a lot of them have experience but not a lot of paid work experience.

And so there's certain skills that go into that, answering the phone.

Like a lot of these students have cell phones, their parents have cell phones, they don't have a landline, they have an answer to phone for business too.

And so they answer the phone, they go, "Hey," (laughs) right?

- [Lisa] Right.

They're not saying, "Hey, this is the so-and-so residents."

This level of customer service and experience is outside of themselves.

Collaboration skills, critical thinking skills are there but not always outside of their academic discipline.

So being able to take some of the analytical skills which you might get looking in English, like reading certain stories and applying them in a scientific way.

These are some of the skills that we're seeing, some leadership skills, verbal and written communication skills.

- Yes.

- We definitely need some more development in those areas.

- I would imagine the stakes are higher if they don't learn those skills.

I mean early on because now you're in college and you're trying to work towards getting a degree, a discipline, but you need those skills as well.

- Yeah.

I mean, there can be a multitude of reasons why students don't come on a college campus with those skills already intact.

We're looking for them to just develop them too.

But you are starting a little bit behind because now you have to understand that you need those skills and then you have to seek opportunities to develop those skills, right?

And so whether it's talking to professors, I used to argue my grades with professors pretty frequently.

That's a skill.

That's a persuasion skill, right?

Understanding the argument from someone else's perspective and how you relate to that argument.

Being able to write effectively, whether it's a resume or cover letter or a personal statement or a proposal for a project that you want to do, that effective communication piece is something that you should be learning in undergrad.

But if students aren't always focused on that, then they don't get to see that full picture of development.

So they're starting off behind the ball like we were saying.

And what we do in career development centers, as a career counselor is, I tell students just like you're in class learning these things to apply throughout your career span, I am teaching you these skills throughout your career span too.

I'm not just trying to help you get the internship or the research opportunity.

- [Lisa] It's life long.

- These are life skills.

- I see.

- And so this is why I'm so big about like not calling them soft skills, just 'cause it limits the understanding, right?

- So then let's bring it back to mental health because how do you recognize when there's a mental health issue?

Is it anxiety?

Or is it just the person who may feel a little awkward because they don't have some of these crucial skills.

- That can be tough, right?

And it's something that we all need to see, which is where my mental health and career background really comes into place.

First, if it's like anxiety or depression or anything along that framework, that is a clinical issue, right?

This isn't a choice.

The student's not choosing to be anxious, they're not choosing to be depressed, right?

This is something that they have.

Now, sometimes those students can still be good in terms of developing those critical skills like we were talking about, but it can hinder them, right?

And so when I'm trying to identify those, let's say I'm working for a student one-on-one, right?

First I'm checking for body language.

I'm trying to understand what circles are they in?

Do they just go to class and then go back to their dorm room and they don't go anywhere, right?

That isolation is bad for multitude of reasons, right?

It limits your interaction of other students.

It limits your interaction with staff members and other program and in professors.

But I'm looking for those key characteristics, right?

So is there a theme of them withdrawing from everything on campus?

Which is usually a symptom of something deeper.

Or do I hear that they're just shy?

They're just of not anxiety, but a little anxious about the situation.

- So then that's easy for you to identify, but give us some thoughts for parents to help them identify this.

- Yeah.

Communication is gonna be essential, right?

And when we're talking about communication as, I'm a parent myself, like my kid is pretty young, but I'm a parent myself.

We have to model these behaviors.

Sometimes we can come from this perspective of, "Oh, I'm your parent and I'm talking to you, "so I expect you to interact with me in this manner."

But we haven't been modeling this and showing how that looks.

- So the parents need to model this, so that the kids actually seeing it.

- [Wesley] 100% - All right.

- [Wesley] 100%.

- Thank you so much for joining us.

Of course, our kids learn soft skills through experience and through watching other people demonstrate them, as we just heard.

Up next, discover what parents can to model soft skills.

(soft upbeat music) - Our final guest today is Dr. Rueben Brock here to talk about how role models help kids learn soft skills.

Thanks for being with us, of course.

Let's talk about this term social learning.

Can you explain what social learning is?

And what that has to do with soft skills?

- Absolutely, so social learning is the idea that we learn from our environment.

So you learn from the messages that you get from other people.

You learn from watching other people.

So your social situation really does teach you a lot about yourself and how to do certain things.

And so with respect to soft skills, it's the idea that you're watching people use their soft skills and that's where you're gonna pick up a lot of things.

Because a lot of this stuff is not something that people are gonna teach you overtly.

- So that is the way that you observe people and then perhaps you emulate that.

- [Rueben] That's exactly right.

- Okay, so our society is becoming much more diverse.

Why is it important for kids to learn how to interact with people who may be very different than they are?

- Right, so it's just what you said.

Our world is constructed of a bunch of different people, it's so diverse.

And oftentimes the majority culture is really the only exposure that a lot of people will get.

And so it's important to learn how to interact with people who are different from you because that's how you connect with people and make meaningful connections and have better relationships and all kinds of things come out of those soft skills.

- Okay, now you do it quite a bit of work focused with black culture and black students.

- [Wesley] Yes.

- Tell me about the issues with acquiring the soft skills when it comes to young people of color.

