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Find yourself. Find your future. | VitaNavis

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VitaNavis™ is a platform that uses personality and data-driven solutions to address larger societal problems. We develop solutions using scientifically validated assessments, real-world data, and innovative technology.

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Developed for Cajon Valley Union School District

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TED Ideas: Which industries will still require a human being in the future?

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TED Ideas: Which industries will still require a human being in the future?

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But some jobs - and industries - will still require a human touch. Technology researchers Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have a guess as to which ones.
A surprising report published this spring projects that 30 percent of current jobs in the UK might be replaced by automation in the next 15 years. That number is 21 percent in Japan, 35 percent in Germany and a whopping 42 percent in the United States. The losses will come mainly from the transportation, banking and retail industries, and largely around jobs that involve a lot of routine, repeatable tasks.
As digital tools challenges human superiority in more complex work - like information processing, pattern recognition, language, intuition, judgment, prediction and physical dexterity - we hear one question asked over and over again: "Which abilities will continue to be uniquely human as technology races ahead?" In other words, are there any areas where we humans should not expect to be outstripped?

The most common answer we hear is "creativity." Many people argue there's something uniquely human about the ability to come up with a new idea. But a look at the field of industrial design might convince them that machines are getting quite good at coming up with powerful new ideas on their own.

It's probably safe to say that most people never think about heat exchangers. But people who design refrigerators, furnaces and engines think about them a lot. An exchanger lets heat move from one fluid (like a liquid or gas) to another, while preventing either fluid from coming into contact with the other. A bedroom radiator contains a heat exchanger - it passes heat from the steam flowing through it to the air around it - and so does an air conditioner, and the grid on the back of your fridge. A typical heat exchanger looks like this.

Creating a good heat exchanger is tough. It has to transfer the right amount of energy, and it has to be efficient, safe, durable and cheap. A heat-exchanger designer has to understand required performance levels, thermo- and fluid dynamics, material properties, manufacturing methods and costs, and so on. Many designers draw on the useful knowledge embedded in previous successful heat exchangers; they tweak an existing design to satisfy a new case.

But what would a heat exchanger designer who had all the requisite knowledge but none of the accumulated experience come up with? Let's say the designer knew exactly what the performance specs were - the dimensions, cost, lifespan, energy transfer, etc. - and was an expert in the relevant scientific and engineering disciplines, but had never worked on a heat exchanger before or recognized that it might be valuable. Below is one example of what such a designer would come up with. As you probably guessed by now, it was designed by a computer.

It's an example of "generative design," a process in which software is used not to help a human designer create drawings, perform calculations and explore trade-offs, but instead to do all that work, 100 percent automatically, and to come up with designs that satisfy all requirements. This part was manufactured by 3D printing. In fact, it would have been impossible to make using traditional manufacturing processes. Generative-design software is not constrained by older methods, so it is free to imagine and propose a vastly wider range of shapes. Unlike most, if not all, human designers, the software isn't consciously or subconsciously biased toward existing processes, so it does explore more freely.

Merriam-Webster defines creativity as "the ability to make new things or think of new ideas." By their definition, this software is creative.

Is generative-design software "creative?" The Oxford English Dictionary states that creativity is "the use of imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work." A heat exchanger made by generative-design software doesn't quite meet this definition, since it's not intended to be an artistic work and didn't result from anyone's imagination. Merriam-Webster, however, has a quite different definition of creativity: "the ability to make new things or think of new ideas." By this definition, generative-design software is clearly creative.

Humans played no role in designing the part shown, but they were essential for telling the software what kind of part to design. To do this work well, they had to understand where the part needed to fit, the environment it had to survive and operate in, the energy it needed to transfer, and so on. These human specifiers had a great deal of domain knowledge and skill - maybe as much as human designers would need to create a design.

What if some of that knowledge could also be generated automatically? What if additional tools could be added to the combination of generative-design software and 3D printing to advance the ability of creative digital technologies? In 2013, Autodesk teamed up with a group of car designers and stunt drivers in Los Angeles to find out. Their goal was an automated system that could design a race car chassis and determine for itself how well the chassis needed to be able to perform.

