Helping young people be workplace ready

 

Helping young people be workplace ready Grow Salone is a private company that provides professional skills training and recruitment services to tertiary graduates and employers in Sierra Leone. Through research and consultation with employers across different professional sectors we designed the Professional Skills Programme. The PSP is a full-time, 10-week intensive programme which is more than training; for our graduating students, it is a pathway to employment. 

Through the Professional Skills Programme we not only assess the academic performance of our trainees; but through direct observations, we collect over 2,500 data points across 75 indicators of behavioural and attitudinal performance relating to participation, mindset, approach and delivery. 

 With this information we are able to provide detailed feedback and comprehensive skills reports to our trainees and to their future employers, supporting not only the learning process but the recruitment and management of those individuals by their employers. 

When we talk about workplace readiness from an educational standpoint the term “skills” should be in the forefront of our minds… Skills acquisition should be a key outcome of every good educational system and, indeed, every good professional development plan. 

We should agree, first, that there is a direct link between education and the economy, and that another key goal of education in Sierra Leone should be to deliver the manpower into the workforce that will be able to drive productivity, improve efficiency and lead to increased output for firms which, in turn, will attract global investment and deeper integration into global supply chains. 

The idea that the educational system should primarily deliver knowledge and technical know-how seems logical then: most careers require specific skills in order to enter and progress, particularly in a developing nation where the jobs available relate to the phase of economic development. In fact, many accreditation bodies – from primary right through to tertiary (and in most nations globally) - assess their students only on this basis: the acquisition of knowledge and technical skills via testing an examination. 

 It is also true that industries in Sierra Leone are held back by a lack of quality practical technical training – be it accounting, mechanical engineering or heavy machine operation – industries lack the skilled workforce to achieve their potential production, serving to reduce economic output of the company, their industry and the economy. 

All of this is true – knowledge and technical skills are a key objective of education. Knowledge and skills acquisition are key drivers in economic output. The workforce in Sierra Leone does lack the skills that organisations need to improve productivity. 

Just because these things are true, however, it does not mean that we should limit ourselves to define “skills” as a package of academic knowledge or of technical know-how. Rather, when we are considering how we can help young people to be workplace ready, we should consider the opportunity – a time where lots of good work is being done in school-age educational quality, under the direction of the President and the New Direction, and where the very important work of the local content agency is being driven through and making organisations really consider their staffing development – to consider what opportunities we all have to nurture a wider definition of skills through our programmes, in our organisations and in our relationships. We should not see skills as packets of knowledge, but of competency. And these competencies to be driven by knowledge, behaviours and attitudes! 

I would like you all to consider momentarily the last junior employee/colleague/service staff member that has disappointed you, possibly whom you had to release from your organisation: was that brought about by a failure of their academic or technical knowledge, or was that an inability to deliver the behaviours or attitudes that you expected, or to adapt to challenges of their role or of your organisation? 

Now, consider all of the junior employees/colleagues/service staff members that have disappointed you: can you identify even one that has let you down based on a lack of technical knowledge? I struggle to do so… 

Let me ask you this: how is it that there are thousands of students graduating from universities nationwide every year complaining about a lack of jobs, yet at the same time we speak with organisations every day complaining about a lack of high-performing entry-level recruits? 

At Grow Salone, we think that we have the answer. 

Skills acquisition should be understood as a holistic experience that prepares the individual to be workplace ready, and it must be considered this way in order to engage in truly transformative human capital development: 

The experience of acquiring those skills must: 

• Encourage and develop positive ways to approach work, particularly when that work is challenging 
• Value when individuals try to take the initiative. Even when their initiative leads to an incorrect conclusion, the effort to try and resolve it should be praised 
• Reward individuals based on the effort that they put in, and the progress that they are able to make, rather than their individual outcomes 

School-age education DOES impact whether young professionals are able to problem-solve and, to some degree, to take the initiative. It is proven that by delivering learning in a learner-centred environment that school leavers will have higher levels of critical thinking and stronger problem-solving skills. Furthermore, schools can develop the appetite for learning as well: if teachers are encouraged to praise their students based on their effort – by saying, for example, “well done – you must have worked so hard to have achieved that mark” rather than “well done – you are very good at Mathematics” - has a tremendous effect on a persons’ learning attitudes and skills acquisition later in life. 

