Social Skills Are Marketable Assets: Who knew?

 On Saturday, The New York Times posted an article entitled, Why What You Learned In Preschool Is Crucial At Work, by Clare Cain Miller. Perhaps some of you saw it. I hope so.

Miller begins by telling us “for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills.”

“Skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility,” Miller goes on to say, ”have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.”

And get this: According to Miller, research shows that “occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills. The jobs hit hardest” in the economic downturn “seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.”

What does this mean for our kids and us? I would include the world over. There is no doubt about it: We need to figure out how to work with each other in school, in the workplace and in the world.

I have been taught well how arrogant the United States seems to other countries. My first—of many--summer in the UK introduced me to how we are perceived. And the English are our friends! Culturally they are the most like us. Nonetheless every social gathering I attended offered me another earful about our irritating superiority, our failure to grapple with the subtleties of other cultures in order to come to the table with them effectively. In British opinion we are deficient in negotiating and mediating, in all manner of diplomacy. 

 The Times article goes on to reveal that “James Heckman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that non-cognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.”

Except in preschool and the early grades. By the time we are in college, we sit in lecture halls, rarely studying in groups, creating in groups or doing any serious work cooperatively. We are not invited to “engage in productive partnerships,” combining our various skills for a better outcome.

The Unquowa School in Fairfield, CT—preK3 through grade eight--has a room they call “The Maker Space” where kids can collaboratively or individually build things. Anything. There are all sorts of building materials in the space, available on open, reachable shelves and the kids are allowed to let their imaginations run. Four of them may be putting together a small table; a group may be painting one large picture, six or more may be constructing an elaborate edifice at the large Lego table.

The hope of the world

The Maker Space offers the perfect laboratory for collaboration and cooperation. What was once perceived as simply play time, according to Miller, has the potential for developing highly remunerative skills. It’s not about the table or the painting, although the product may please them—or not? It’s about the ability to cooperate on a project larger than one’s own perception and developing the ability to empathize and be flexible with your co-workers during the process.

We live in a demanding and increasingly global society. I am encouraged by Miller’s article which informs us that a person trained in empathic and collaborative skills, as well as good cognitive skills, is not made obsolete by robots or even our blind-seeming, non-stop drive for supremacy and power. On the contrary, statistics are demonstrating that such an individual is highly desirable in the marketplace and a valuable asset in our competitive and complex world, to say nothing of being a better human being.

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Some collaborative "what ifs:"

What if the all drug companies collaborated their cancer research toward a cure for the disease instead of engaging in a cut throat competition that puts cure out of the picture and makes "managing" cancer the goal: a goal none of us can afford. 

What if all of the prosperous countries of the world agreed to collaborate on the goal that no child anywhere in the world would go to bed hungry?

What if all the nuclear empowered nations collaborated to take nuclear weapons off the table? Period. Gone.