Building a People-Centric Workforce

I hear many people talk about the generation gap, and how different “kids” are these days. I got to thinking about this recently as Perch opened up two opportunities for summer interns - one for community engagement and events, and another for data and research. I’ll explain in a moment why the response to our internships was so startling to me, and perhaps offer my perspective of what education and workforce is doing right, and where it may need some work.

When my own kids were small, I focused most of my parenting energy on the social side of their experiences and learnings - ensuring they had ample opportunities, at a very young age, to build skills that I thought were among the most important I could offer them - learning how to interact with people. For me, that included allowing them to pay for things themselves when they wanted something at the store (they had to interact with the clerk and make conversation), coaching them to speak up to teachers when they needed help or an assignment was going to be handed in late, to talk (and listen carefully) to the range of octogenarians in our family and extended circle, and pay attention to perhaps subtle things we saw while on outings in the street.

As a product of an immigrant family wherein my maternal grandmother wore her public school education like a badge of honor (first one in our family with a diploma; my grandfather dropped out of school by the 5th grade to go to work for the family) I believe so strongly in the power of education and learning. After all, your education, unlike some things, is one thing that no one can ever take away from you (my mom used to say this a lot when I told her I wanted to pursue other things instead of college - guess what, she was right!).

Hard for me to admit having barely eeked out a Bachelor’s degree, but out there in the universe when you are just finding your way through your first job or two, the world of work certainly judges you based on your degree(s), the brand name where they’re from, and conversely, if you don’t have a high school diploma or any higher education degree. But it seems to me that in some ways, we may be connecting some of the dots out of order when it comes to how young people learn to advance through education, particularly high school and college.

Getting back to my original point around our two summer internships - our community engagement and data/research roles - we posted these opportunities not knowing what to expect, as it's been a while since we opened up opportunities for summer internships. The day that we were able to view the applicants - the stark difference between the number of applicants for each role nearly knocked me off my chair: a whopping 49 applicants for data and research internship, and only 3 applicants for our community engagement role.

Now, perhaps you’re wondering why I was a little shocked at what I saw. First, I was surprised with the sheer number of total applicants - that was kind of cool and reminded me our work is interesting enough to attract a crowd. But the split between the data (aka tech) role and the community engagement (aka people) role was so pronounced, that my first thought was “what are we emphasizing when teaching and training our young people?”.

I had a rousing lunch last week with two of my favorite professional colleagues in the economic development space. We were discussing programs that the respective (for-profit, and not-for-profit) organizations lead for young adults. A hearty debate ensued on the merits of the adjective “soft skills” (such a 2000’s term) wherein one colleague remarked that what soft skills used to be is really effectively workplace skills - showing up on time, learning how to collaborate, interacting appropriately with other people - those skills are the most foundational skills, we all agreed, that young adults need, and perhaps they may be missing out on. I could sit here and blame it all on COVID - after all, adults modeled skills of talking to screens for the past 5 years, to a generation whose brain was just forming. Or the increasing reliance of screen time in general, with the overuse of everything digital. OrI could say that as a nation we are moving toward, at rapid speed, a digital world that relies less on our people skills, and more on our digital acquiescence in our society. Nevertheless,the programs that we rely on to help young people - colleague degrees or not - have swiftly shifted toward digital skills as a way to move young adults onto a career rung, and into better paying jobs. The data proves, by and large, that this approach is working; people with even basic digital skills, coupled with some sort of education and training, access jobs that pay better wages, Make no mistake, digital skills have become fundamental.

But what about people? Even within a rapidly transforming society, we are still, at least at the moment (not knocking AI, but that’s another post for another day) a society of people. People that have to interact with others, engage in the world, and lastly, find fundamental meaning in our daily lives through relationships, big and small. In a world of people, how do we help our young adults learn such important skills? In our daily work, we center people as the fundamental building block of every single project, so how do we pass that skill along? At Perch, we spend the time to make sure that we model the behaviour of deep engagement - assuring people are engaged, heard, and understood. We model the language of community through making sure we engage a range of people in discussions, big and small. We emphasize that even tough discussions produce an outcome, or build a skill.

While I don’t have the cheat sheet on how K-12 or colleges can do this, we know that helping young adults to experience the world through people, alongside the digital sphere, can simultaneously build a workforce that is both digitally equipped but also community-curious and people focused.