How Can We Close the Human Skill Gap?

Sandra William, Investment Fellow

The Case for Human Skills:

In June 2020 Chief Empathy Officer became a popular buzzword in news headlines. In the face of a series of difficult and uncharted moments in history — COVID, Black Lives Matter, etc. — top CEOs, like Tim Cook, redefined their leadership roles, communicating the change world leaders need to adopt to face this unprecedented time.¹This singular moment is the product of a longer-term trend: there is a shift in the need for human skills. Despite this, our education system and labor markets emphasize credentials from colleges that do not necessarily teach and recognize these skills. For now, most of these human skills are learned outside of formal schooling.

Human skills, also often called soft skills or 21st century skills, can be defined as durable skills that help citizens and employees participate, contribute and succeed in their communities and in any job vocation. Empathy is one of them. As highlighted earlier, the ability to emotionally understand others has become imperative to engage in the changing dynamics of the global market. Others include critical thinking, perspective-taking, having a growth mindset, emotional intelligence, etc. As we pursue political parity in our democracy, increasing leadership diversity, and deeper collaboration in our workplaces, and develop strategies to handle an increasing pace of innovation and a growing gap in education inequality, human skills have become increasingly critical.

Much literature has argued the benefits and the need for human skills. Numerous pieces of academic literature tie critical thinking and higher-order thinking to citizenship competence, a fundamental element for successful democracies.² In the workplace, employers seek non-automatable, enduring human capabilities such as agility that can continuously create value from technological advancements replacing technical tasks and the rapidly evolving market needs.³ Additionally, it has been shown that employees acquire more proactive attitudes, better work engagement, and increased receptiveness to transformational leadership when they have growth mindsets.⁴ Finally, some human skills are linked to improvements in academic motivation and performance in students.⁵ A kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored 95th percentile on the national achievement test one year after incorporating growth mindset practices in the classroom.6 Similarly, an academically struggling class of fourth-grade students in the South Bronx scored the highest grades in the state of New York on the state math test one year after applying the same approach.⁶

Educational institutions are still in the process of implementing human skill development in their current infrastructure, curriculums, and teaching methods. The human skill gap is real. Integrating it into our educational system can democratize it, creating a fair opportunity for everyone to learn these skills. Teaching human skills will require a transformation of our current educational system, though. ed-tech tools can help us achieve this change.

Rethink Education’s Market POV:

We categorize human skills into 3 key categories. Self-development skills help learners better manage their professional and personal growth. Second are thinking skills, those involving mental processes to absorb and make meaning of information. Finally, interpersonal skills are the social skills needed to interact and communicate with others (see exhibit below).

Based on secondary research and the industry experts we talked to, the most sought after and critical human skills are:

1. Agile learning / Growth Mindset
2. Critical Thinking
3. Emotional Intelligence
4. Empathy
5. Curiosity

Despite varying opinions, there is a larger consensus among experts that developing these skills is most critical before adulthood years. The earlier you teach human skills the better equipped people are to be natural lifelong learners, the more time they have to practice and develop their overall skill portfolio, both in and outside formal schooling.⁷ One way we can teach human skills is to increase the general awareness and knowledge of human skills. Still, experience and practice in the right contexts and with human interaction are at the core of learning human skills.⁶ Human skills eventually become a by-product of continual, accumulated experiences and interventions that train us to exercise the right human skills in the right moments. Consider a waiter whose name is Jane. Jane has completed high school and has been a waiter for the last 2 years. During high school, Jane learned about growth mindset, empathy, and critical thinking. She was encouraged by her teachers to exercise these skills whenever she faced challenging problems and interacted with her classmates. Imagine how these learnings could influence Jane in her current job; she has more potential to be empathetic and better manage difficult customers, carry a positive attitude towards challenging situations, viewing them as growth opportunities vs. failures, and think more critically about political conversations she’s overheard her customers have. Every time she practices these skills she continues to sharpen them. By acquiring an early foundation for these skills, Jane can build on them every day, making her a lifelong learner. She can then carry those human skills with her as she rises into a managerial or professional job.

The larger question to consider is not when it is most optimal for a learner to learn human skills, but when it is most practical and realistic to teach them considering current educational systems. The ed-tech startup space is overcrowded with players offering different solutions that teach human skills from early childhood to employee education. Some of these solutions are not primarily learning solutions but are tools that engage users in ways that breed habits fostering human skills. For instance, Cultivate is a culture development platform helping managers adopt leadership qualities in their communication with employees. It is not an education focused solution, but by using it managers are inherently refining their interpersonal skills. All in all, we can categorize the solutions in the market under 7 buckets (see exhibit below):

Pain Points and Areas of Opportunity:

I. Effectively teaching human skills requires many conditions:

Condition 1: The Right Culture

Unlike learning hard skills, learning human skills requires many systemic and environmental pre-conditions. First, the culture, mindset, and norms around the ways we teach human skills are crucial. Studies have shown that student trust in the instructor and peer norms are critical contributors to an active learning environment.⁸ Similarly, in the corporate field experts have emphasized the importance of creating a sense of safety for employees to practice and experiment their human skills.

