When ‘Soft’ Becomes ‘Durable’: We Can’t Improve What We Don’t Measure
Look them in the eye. Have a firm handshake. Stand up tall. Cross your Ts and dot your Is. As the daughter of Black and Native American parents, I grew up in an upwardly mobile household in Atlanta that knew, saw, and practiced these unspoken yet necessary tools of engagement — tools that could open or close doors before any technical prowess could be displayed. People call them ‘soft skills’, but in my experience, developing this knowledge base has been anything but soft.
THE HISTORY OF THE GOLDEN TICKET
To many people, access to (and retention of) a good job feels as random as finding a golden ticket in a candy bar. In the $1.25B industry that is pre-hire assessments in the U.S., we have witnessed a history of concerning evidence showing the tendency of cognitive pre-hire tests to segregate by race. The evidence has also shown that personality tests offer very low predictability of future job performance. Since the 1980s, employers have been relying on bachelors and masters degrees as proxies for soft skills. These hiring practices mirror the systemic inequities of America, continuously barring folx from underrepresented backgrounds. And as the saying goes, every system was designed to achieve exactly the results that it gets.
There are many explanations for why such practices persist. The perennial reasoning is that soft skills are hard to measure, define, and standardize. Why should this be? In my estimation, a world that can invest billions in an AI organization to create things like ChatGPT is a world that can figure out how to measure, define, and codify human social skills that have existed since the dawn of time. And the time may finally be right for the emergence of the Golden Ticket — a reliable, user-friendly measurement tool for ‘soft skills’.
Historically, the Golden Ticket has been crumpled in a corner, under-resourced and undervalued in the pre-hire assessment market. Now may be the time for it to be rejuvenated, piloted, iterated, and scaled to finally equip hiring managers and rank-and-file supervisors with the horse-power they need to eradicate their previously biased hiring tactics, such as sorting for bachelors degrees. Now is the time for the Golden Ticket to emerge as the main protagonist of the hiring world. It has the potential to change everything and everyone. After all, ‘soft skills’ may be hard to measure, but we cannot improve what we don’t measure. A whole universe of overlooked people stand to improve and demonstrate these skills, and in so doing, become newly seen — that’s the ticket.
TURNING POINT
It was the year 2020. The intersection of a global pandemic, civil rights uprising, and economic crisis led to renewed interest and demand for equity-centered work across all sectors of American life. There came a broad realization that historic systems, including hiring, need to be restructured and iterated in community with those who have been excluded in order to create a healthier world.
Suddenly, the idea of a soft-skills assessment — a tool that could reliably measure human, non-technical, social skills that are universally applicable to any job in any geography at any career stage — felt urgent instead of merely interesting. It seemed like an avenue for justice, not merely opportunity.
Soon, significant sources of power and privilege became devoted to the idea of an assessment for Durable Skills — a set of broadly applicable, non-technical skills that are transferable from one profession to another, take significant time to develop, and in many cases, are proxied (though not necessarily developed) by expensive educational options like bachelors degrees.
In the last two years, the promise of this idea has been reinvigorated with fresh resources, attention, and support through projects like the Durable Skills Rubric collaboration currently underway among a triad of partners: America Succeeds, CompTIA, and Common Group. I currently have the pleasure to co-lead this project in my position as Senior Manager at Common Group.
GOLDEN TICKETS FOR ALL?
But there is still a question of process. How do we get there? As a product designer myself, I know and deeply value efficiencies in product R&D to help optimize the outcome. However, over the past two decades, the Golden Ticket that could allow employers nationwide to upend centuries-old bias in hiring practices — a reliable Durable Skills measurement tool — has been repeatedly funneled into an R&D process that was optimized for a different product type entirely. These R&D processes are built for the pre-hire test product that is focused on objectively measurable, certifiable, technical skills that are to be utilized in hiring scenarios generally devoid of any real relationship to fixing the problem of inequity in America.
That is not the context of design this time — so why would we use the same R&D approach? It’s like trying to design an airplane using the R&D process for cars — painful from both a product design and human experience perspective. Our partners at America Succeeds and CompTIA see the conundrum as clearly as we do — another ray of hope. This time feels different. A reliable assessment for Durable Skills can and will be designed in full view of the societal context from which it emerges, and I am thrilled to embark upon this work, arm-in-arm with our partners from CompTIA, America Succeeds, and countless other contributors — literally starting on Monday, January 23 in New Orleans!
In three short days — and on the heels of a week honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — our team of partners will convene for five days to officially co-launch our first iterative, collaborative, equity-centered R&D event. Together, about thirty co-creators from a wide array of diverse workplaces across the country will come together for a week in the Crescent City to make good on Dr. King’s dream, and to push that dream one notch closer to a more equitable labor market for all — via Golden Tickets to a revolutionized hiring world, available to supervisors and hiring managers everywhere.
Stay tuned for our insights coming out of our sessions, and see you in New Orleans!
Special Thanks to Lisa Baird and George Vinton from the Common Group for their collective time and support in crafting this message.
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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 January 20, 2023.
