Photo: One Million Degrees scholars meet with volunteer coaches during their annual Mocktail event at Chase Tower in Chicago, Thursday, March 20, 2014. OMD program participants maintain a 70% graduation rate at community college (over three times the Illinois average) and are entering the workforce in high-demand fields and/or transferring to 4-year colleges and universities around the state. Much of our programming is focused on soft-skills development, emphasizing professionalism and executive functioning skills. One Million Degrees (OMD), a nonprofit committed to empowering low-income, highly motivated community college students to succeed in school, in work, and in life, provides academic, professional, personal, and financial supports to help students excel in community college and beyond. ![]() It is also soft skills that are often the hardest to develop. It is these skills that can help employees become upwardly mobile in their careers over the long term. While technical skills are a critical minimum requirement for performing a job, it is ultimately soft skills that make for a successful employee. This deficit is more prominent among low-income, first-generation minority students who can lack access to the social capital that helps support the development of soft skills. Soft skills include critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity, initiative, self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, productivity, and accountability, and there is growing concern that employees are entering the workforce without these skills. While public-private partnerships are making significant progress in addressing Illinois’ technical skills gap, we can’t ignore the other skills gap frequently cited by a growing number of employers: the soft skills gap. ![]() Jessica Besser-Rosenberg and Jiffy Lansing recently presented at the Scaling Up Pathways to Results conference on the importance of soft skills and Jessica submitted this post as a review of their talk.
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