Opportunity: We see an opportunity for VR solutions to close this gap by creating controlled environments that stimulate the right learning conditions for human skills. A recent study by PWC showed that employees felt 40% more confident about applying soft skills they learned through a VR experience compared to other forms of delivery because VR created a safe environment for them to learn and practice these skills.⁹ Another experiment done by Stanford researchers found that participants who undergone VR simulation experienced higher and sustained levels of empathy towards homelessness as compared to participants who undertook other forms of empathy education.¹⁰ Mursion is a great example of a startup that curates 2D and 3D VR simulations to teach different types of soft skills relevant to different industries. Another is Praxis Labs, which uses VR to create simulations that increase empathy in the workplace to support DEI initiatives.

Condition 2: Continuous and Contextual Learning

Another limitation, which we find in many of the solutions in the market, is the isolative nature of teaching human skills. Compartmentalizing the human skill learning experience as one-off instances that are not contextualized does not capture its full value. Having one travel experience, one project-based assignment or one class discussing empathy that exposes students to interpersonal skills does not instill long-lasting transferable learning in them. Instead, teaching human skills must become a routine practice embedded in the day-to-day learning process just as teaching math needs to be a repeated practice for students to grasp it.

Opportunity: Habit development apps such as wixklub can be useful here as they create a 10-minute daily drill routine in their app-based programs for students to practice different thinking skills: e.g., critical thinking, creativity, etc.

Other than making it a recurring practice, students learn human skills most effectively while they practice them, rather than learning them solely conceptually. For instance, students may be able to understand creativity as a theoretical concept, but they may not be able to put such conceptual understanding into practice. However, if you teach the idea of creativity and creative strategies while developing a project, for example in an art class, an “aha” moment can be created for the students. Alternatively, the recurring practice of creative thinking in an art classroom, without recognizing it as they practice it, allows for creativity to become tacit knowledge, intuitive wisdom that will unconsciously shape actions in the future.

Opportunity: An interesting solution here can be an idea similar to Local Civics. Local Civics is reinventing civics education by providing educators and students a platform that gives students opportunities to participate in civic engagement as compared to learning standard curriculums. Students get to learn about civics while practicing activities that expose them to community service and outreach, and civic discussions that train their debating, active listening, and perspective-taking skills in a relevant context, politics.

Condition 3: Leader & Educator Buy-in

Corporate and school leaders, teachers, and faculty members have a lot of power in shaping the right learning culture, applying the right teaching methodologies, and foreseeing opportunities to contextualize human skills. Finally, educators are a consistent part of a student’s learning journey giving them the ability to continually intervene and make human skill development a repetitive learning process. Without their buy-in, rolling out human skill programs can become fruitless. However, educators and employees are already overworked with the increasing demands and pressures of the current schooling system and the job market. The same is true for students.

Opportunity: Hence, the best solutions are the ones that find a way to integrate, and not add, human skill development into the current educational curriculum or work processes. Gong is a great example highlighted later in the article that tracks and manages soft skills as employees do their job, without requiring significant time to be carved out for it. Another critical element to seek in solutions is whether it considers the change management programs needed to motivate and train educators and business leaders in building the right culture that encourages human skill development.

II. Measuring human skills and their impact:

One thing we noticed during our interviews is the lack of a common language or terminologies used to refer to human skills. Educational institutions tend to emphasize words such as SEL, resilience, or perseverance, while corporate language usually revolves around agility, soft skills, and growth mindset, words that are usually used as an umbrella terminology for various human skills.

Building a common language, approach or metric system that can measure skill progression and impact can open doors to exchange knowledge and create a shared ecosystem to extend the value of these skills and increase the willingness to pay for human skill solutions. We already see an appetite to invest in solutions that build human skills. This March President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), 20% ($22B) of which is dedicated to addressing student’s wellbeing and social and emotional learning (SEL). Companies, managers, and business schools are spending over $24B on management training services. Still, the ability to scale, manage and make informed decisions that yield better outcomes is hindered as long as we don’t have a way to measure these skills and their impact. Such generous funding can easily be allocated to traditional ways schools have addressed SEL, e.g., increasing the number of counselors and social workers, instead of revamping curriculums and classroom facilitation in ways that challenge students to apply human skills daily.

Why is it hard to measure human skills?
Measurement of human skills is hard for many reasons.

1. Unlike technical skills, human skills cannot be assessed through a standardized test. Setting a standard definition for good communication skills becomes impossible when it can vary by culture, organization, and role.

2. The human element is critical, both from an outside-in and self-perception angle. Even if peers assess that an employee has strong negotiation skills, unless the employee believes in this assessment they will not use these skills.

3. Human skills are dynamic and life-stage dependent. The human skills you need today may not be the same skills you need in your next role. Setting and tracking human skill goals is a personalized process that should align with your current vocation and needs to be continuously revised and updated.

