In the World of Work, Why Are ‘Soft’ or ‘Durable’ Skills So…. Hard?
It’s the year 2033. Despite numerous obstacles, we have witnessed enormously positive global shifts in business and society over the past years. These shifts can largely be attributed to the awakening of our society’s collective consciousness that placed a renewed value on both people and our planet following the summer of 2020.
Many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets have made significant headway, including SDG Target 4.4 which sought to “substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship by 2030.” The global success related to this goal is a product of leapfrog technologies created with equity-centered approaches, servant leadership demonstrated in multi-sectoral partnerships and the widespread reach of d urable skills. This has been the decade of Democratized Innovation in the workforce development and education sector.
TIME TRAVEL: BACK TO THE BEGINNING
The catalyst of this new age first took root in 2023. This was the year that America Succeeds, CompTIA,and Common Group embarked on a collaboration to create a rubric for measuring durable skills. Their founding R&D work ensured that the durable skills rubric was truly human- and equity-centered, intentionally designed to avoid historically biased and oppressive norms while at the same time being useful and intuitive for a wide array of hiring managers and job seekers.
How did they do it? Together with 19 diverse employers and early-career professionals, they took the first step in pioneering the basic science underpinning several powerful products, including a reliable durable skills measurement tool for all, or as its been colloquially called — the Golden Ticket. Over the course of five intense days in New Orleans, this group produced the first prototype of the durable skills rubric, which catalyzed a rich equity-centered design research program from March-May 2023.
Through this research program, the voices of people who had historically experienced various forms of unfair exclusion in the labor market were documented and heard. Their feedback and product validation insights were reflected into the rubric beta prototype — and ultimately into the many derivative products built around the rubric, ranging from educators’ tools deployed in K-12 classrooms all the way up to leadership development tools deployed in corporate conference rooms. This founding R&D infused equity into the durable skills ecosystem at large, which was transformative.
Simultaneously, 2023 was a year when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro announced that he had “ eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for the vast majority of jobs in the state government “ on the heels of similar changes made in Utah and Maryland. This created a ripple effect across the U.S. public and private sectors, where the lived and learned experiences of job seekers were truly valued by employers because many of the outcomes of those experiences suddenly became demonstrable and measurable. This led to increased confidence and livable-wage jobs amongst people historically and unfairly excluded from various parts of the labor market. The cycle of intergenerational poverty was broken amongst record numbers of families, and economic mobility was finally within reach. Over time, however, unintended consequences started to crop up. Will the idea of a Golden Ticket based on durable skills be strong enough to overcome these challenges?
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this two-part speculative design fiction that will be inspired by insights from our next phase of work, which will include equity-centered design research to inform the next iteration of the durable skills rubric prototype. Keep following along for more learnings and insights to come!
Special Thanks to Lisa Baird, Naomi Graham-Stanford, and George Vinton from the Common Group for their collective time and support in crafting this message.
_________________________________________________________________
Jasmine facilitating an Equity Centered Design Session at the Durable Skills SME Workshop in January 2023.
About Jasmine Burton: Jasmine [she/her] works to dismantle barriers for structurally excluded people. She is a designer, entrepreneur, and social-inclusion specialist who uses design thinking, business strategy, and evidence-based research to build a more inclusive world. For a decade, she has led the sanitation nonprofit Wish for WASH as the founding CEO in addition to leading innovative ESG projects through her independent consulting firm Hybrid Hype. More recently, Jasmine has jumped into the world of workforce development and education innovation as the first senior manager of social-impact consulting firm Common Group.
To learn more about Durable Skills, please visit https://americasucceeds.org/policy-priorities/durable-skills.
Originally published at https://medium.com on February 20, 2023.
