About This Resource

This toolkit was initially created for our CA:RISE program, and is now available to the field!

Purpose

To provide employment social enterprises (ESEs) with a self-guided tour of existing frameworks and curriculums for job readiness training and to help jumpstart the implementation process with key background, resources, and considerations. The curriculum discussed in this guide are not supporting your hard or technical skill training, but rather soft skills that lead to job readiness. We are defining soft skills as: personal attributes, social abilities, and emotional intelligence competencies that enable individuals to navigate the workplace. We believe that soft skill training combined with the hard skills acquired by working in your ESE results in job readiness.

Why this matters

The idea of supporting job seekers with soft skills is not new. Workforce development efforts have prioritized soft skills since the late 20th century, featuring the importance of communication, time management, leadership, and teamwork. In today’s labor market, skills-based hiring is a growing trend where companies focus on specific competencies rather than traditional qualifications, like degrees, when choosing candidates. Moreover, changes in today’s labor market have caused a shift from compliance-based skills to problem-solving skills. With artificial intelligence able to take on more routine, manual tasks, experts predict that as many as 85 million jobs could be displaced. As new jobs emerge in response to this shift, employers are placing greater emphasis on soft skills like complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. Thus, it is essential that ESEs help participants hone both technical and soft skills.

The Guide

This list of curriculum and training frameworks has been curated to support these new developments, using the following criteria:

• Soft skills that are needed in the new economy: These resources highlight soft skills that job seekers can take with them, no matter what kind of role they find themselves in.
• Soft skills that can be learned on shift: These resources allow for the majority of training to be performed on shift–meaning that participants gain critical skills without facing additional costs or spending significant time outside of regular work hours. We know that employment social enterprise staff have numerous priorities competing for their attention.

These frameworks have been chosen to not only prepare participants to navigate the new economy but also to fit into the work you’re already doing. The options that call for classroom support are helpful for those serving populations with specific and unique needs, and opportunities for one-on-one coaching are available to enhance programming.

Selecting a framework or curriculum for your workforce development program, allows you to develop a uniform implementation process. This means you can better measure and highlight what sets you apart as a workforce development organization. In addition, program participants can more easily articulate ways they’ve honed particular skills, making them more marketable candidates on their career journeys.

Download the guide here:

About Flying Whale Strategies

Flying Whale Strategies is supporting a new wave of nonprofit leaders who design definitive solutions to age-old problems. These leaders are working on deeply rooted challenges that have no foreseeable solution: hunger, the education system, criminal justice reform, the climate crisis, the refugee crisis, to name a few. And yet despite the enormity of these challenges, we believe nonprofit leaders could begin with the question, “Why can’t we?” They offer consulting and training in: culture, leadership, development, and operations.