What are some current measurement approaches and their limitations?
There are already various skills mapping solutions in the market applying different measurement frameworks. Some rely on self-reporting tools, others on frequency-based metrics, elaborate role-based rubrics that define exceptional, average vs. unacceptable performances, or feedback loops that collect team input through 360-degree surveys, etc. However, these solutions have not been scientifically proven to enhance human skills in the long run, nor have they been tied to an overall better job or academic performance, or human well-being and competence. They also heavily rely on human bias and lack a common taxonomy that can be used across organizations, meaning that students nor employees can use them as credentials to support their career progression. Finally, these solutions only measure human skills in a formal learning context while a lot of human skills are acquired outside such settings. A stay-at-home mother may have accumulated more human skills than a white-collar employee with 15 years of experience; however, as of today, we have no way to measure and formally recognize her human skills that can help her find a job. Similarly, Jane, the waiter we’ve mentioned earlier in this article, has no way to formally credit the human skills she developed as a waiter, a priceless advantage that can help her progress in her career.

Opportunity: An interesting solution we have come across is a revenue intelligence platform specifically used for sales teams. It assesses soft skills based on hard data collected from employee video and phone calls, emails, and messages, naturally embedding itself in the day-to-day of sales teams. They use this data to support employee development by creating personalized coaching programs and highlighting preventive measures to avoid trouble spots in employee interactions. They also couple customer feedback to their data, adding a human element to the overall assessment. What is specifically great about Gong is its ability to build a customer network of 2,000+ companies creating a common standardized system for organizations to approach human skill measurement in the context of sales teams. Moreover, this network effect reinforces a continuous learning cycle for Gong to perfect its AI skill assessment algorithm as its database continues to grow with its growing customer base. The Gong model is not a conventional ed-tech solution, but it can inspire other human skill measurement solutions that can be applied to different contexts to create a similar network effect.

III. Limited Scalability:

As shown in the market landscape exhibit, the market is filled with many players providing diverse solutions, but none of these solutions have proven to be scalable. This is natural considering that human skills, or human behavior, vary contextually and need to be personalized to each learner’s journey and environment. For example, RADical Hope Foundation launched RADical Health, a program to support students develop skills around relationship-building, resilience, time management, etc., and has recently launched a pilot at NYU. In general, such programs can be difficult to scale to the wider university community since it requires adaptation to speak to the different communities in a school. The program needs to be adapted to the athletes, art students, and medical students for it to be relevant to each of them. These scale barriers exist within the context of one university. Imagine the customization needed when we start considering different countries, cultures, and organizations. What may seem to be effective communication skills in one culture may be perceived as rude elsewhere. When failure is celebrated in one organization and rejected in another there will be a need to tailor the way growth mindset and learning agility practices are introduced in each organization respectively.”

Even if a one size fits all solution cannot exist there surely can be a way to extrapolate the value that these micro-solutions offer by connecting them and letting them speak to each other. For instance, you can make a project-based learning experience much more informative if it is mapped to a skills mapping tool that prompts students to intentionally set human skills goals and track them throughout their learning experience. This skills mapping tool can inform educational institutions and teachers about the students’ human skill gaps and help them curate content and exercises to tackle them. On an even larger scale, educational institutions, governments, and employers can share such data to align agendas. By integrating micro solutions we can create a scalable impact.

Opportunity: Perhaps there are a few ways we can integrate these solutions.

1. Larger data or HR management systems, such as Workday or Lattice, can start partnering with ed-tech human skills solutions. This can build a more centralized and holistic platform that can be adapted by an organization or educational institution while also giving room for data to be exchanged across them.

2. Another way is through APIs that connect different apps or solutions used within an organization, increasing the sum of its parts. A good place to integrate and centralize human skill solutions is in the software we naturally use in the day-to-day. For instance, adding a habit formation app such as Life Intelligence into Zoom or Teams can trigger employees to check in and practice a human skill such as empathy before a meeting start, normalizing the empathy practice.

3. Finally, there are already integrated software systems that offer educational institutions a larger suite of human skills solutions. For instance, The Indigo Education Company provides schools with a suite system that includes standard content of human skills, train the trainer material, and skill mapping tools.

All in all, ed-tech investors, VCs, and portfolio companies are well-positioned to lead this form of integration and tap into the new value that can come across solutions.

Human skills do so much to shape our professional, political, social, and private lives. Their tremendous and all-time relevancy makes us confident that the need for them is here to stay and will continue to be a growing priority for most political, business, and educational leaders. We hope that we can find and integrate tools that place human skills development at the front center of a person’s everyday life.

There is so much room for us to learn about human skills. We would like to continue having conversations and discussions around ways we can create new opportunities to support democratizing human skills in and outside formal educational settings.

If you are a founder building something around human skills, drop us a line!

If you are an L&D leader, educational leader, or researcher involved in human skills development and interested in engaging in these conversations or exploring innovative tools, please reach out! Email: s.will9001@gmail.com and epope@rteducation.com

References:

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