To do this, the team first built a stripped-down traditional race car: a chassis, transmission, engine, seat and wheels. The team then blanketed the chassis with sensors that measured the stresses, strains, temperatures, displacements, and all the other things that it had to be able to accommodate. Since digital sensors are small, cheap and capable, the team could inexpensively obtain huge amounts of data.

They took this car to the Mojave Desert, where a test driver pushed it to its limits by accelerating, braking and steering as hard as they could without crashing, while the sensors collected information. By the end of this session, the team had some 20 million data points about the car's structure and the forces acting on it, which were plugged into Project Dreamcatcher, a generative-design technology from Autodesk, and applied to a 3D model of the existing chassis. Below is what the software came up with.

To us, it's only vaguely recognizable as a race car chassis; it looks much more like the skull of a mammoth or a whale, or the microscopic skeleton of a diatom. This is not a coincidence. Bones, exoskeletons and other structures in nature are the winning entries in evolution's relentless competition, the outcomes of which are life and death. Evolution has resulted in designs that are simultaneously resilient, durable, energy efficient, intricate, strong and slim. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that when generative-design software is given the task of designing an optimal structure to satisfy a set of performance requirements, it comes up with something that looks as if it came from nature.

This chassis is also asymmetric; its right and left sides are not mirror images. This makes sense. Because a race car turns more often in one direction than the other as it does laps, the two sides of its chassis are subject to different forces. Human designers have been aware of this fact for a long time, but their creations have rarely, if ever, been as deeply asymmetric as the ones that emerge from generative-design software.

Examples like this chassis convince us that digital creativity is more than mimicry and incrementalism. Computers can come up with more than extensions and recombinations of what humans have done. And we're optimistic that something close to the opposite can happen, that when they're primed with our scientific and engineering knowledge and given the requirements of a situation or enough data to figure out those requirements, computers can and will come up with novel solutions that never would have occurred to us.

What jobs and tasks will remain least affected by technology? The ones that tap into our social drives.

So if this kind of creativity can be exhibited by machines, what qualities are uniquely human? As we know, the human condition is inherently interpersonal. We are deeply social beings who have been living in ever-larger groups - families, bands, tribes, cities - throughout modern evolutionary history. An inevitable consequence is that we are acutely attuned to each other, both as individuals and as group members. MIT researcher Deb Roy (TED Talk: The birth of a word) has pointed out this social nature gives us a powerful way to predict what jobs and tasks will remain least affected by technological progress. Very simply, they're the ones that tap into our social drives.

Roy's list of drives includes compassion, pride, embarrassment, envy, justice and solidarity. To see how they apply in the world of work, take the example of a high school girls' soccer coach. It would be great if she had a deep understanding of the sport and an ability to observe the flow of a game and shift tactics appropriately, but the ability to deliver wins isn't what's most important. Instead, what matters is the ability to get the girls to work well together towards a goal, to teach them to be good and supportive teammates, and to develop their characters through athletics. The coach accomplishes this in large part by tapping into her own compassion and the girls' pride. She also makes use of the girls' desire for approval from her.

Now try to imagine an all-digital, artificially intelligent girls' soccer coach. Could it pick out the natural leaders and difficult personalities on the team and know what to do if some girls were both? Could it bond the team over the course of a season, navigating the highs and lows? Would it be able to motivate a girl to accomplish things she didn't think possible? We've learned never to say never with technology, but here we'll say "almost certainly not."

It's a novel way to combine minds and machines: let computers take the lead on making decisions, then let people take the lead in convincing others to go along with them.

While computers are getting good at tasks like determining people's emotional states by observing their facial expressions and vocal patterns, this is a long way from doing the things we listed. We're confident that the ability to work effectively with people's emotional states and social drives will remain a deeply human skill for some time to come. This implies a novel way to combine minds and machines: let the computers take the lead on making decisions (or judgments, predictions and diagnoses), then let people take the lead if others need to be convinced or persuaded to go along with the decisions.

Health care provides examples of how this can be put into practice. Medical diagnosis is, in part, a pattern-matching exercise, and thanks to the digitization of healthcare information and advances in machine learning and other fields, computers are achieving superhuman levels of performance at this exercise. If the world's best diagnostician in most specialties - including radiology, pathology and oncology - is not already digital, it soon will be.

