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Soft Skill Development Is Essential: Students Aren’t Ready for the Workforce

Written by Bill Laurienti

Teacher Trevor Muir, wrote a blog on a thought-provoking topic; soft-skills are not necessarily ‘soft,’ they should be called ‘essential skills.’

To support that, five of the main reasons millennials get fired is because they lack these essential skills.

Those skills include:

  • Independence
  • Confidence
  • Composure
  • Communication
  • Vision

We need to take a new approach to these skills and make soft-skill development an essential part of education—right next to English, math, science and history.

Muir’s point is that there is nothing soft about getting fired. If employers are looking for these skills, why do they take a back seat in education?

This issue is not the teacher’s fault, it is a systematic issue that needs to be corrected so future generations can be successful.

Communication, collaboration, critical thinking, work ethic, and confidence are essential skills for young people to have and they gain those skills every day in a SmartLab Learning solution.

To learn and master those skills, we should ensure they play a larger role in our students’ education. According to LinkedIn, 92% of talent professionals and hiring managers say that soft skills are just as important, if not more important, as hard skills.

Helping learners develop next-gen skills is intentionally designed into every SmartLab Learning solution.
Bill.Laurienti
Bill Laurienti
Content Marketing Manager

Bill Laurienti is the content marketing manager at SmartLab. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Secondary Education (English) from Colorado Mesa University and a Master of Arts in Secondary Teaching from the University of California's Rossier School of Education. Bill came to SmartLab after 10 years in the secondary classroom. He believes SmartLabs are important tools for engaging unengaged students and helping them access careers they might not otherwise have imagined.

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