What do you think is inadequate about the discussion of skills in higher education and the workforce?
We don’t know what “skills” means. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of that word and its relationship to content or knowledge, as if they’re two different things, which they’re not. Whatever dictionary you look at, “skills” refers to an ability or a proficiency to use disciplinary content and technical knowledge in the service of executing a task. It’s not some generic, abstracted concept, like “critical thinking.”
People talk about these abstract abilities — like critical thinking or communication — but those don’t exist except in some abstract theoretical discussion about aptitude. That’s always bugged me as a learning scientist with a Ph.D. in educational psychology. When I first came across this discussion of skills in the skills-gap era, especially here in Wisconsin with Scott Walker, a lot of the conversations were dominated by labor economists where skills are distilled into those generics. And so it just ran counter to everything I was learning and studying and seeing in the world.
The one document I’ve been returning to over and over again is the 1972 Con Arc report on the soft-skills conference from the U.S. Army. Holy moly, it’s a doozy. It’s the source document for a lot of our misunderstandings and a lot of our solutions. But in a nutshell, they were trying to come up with some skills taxonomy so that they could make the training and evaluation of skills in the military more efficient. They wanted some simple rubric, and “hard” and “soft” skills was what they had originally proposed — “soft” being around people and paper, not machines, kind of context-independent, and generally applicable across settings. Changing oil in a Jeep is not generally applicable, specific to one setting and task, but motivating leadership by a general is generally applicable.
So they did all this research and surveys to determine, Does this binary work? They concluded: no. And one of the things that led to that no was they surveyed people about actual work in the military. Almost all of it had to do with people and paper. Almost all of it was generally applicable. And so they concluded that they should get rid of this term “soft skills.” They said, We need to now train our people using hands-on simulation, active learning within specific disciplinary professional knowledge bases — which is exactly what I’m arguing for.
Do you think people are simplifying skills so they can sell simple solutions for them?
Yep. One of the things that struck me about your newsletter about that skills conference was just that topic. Ideally, you could identify a library of transferable skills and the content upon which they draw and the context in which they’re used. Here’s an example: Oral communication used in technical meetings where you’re speaking with non-specialists such as sales or the client. That kind of translation of jargon to non-engineers is super important in the engineering workplace. But if you do that for every possible permutation of discipline, level of a course, and student subfield, you’re talking about probably millions of skills. That does not align with the kind of apps and software that people are talking about developing for evaluating student skills in an internship, which is what the National Association of Colleges and Employers is trying to do with their competencies. And that doesn’t align with an app that takes these skills and applies them to a job of the future and then compares that to a curricular pathway and a major for a student thinking about college. To do those things, you need a far more reductionist list of 10 generic skills, which you can put into software to come up with some answer for the student.
I also see that happening with curriculum development and assessment. I can’t tell you how many soft-skills assessments I’ve seen that are given to faculty. And they’re like, What do I do with this? This generic definition of critical thinking doesn’t match the troubleshooting I’m trying to teach in this robotics class — they just don’t align because I’m doing something very specialized in robotics for community-college students. There definitely is an effort of trying to shoehorn the complexity of the real world and the professions and how people actually perform tasks into these generic-skills lists for guidance, measurement, assessment, and professional development. It’s an important starting point — I don’t think we should start with all the complexity and fine-grained nuance of the real world. We have to start with something that’s a bit more chunked or abstracted — our minds need that. But then we got to move away from that as soon as possible, and we haven’t done that yet as a field.
How do contextual skills in one learning area inform the skills from other learning areas?
That gets to the distinction and cognitive psychology of domain-general or domain-specific aptitudes or capacities of the human mind. Is critical thinking domain-general? It’s just a skill and proficiency that we develop that can apply everywhere? Or is it domain-specific?
One of the arguments in the Education for Life and Work report by the National Research Council was that there are elements of domain generality for these skills we’re talking about, like critical thinking. Yes, once you learn how to assess different sources of information and evaluate the validity and veracity of each data point and then select the most optimal course of action in one setting, you should be able to transfer it to another setting. But they also say that skills are domain-specific. Say I learn how to do social-science research — how to collect data in a formal research, empirical research, field-research endeavor, and I get really good at it. Can I then apply that critical thinking or problem-solving to a legal or criminal-justice context? The answer is no, because I know nothing about the law or criminal justice.
That is at the crux of a lot of the problems we’re facing now, because there’s an assumption that if we taught students critical thinking, they have that skill now and it can be applied here and there. But no, unless they have been trained in the book knowledge, the abstract knowledge of that field or that discipline, they’re not going to know how to critically think about it.
What do you think about skills-based hiring?
I’m yet to be convinced that skills-based hiring is a thing, that it’s something that employers are actively using as they screen resumes and interview applicants. I understand that many employers, like some state governments, have removed a bachelor’s degree as a requirement for entry into a certain job title. But that’s not the same as skills-based hiring, because there the argument was that if you have good critical thinking or communication skills and job experience in high school, that you would then be competitive for a well-paying family-supporting job. That’s some of the rhetoric. And I haven’t seen any research or evidence that employers en masse are doing that. I actually had a student do a literature review looking for evidence that this is happening and we’re very hard-pressed to find it.
This gets to a lot of the discourse now about diversity, equity, and inclusion. When you have different groups define what constitutes good communication skills, for example, you’re going to get different answers, not just depending on profession or discipline, but also on that person’s gender, their family background, their racial and ethnic identities, their disability status. It’s very subjective, in other words, what constitutes good communication skill. So that kind of worried me when I first heard about skills-based hiring. Who’s determining what’s good communication as they make that hiring decision?
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong but I’m very skeptical an app or some software is going to really provide students with advice on this that meets their very idiosyncratic situations.
Does this focus on skills really undermine what we’ve built in the college learning environment? A lot of this talk is presented like: You don’t need the college degree if you can just get the skills.
It’s so bad, Scott. I mean, if I was emperor, I would take a lot of this money that’s being spent on a lot of the things that were at that conference and shift it to two things: Hiring more professors, not adjuncts who are overworked and underpaid, but hiring more tenure-track, teaching-focused faculty or research faculty, and beef up our frontline educators to give them the training to do hands-on, experiential, workplace-relevant instruction in the classroom, because we don’t have that right now. And then I would hire more career advisers. But I don’t see that happening for a variety of reasons.