Most patients, however, don't want to get their diagnosis from a machine. They want to hear it from a compassionate person who can help them understand and accept the news. And after a diagnosis is made, medical professionals who can form interpersonal connections and tap into social drives are highly valuable, because they stand a better chance of getting patients to comply with treatment. Noncompliance is a major problem, negatively affecting the health of millions of people.

As a result, people will continue to be critically important in the health care systems of the future but not in the same roles as today. Emotionally and socially astute care coordinators, rather than brilliant diagnosticians, might move to center stage. You may have heard the old joke about the two employees (person and dog) in the factory of the future: The human is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man from touching the equipment. We suggest a slight tweak for health care. The medical office of the future might employ an AI, a person and a dog: the AI's job will be to diagnose the patient, the person's job will be to communicate the diagnosis and coach the patient through treatment - and the dog's job will be to bite the person if they second-guess the AI.

Excerpted with permission from the new book Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. Copyright © 2017 Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

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Machines might actually be better than humans at creativity. So ... what's left for us to do?

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A surprising report published this spring projects that 30 percent of current jobs in the UK might be replaced by automation in the next 15 years. That number is 21 percent in Japan, 35 percent in Germany and a whopping 42 percent in the United States.

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Sir Ken Robinson: How to Create a Culture for Valuable Learning 

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Sir Ken Robinson: How to Create a Culture for Valuable Learning 

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"There's much more to human intelligence than a certain sort of academic work," Robinson said. And, "if you get preoccupied by a certain type of achievement then you don't even look for other things people might be good at." Robinson points out that when the system narrowly defines success, it will exclude a huge portion of students who don't happen to be good at those few valued skills.

"We marginalize other forms of intelligence; and it's a big deal," Robinson said. But if collectively those involved in the education system changed what it means to achieve in a way that honors the natural diversity of human life, many more people would see themselves as achievers and would push themselves beyond expectations set for them.

The other central tenet of today's education system is compliance, which Robinson sees best reflected in the testing industry, a multibillion dollar business. But tests only measure what test-makers put on them, and how can such a small group of people know what will truly be useful to a student in a quickly-changing future? Robinson is troubled by the trend of adults in the current moment trying to predict the specific-knowledge students will need. The current focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning is a good example of adults looking at where jobs are right now and trying to make education fit. But who knows what other skills might be necessary 20 years from now?

"The real principle on which human life is based is organic growth and development," Robinson said. It's based on the need to invent your own life." But the education system is not set up to allow for that kind of organic development, although Robinson acknowledges that many educators are doing their best to protect this form of learning. "They're doing wonderful work because they believe in kids and the work, but they're doing it against a headwind," he said.

Part of the problem is the multitude of opinions and lack of clarity on exactly what it is an education should do. Debates about how to improve education will continue to rage because at a fundamental level participants don't agree about why (or if) kids should go to school. Robinson firmly believes that creativity is a central element of what sets humans apart from other forms of life on earth and so educators' mission should be to bring out the unique creative energy within each child.

Robinson believes education is "to enable students to understand the world around them, and the talents within them, so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens." He doesn't deny that learning information about the world is important, but he says it's equally important for students to understand their own talents, motivations and passions if they are going to lead lives that satisfy them. The current system of conformity and compliance leaves no space for this type of self-exploration.

"We spend more time talking about the outside world at school, but not enough time compelling the world within them," Robinson said. But it's the individual's world view that ultimately determines whether that person stays in school, persists through challenges, feels motivated, interested, engaged and dedicated to work. And failing to focus on a sense of individual purpose could even be contributing to rising levels of depression seen in the US.

