Ed-tech founder, educator & father of four on what parents should know about raising kids for future-forward careers.
The data shows "core skills" among kids decline but parental interest in soft skills is on the rise
Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash
Issue 11:
Friday, November 11, 2022
Top Of Mind: A decline in core skills and a rise in the interest in soft skills
Making the headlines: NAEP testing reveals a nationwide decline in core math and reading skills. At the same time, recent research shows parents increasingly emphasize "soft skills" like grit, perseverance, and critical thinking. The takeaway is that there’s a shift happening, and parents recognize that in the future of work, the skills that aren't measured on standardized tests are increasingly seen as essential for a child's future preparedness.
The LongRange: Feature Interview:
Here's what ed-tech founder, educator, and father of four Caleb Hicks advises parents on college and getting kids ready for future-forward careers.
And how the first hour of his first internship completely changed the course of his career.
Caleb Hicks has been on the front lines of the future of education and career readiness for two decades, re-designing and building new education models and looking for ways to close the gaps for students at scale. Before working at Apple on the Everyone Can Code program, he started as a high school teacher. Caleb and I worked together at Lambda School (now Bloomtech), where he built and ran their unique 9-18 month technical program.
Today, he's the founder of Factor, a platform offering teenagers the experience of different careers and jobs to help them make more informed decisions about their future. I spoke with Caleb about what parents need to understand about education and workplace readiness for future-forward careers and how he's bringing these ideas into his kid's daily life.
These insights are condensed from our recent conversation.
"Right now, we have a broken pathway to career readiness."
Less than 2% of teenagers currently do an internship in high school. And yet, after high school, they are expected to commit (and with significant financial investment) to a specific skill or career path and then go deep into it.
"As an educator who lived rurally and then worked in SF, I've seen cohorts of learners at scale. And what's true is that despite all the changes in career and job options, how schools and society think about getting kids to think about work and career is still essentially the same as it has been for decades. We are overwhelmingly influenced by what our parents do and the typical job where we live. Very often, for ambitious kids, it's looking around and seeing what my wealthiest friends do - and then they decide to follow that."
"This is what we are looking to change with Factor. We are giving high school and early college kids a place to discover, explore and understand what working in a job or industry would be like. But we aren't just talking about - we design experiences, real-world projects, and mini boot camps to give them month-long deep dives to give them as much understanding as possible into what it would be like for themselves. We must move beyond the false, ultimately limiting, and dangerous framework of choosing something early and going deep without actually experiencing it first."
For parents looking to offer this experience to their kids, pro-ams like Factor are one option. Caleb and his team hope to soon partner with schools to provide this program more widely. Other ways to offer this immersive and real-world work experience: are volunteer and service opportunities, internships, online boot camps, take-your-kids-to-work days, and tours provided by local businesses or employers. While not perfect, these are a start for showing kids what industries and roles they might think they are interested in - look like.
"We need to address the incredible levels of anxiety that our kids have about the future by enabling them at scale to get the experiences and insights that get them excited about what they can do and be."
"Our kids live in this 24/7 news cycle of climate disasters, terrorism, war, the pressures of social media, the impact of the pandemic, it is quite a list, and it's creating a nihilistic mindset where even though there's never been more opportunity to do more from anywhere, this isn't what we are messaging to our kids. Part of our hope with Factor is that we can help kids find their aspiration and purpose and to get excited about finding, not a job or even a career but a body of skills they are interested in exploring ."
"The "find your passion" frame is an overwhelming and unhelpful way to advise someone on building and navigating a career. What we need is to get people excited about the possibilities. This comes from trying many different things, learning to enjoy the journey of learning, pushing themselves, and having more genuine, relevant, and appropriate touch points to expand what they think they can and want to do."
"The first hour of my first internship completely reset my career path."
"All through high school, I was n a pre-med track, mainly because I had an incredible science teacher, and I loved the expectations and challenges she set for us. And what do you do if you have good grades in science? You become a doctor.” shares Caleb. “And so that's what I am working to, and then, in my senior year, I did my first hospital internship. In that first hour, I had to support a c-section for triplets. After that, I completely changed my application. It’s one of the reasons I’m so committed to helping people find earlier what’s right for them in terms of work and career because these are life-changing experiences."
On college...
"I'm not anti-college at all. But we need to be honest and clear that recently, what colleges are selling, what people think they are buying, and what colleges provide are all at odds with one another. And it's an incredibly damaging framework."
"We need personal infrastructure as badly as we need hard skills."
"At Factor, we're also actively looking at how we can help build out the meta-skills kids need to thrive. Hard skills and learning are essential - but we are looking at how to unbundle and teach the mental models and mindsets crucial for handling change—and positively navigating the future. Unfortunately, nothing about traditional schools still teaches self-mastery as the stand-alone course it should be."
Tactics, tools & frameworks:
Some of Caleb's favorite and most effective nudge tactics for incorporating some of these ideas into daily family life include:
Making hard things more fun.
For younger kids, play the ice-cube game - where everyone gets on to hold and see who can last the longest. For older kids, plank challenges and ice showers are little ways to remind them that they can choose to do hard things, find the fun, and conquer the challenge.Help kids appreciate the world from a builder's lens.
Whether you are out shopping, playing a video game, or out in the world, help your kids take the framework of looking at all the jobs and careers that enable them to have this toy, game, or experience and have them think all the people likely involved in bringing to be. It also helps cultivate their curiosity and interest in exploring.Be ok with trying and quitting.
"One of the traditional parenting paradigms we need to drop is the idea that we should push our kids to "stick with" whatever they are trying. Stop. Let them try things low stakes and respect when they don't want to continue. This is how they learn to trust what they are curious about and engaged with.
For more on Factor programs, see: www.joinfactor.com
On Point & Interesting:
The idea of not just being ok being ordinary but encouraging our kids to do so might be one of the most disruptive parenting perspectives out there at this moment where, as author and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen describes in The Economist, "Educational, aesthetic, and financial betterment and the need for validation from others are the elements that form the perfectionist air we all now breathe."