Why do employers insist on hiring people with a traditional degree, even for jobs that don’t require one? The short answer: employers lack other accepted and predictive proxies for competency. The degree is the easiest and fastest way to filter talent. To employers, hiring someone without a degree feels risky. But what if we had measures that were as good —or even better—predictors of success in the workplace? What if people could qualify for all of the jobs for which they have the skills to be successful? We’re well on our way here where hard skills are concerned, in part because they are relatively easy to assess. But soft skills are a different story. Employers desperately need talent with soft skills—such as teamwork, communication and problem solving—but lack the tools to recognize them. The good news: The Sandbox?ColLABorative at?Southern New Hampshire University?is teaming up with Google.org and others (like our team at Entangled) to build an assessment platform designed to map in-demand soft skills for opportunity youth (people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither in school nor working).? https://lnkd.in/gbtvmhN Do you know models we should look to as exemplars? Have ideas for this work? I would love to hear them.
Susanna Williams
6 年
Check out https://www.microcompetencies.com/
Mathieu Plourde
6 年
Yup. We need new proxies that don't involve just jumping through the hoops of a bachelor's degree and getting into $100K of debt in the process. Repaying student loans is a risk most college students don't quite grasp yet.
Nick DiNardo
6 年
Allison Salisbury - you are speaking David Blake’s language. His team is doing some amazing things to change culture on the corporate side.
Writer/Essayist/Blogger/Technologist/Electronics/Software
6 年One can say that a college graduate can learn at a high level and that cannot be said about non-college graduates. Businesses need those who can learn. So-called soft skills will be learned or honed in college. There is not need to teach them directly. Things like collaboration is done quite naturally. We as a species have worked together just to survive and grow, ever since the caveman days. If we work at cross purposes then we fail in business and probably in life itself.