Robinson doesn't deny that education has an economic purpose, and that it's important for young people to become economically independent and self-sufficient. But to do that, he argues, they shouldn't all learn the same thing. Instead, they should be learning to be adaptable, to be innovative, to flow with change, to collaborate and other globalized skills that will apply to whatever area of work they are passionate about pursuing. An education can help expose students to different life paths and support them in finding their passions, while giving them the transferable skills to attack any problem.
CULTIVATING GROWTH
The education system is commonly compared to mechanization, a " factory-model," designed to push cookie-cutter children through in age-based batches. Robinson finds industrialized farming to be a better metaphor because it deals with living organisms. Farmers went from an organic model of farming that prioritized crop diversity, rotation and fertile soil to a system of monocrops that easily fall prey to pests, which in turn are killed with chemicals. The focus is on output and yield, which increased with chemical fertilizers. This system does what it was designed to do -- it produces a lot of food, but at the expense of the environment.

Similarly, the education system has focused on increasing the number of high school graduates, the output, with no concern for whether they become happy, fulfilled human beings.

"The way you increase the quality of our children's experience, their life chances, it's not by focusing on yield, but on focusing on the culture of the school," Robinson said. A healthy mix of mentorship, arts, physical education, academic subjects and more creates the "healthy soil" in this analogy, the environment in which kids can flourish. Author Paul Tough also talked about strong learning environments as the key element to success in his book Helping Children Succeed.

Robinson said when schools get the culture part right they become an important asset for the community around them. "Great schools enrich the entire neighborhood, the entire ecosystem," Robinson said. But "schools that don't get their role in the community can drain the life force out of the community." The best schools develop the human resources of the community to further more investment, pride and high expectations.

"We spend so much time containing and constraining our teachers and students who have so much talent," Robinson said. And while some parts of the conformist and compliance-based system are unavoidable, other parts are perpetuated by well-meaning educators simply because that's the way things have always been done. Robinson is calling on all educators to look at the available resources differently, more creatively, and to use them to create learning environments that allow individual students to thrive and flourish.

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Sir Ken Robinson: How to Create a Culture For Valuable Learning

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"There's much more to human intelligence than a certain sort of academic work," Robinson said. And, "if you get preoccupied by a certain type of achievement then you don't even look for other things people might be good at."

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Why is it important for students to explore WoW?

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Why is it important for students to explore WoW?

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Did You Know  (Officially updated for 2017)

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Did You Know 6.0 (Officially updated for 2017) , Did You Know (Officially updated for 2016-17) Latest

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How one CVUSD teacher and her students are exploring WoW

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How one CVUSD teacher and her students are exploring WoW

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This video is about RIASEC TEAM TASKS '17

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KQED Mindshift: Employer's Challenge to Educators - Make Learning Relevant

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KQED Mindshift: Employer's Challenge to Educators - Make Learning Relevant

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Business leaders and economic thinkers are worried that today's students aren't leaving school with the skills they'll need to succeed in the workplace. Representatives from tech companies and hiring experts are looking for applicants who show individuality, confidence in their abilities, ability to identify and communicate their strengths, and who are capable of thinking on their feet.

At the recent Next New World conference hosted by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, panelists addressed the question of how the American education system can better prepare students to meet the evolving challenges of the 21st century economy.

Every panelist agreed that right now, the U.S. does not have a system that produces students that meet those needs.

"The problem is not to get incrementally better with our current education system," said Tony Wagner, expert in residence at Harvard's Innovation Lab. "The problem is to reimagine it." Wagner is not the first to call for a make-over of the education system, and he certainly isn't the first to advocate for content that connects with students in authentic ways or that teaches real world skills. His voice joins with the countless educators clamoring for the freedom to pursue those same goals.

"Content knowledge has to be engaging to kids," Wagner said. "If kids aren't motivated, you can pour content knowledge in their heads and it comes right out the other ear." And while critical thinking and communication are important, Wagner said schools are in danger if they stop there. "Above all, they need to be creative problem solvers," Wagner said.

Wagner highlighted schools in the deeper learning network like New Tech Network, Expeditionary Learning, High Tech High and Big Picture as school models that are aiming to fulfill many of these qualities. "Students are learning many more real world skills, as well as content knowledge, through projects," Wagner said. "They're doing work worth doing. They're doing work that's interesting, and engaging."

When these factors are woven throughout the school experience, students develop intrinsic motivation to take initiative and find their place in the world. They develop hope for what their future might hold. "Most kids are not low on goals and they're not low on agency," said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. "It's that they don't see pathways."