Tertiary institutions DO have the power to ensure that the right signals are reaching their graduates’ future employers – they can ensure that the level of education is high, and that accreditations are fairly and evenly earned. 

Do you think that it is within the purview of a school, a technical college or a university to develop professional behaviours and attitudes? In my mind, schools should focus on the development of learning attitudes, lateral thinking and fundamental concepts. Universities should provide individuals with an opportunity to develop and nurture independent thought and expression, and to learn a set of academic strategies that will support future career performance. Technical colleges are designed to give individuals with the ‘tools of the trade’ as it were – technical knowledge on how to work with machinery and materials… 

None of these institutions are set up to develop the soft skills and professional behaviours that are required to be effective in the workplace; none of them prepare young people to: 

• Communicating effectively and concisely; ensuring they understand and are well understood 
• Participating within and building a positive team dynamic to deliver projects effectively 
• Thinking consequentially, considering how actions today reflect on them and their career 
• Managing conflict constructively, maintaining their professionalism at all times 
• Taking the initiative when possible whilst understanding their limits within the organisation 
• Being reliable and delivering projects; being proactive in communication when issues arise 
• Understand the expectations of employers and to knowing how to meet these expectations 

The development of this mutually understood set of soft skills and positive professional behaviours and attitudes can come through several soft inputs throughout a person’s life. Consider a young girl watching her father come home from work at 7pm and discussing the challenges of his day with the family and how he managed to overcome it. A teenager watching a movie based in a professional environment capturing the excitement and virtues of working in a supportive and high-performing team. A young boy vicariously experiencing the demands of the workplace through elder siblings, uncles and in-laws help to prepare young people for the fact that the workplace is difficult, and that every day professionals need to be reliable and competitive. 

Sierra Leonean universities and technical colleges are producing more graduates than ever. For many of them, they may be the first in their family to go to university, and maybe to work in an office environment. Few university graduates have the soft inputs, the role models, that they can look to in order to learn how they should behave in order to become a valuable asset in their workplace. This lack of exposure is not something that they have failed to learn, it’s just something that they haven’t had an opportunity to experience. And I would suggest this lack of soft inputs is one of the key drivers in why we reach the situation where there are thousands of unemployed graduates with employers complaining about the lack of “skills”. 

To me, schools, technical colleges and universities are able to nurture these behaviours but only in a limited way. The staff in these institutions can demonstrate good professional behaviours and decorum and demonstrate how they will benefit individuals in their careers. However, these behaviours are best learned by doing. If we are going to be able to deliver the kind of human capital development that we need to see to improve Sierra Leone’s productivity, output and economic standing in the short term, we need to all take responsibility for driving through these behaviours in our organisations. 

Where we have a society that is in flux – more and more school leavers, more and more university joiners etc. – and we understand that there is a gap between professional expectations of graduates and professional delivery by graduates, we must find a solution. 

The problem is large, and it is challenging. However, when I hear the phrase: “We can train them to have the skills, but we can’t train them to have the right attitude” – I disagree – wholeheartedly. At Grow Salone we have had success in nurturing the very same behaviours and attitudes that we have been discussing. Fortunately, you can utilise the same methodologies that we observe in our Professional Skills Programme in your own performance management. 

When working with young people especially, although all staff would benefit from this, consider not only the delivery of work – things like their ability to make decisions, meeting timescales and taking action – but also their approach to their work and their mindset during their work. You should consider how well they invite feedback, embrace change, explore possibilities, examine information. 

By focussing targeted feedback based on an assessment of observed criteria young people have shown to us that they are very ready to adapt their ways to be a reliable, committed, honest and passionate professional once understand their employers’ expectations and they know how to be those things. 

To hear business leaders espouse the merits of being a life-long leader is common; learning every day, and seeing every challenge as an opportunity to improve. This is essential in both our behaviour around, our conduct towards and our development of young people entering the workplace. 

 If your organisation is interested in developing an observation framework of behaviours and attitudes, then please do get in touch and we would be happy to share what we have learned with you.