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>> BARNES: Hi, my name is Inger Barnes. I’m the program director for the HPOG program
in Pensacola State, Florida, and what I’ll be sharing with your today is our promising
practice, which is soft skills. We want to ask ourselves why soft skills are so important.
And I have three reasons why. The first reason is because they’re vital to our professional
success, to our students there’s a balance between company and the individual, and most
importantly, soft skills are transferable. So what we do is we implement our soft skills
workshops as part of their hard skills, which is their training, and our goal is to help
implement and integrate these things into their curriculum so they don’t have this
happen to them.
We teach them how to identify their interpersonal skills through the workshops. We host several
different workshops, and some of the types of workshops that we host for our individuals
are, of course, interviewing skills, employment skills, budgeting, test taking, note taking,
job getting, job keeping. We also offer soft skills such as parenting. And there’s a
difference between hard skills and soft skills. The hard skills are those that we all see.
They’re identifiable, such as the training. But the soft skills are the piece that many
people tend not to have. So our individuals come unprepared. And so what we try to do
is we try to focus on those things that will hopefully help bridge the gaps. But most importantly,
we look at it is a parallel curriculum. We give them their hard skills training, which
is their training and their health-care program, as well as the soft skills, so they go hand
in hand together. And most importantly, we’re bridging the gaps, because we know workforce
gaps are out there, and we seek to bridge that gap with providing them the soft-skills
workshops that we have available.
And, again, there are three key reasons why we offer the soft skills workshops. One is
being that it provides the vital and professional success. There’s a balance between the company
and the individual, and soft skills are transferable. An individual can either inherit or develop
these types of qualities. And so I encourage you to look at offering soft skills in your
project. Thank you.