- Right, so the problem is that people of color are underrepresented in a lot of the areas where you're gonna use a lot of soft skills.

In entertainment, in business, in engineering.

The people that you look at at the top don't always look like us.

And so unfortunately what happens is young people of color are vicariously learning to not use those skills because they're not seeing people that look like them, use them.

- And I think a part of that also is having the confidence when they are in an environment and there aren't a lot of people who look like them being able to use those skills.

What does the research show about the importance of young people of color seeing role models of color?

- Yes, so there's a clear connection between a person's belief in their own abilities, as we call it self efficacy, and their exposure to people who look like them.

So in other words, the original researcher, Albert Bandura, who talked about social learning, he said that you have to be able to identify with the model.

And so a young person, let's say a young black kid, he needs to really see people of color doing the things that he might think to do so that he will see that as a role model.

So the more exposure we can give young people to people that look like them, the more they might aspire to the things where you're gonna pick up those skills.

- And I've heard people say, "If you can see it, "you can be it."

- [Rueben] That's Right.

- So what advice then do you have for families and educators about exposing young people to diverse role models?

As examples of soft skills in action.

- What I would say is be intentional.

So it's not gonna naturally happen because of that lack of representation in a lot of fields.

It's not gonna naturally happen that a young person of color is gonna see models that look like them and are good models for them.

And so you have to be intentional about, if you're a teacher, bringing in speakers who are, maybe a black engineer or those kinds of things.

Because if you don't really, really attempt to, you can miss out on diversity entirely.

- What about representation that we see maybe in entertainment, in media, in culture?

How does that factor in?

- So that can be a positive and a negative because unfortunately for people of color, a lot of the messages and images that we see aren't exactly the best role models, right?

If you're watching videos all the time and stuff like that, you're watching people who have become successful but not by using conventional soft skills.

And so the danger is you can get the message.

When I talk to young people, a lot of young black kids think that they can only be certain things, entertainers, athletes, right?

And so they establish that culture for themselves, whereas they're not learning to be doctors and lawyers, and they're not watching those models.

So we really wanna be, again, intentional about exposing young people to all of the spectrum of models so that they have all doors open to them.

- Okay, so then let's talk about mentors because they play a very critical role.

If the child has a mentor, how can they help young people understand and build those soft skills?

- So it's about the vicarious learning.

It's social learning in action.

A role model is really not necessarily gonna be overtly teaching you things necessarily, more so it's about showing them, right?

If you are my mentor, if you are my role model, I just watch you in action and I learn vicariously through the way you carry yourself.

So when I see you interacting with your producers and things like that, I'm watching you, and then I say, "Oh, I see how she did that.

"That's interesting."

And I'm socking that away.

And that's what really a role model does.

A good mentor is showing you how to live rather than telling you.

- I see, and this is probably a tough one.

But, how do we improve access to mentors in those underserved areas?

- That is a tough one.

And I would say that one goes to the professionals, the people who are in position to be mentors, they have to take it upon themselves to make themselves available to the people who need the role models.

- Okay.

So we all have moments when we don't model the best interpersonal skills for our children.

Is there a way to turn our own laps and soft skills maybe with the parents lacking, maybe you don't have that self confidence into a teachable moment for the child.

- Yes, and so you would do that by modeling one of the soft skills, which would be introspection, self-reflection.

So if I make a mistake and I'm in front of my daughter, if I'm willing to stop and say, "Hey, okay, I'm really sorry about what I did just then, "I wanna talk to you about that.

"Did you see how I yelled at that lady when I was in traffic "and I was mad.

"That wasn't exactly the best thing to do, "and let's talk about why."

And so not only am I telling her this is what you actually should do.

I'm showing her that I'm willing to be wrong, to learn from my mistakes, to acknowledge the things that I'm doing and that I can continue to learn.

That is not only telling her something but that, I'm modeling good behavior.

- Is it ever okay for parents to take a step back and to let the kids learn those soft skills through trial and error?

- Absolutely.

They're gonna do that anyway.

You cannot be where your child is 24 seven.

And so they're gonna be out learning through trial and error anyway.

But you will also wanna be a little bit intentional.

You wanna put them in situations where their trial and error is gonna be really, really effective.

So in other words, getting them to STEM camps, getting them to the kinds of exposures that will give them the skills that they need.

- So what is your final advice for parents to help with their kids build those strong people skills?

- If you really put thought into it, you can create in your child an environment that really sets them up for success in the future.

- So make sure that you are intentional, - [Rueben] Yes.

- and getting your kid exposed and that's how they learn those skills.

- That's exactly right.

- Not by someone telling them, - That's right.

- but by them seeing them.

- [Rueben] Right.

- All right, Dr. Brock, thanks so much for joining us.

And thank you for being here too for this important focus on the soft skills that kids need to succeed at school, at work and in life.

Join us again next time for more IQ:smartparent.

- [Narrator] Want to learn more about IQ:smartparent, visit us online @iQsmartparent.org.

For more episodes and additional tools and resources, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest to share your thoughts on being a 21st century parent.

(soft upbeat music) IQ:smartparent is made possible by The Grable Foundation.

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