Soft Skills for Success
Here at the Digital Corps, we have a set of core values that help guide our daily lives as employees, students, and future members of the workforce. Among these is our value of being a student-centered workplace. This seems obvious enough, as nearly all of our employees are students. But, being student-centered is about more than just hiring students; for us, it’s about giving students opportunities to learn, grow, and broaden their horizons, even on the job.
Student Soft Skills
One major way we foster this value is through our weekly Soft Skills meetings. When you hear the words “soft skills,” you might think of effective communication, time management, and interpersonal skills. Here at the Digital Corps, we would agree, but our soft skills go a step further.
Each week, our student employees meet in groups to learn about, discuss, and reflect on a vast array of soft skills that our staff believes will help us become better adapted and more well-rounded people after we graduate. Staff members choose the topics they want to lead, and each group of students meets for one hour to hear a related presentation, usually accompanied by discussion points, activities, and even handouts. According to an article by Monster.com, employers value not only the hard skills associated with specific jobs, but also look for skills like creativity and problem solving that can be more difficult to define.
Our Soft Skills topics have ranged from professional expertise, like networking, to practical life experiences, like changing a tire. Ultimately, these sessions are all about preparing us Corps employees for life — a pursuit Riley Paulsen, Design Team Lead, recently took rather literally.
Life Isn’t Just a Game
Among the more memorable Soft Skills sessions of last fall was Riley’s version of the game of Life (or Monopoly, depending on who you ask). This larger-than-life board game included real-world expenses like student loans, taxes, and even pet ownership. Students teamed up and worked together to try to make the best decisions for their financial futures.
Hailey Russell, a member of the Video Team, found this highly interactive session to stand out in the Soft Skills lineup. “I thought that it was way different than our other Soft Skills,” she says. “It made it really fun because we were up and about and we were actually learning something while we were doing it.”
Can’t Relate
Staff members help create these memorable, rewarding experiences for us students every week, with a new topic, format, and conversation each time. For students like Jake O’Dell of the User Experience Team, this variety is a good thing. One of our most recent sessions was all about maintaining relationships — personal, professional, and romantic. For Jake, this was interesting because he found it personally significant.
“It was really interesting, because we were talking about things that weren’t going to be expressly work-related. You don’t use that skill in work, or just in work, you use it in life,” Jake says. Josh Shaffer, the Design Team Lead who led this session, covered various topics within the realm of interpersonal relationships, both in the office and out. Jake reflected that this was most likely a pressing issue for a number of Corps employees, not just himself. He says, “It was nice to hear tips about how to keep up relationships because we’re all reaching that point in life where we’re about to move away from college and not be around everyone we know.”
These were just two notable Soft Skills sessions that we have had the opportunity to take part in during the 2018–2019 academic year. Our staff members are constantly helping us explore and understand new topics to help us grow while we’re students, and they work to ensure there is something from which every employee can benefit.
“It’s hard to find something that pleases everyone, but [the relationships session] I feel like was very useful to me, and whenever I find them more applicable to me I enjoy them more,” Jake says.
This all doesn’t happen by accident. Each year, the staff turn to the students for input in planning the next year of Soft Skills. By listening to our student perspectives on what we actually want to learn about, the staff can more successfully create a year’s worth of rewarding, relevant sessions. Soft Skills are constantly bringing us students new ideas, perspectives, and tools to help us prepare for life after graduation, and in this way they are truly exemplary of the values we champion at the Digital Corps. Being student-centered means always providing new opportunities to learn, whether that’s about the value of interpersonal relationships or our financial futures, and resources like Soft Skills make this possible.