That's why Wagner half-jokingly advocated for "Dream Directors" in schools, whose job it would be to help students identify their dreams and scaffold tasks to help students obtain the skills needed for that dream. Over time attention to the needs of individuals would transform the content and delivery methods in schools.

"Students are the power tools of change in education. They are the most ignored and they have the most at stake."

To transform education in ways that have impact, a bottom-up and top-down strategy should be implemented, Wagner said. If parents, students and teachers make their voices heard about what true accountability would look like, they could change the conversation. But the bottom-up strategy will only work, Wagner said, if it's accompanied by business leaders clearly articulating the outcomes they'd like to see and helping align accountability to those outcomes.

"We need teachers and parents to advocate for a better system," Wagner said. And perhaps most importantly, students need a voice as education goes through major changes. "We're not asking students at all about what they think about the quality of their own learning and about what they aspire to learn," Wagner said.
ALIGNING WITH COLLEGE
The changes and trends in K-12 education often seem completely divorced from higher education and the grueling college application process that lands students at colleges all over the country. But that might be changing. Recently, College Board officials announced they are changing the SAT to better reflect what students learn in school.

The SAT used to be like studying infinity, said David Coleman, President and CEO of the College Board. The new test is meant to focus on fewer standards, but reflect the most important ones more deeply. "Honoring those few things that have disproportionate power is the way through," Coleman said.

The SAT has been criticized as an unfair measure of what students have learned or know because of the large tutoring industry that has sprung up around it, ensuring that wealthy kids get top scores. But that's also changing. Recently elite liberal arts colleges like Hampshire and Bard have announced they won't consider SAT or ACT scores if they're submitted with an application, because admissions officers don't believe the tests are a good measure of students' potential.

The College Board is trying to push back against some of the negative press by partnering with Khan Academy to offer free test prep materials that all students can access. They're also doing more to reach out to the many qualified students in the lower quartile of income who never apply to university with specialized packets detailing how they can apply for assistance to pay for application fees and tuition.
IS WORK IN COLLEGE MEANINGFUL?
Many educators would argue that even once students make it to college - the stated goal of many high schools - the education they receive there isn't preparing them to become innovative thinkers and engaged citizens.

Gallup recently did a study of college graduates to gauge how engaged they are with their work and whether they are thriving in the world. In the past, the most studies centered around on how much college graduates earned compared to peers without degrees.

The survey found that student who felt supported - that their professors cared about them as individuals, that professors made them want to learn, that they had a mentor - were three times more likely to thrive as those who did not feel supported. Only 14 percent of college graduates answered that all three of those qualities were present in their college experience.

Even fewer college graduates found their higher education experience to be relevant to life and work after college. Only six percent reported with strong affirmatives that they worked on a long term project (at least a semester), had an internship where they could apply skills, and were very engaged in an extracurricular. If a graduate answered "strongly agree" to all three of these qualities he or she was three times as likely to be engaged at work.

These numbers show that colleges, like K-12 institutions, need to care for individual learners. Feeling connected and mentored makes a difference, just as understanding how learning is relevant and applicable makes students feel prepared for life after college. Without a move in that direction, the U.S. risks continuing to educate young people who go into the workplace disengaged and less likely to thrive.
OLIN COLLEGE TRIES NEW MODEL
The founders of Olin College identified the gap in skilled workers ready for jobs in science, technology, engineering and math and decided to start over with a completely different kind of university. To apply, students visit the college and work in groups on projects. College staff are evaluating them for how they will fit in at the university, primarily looking for strong problem solvers and people who know how to make things.

"Its purpose is to produce education innovators," said Richard Miller, president and professor at Olin College. The Massachusetts college is an education laboratory. There are no departments, no tenure, no tuition and the curriculum has an expiration date so that it stays relevant.

"Olin is essentially a 'maker' university," Miller said. In one class, students are asked to identify a group of people whose lives they want to change. Through research and interviews they develop a sociological profile of the group that is used to come up with two to three systems, devices or technologies that don't already exist and that the group says would make a difference in their lives. Students then develop the specifications for the product and show how to build it. By the end of the course they have the outline for a patent.

"By the time they graduate a significant fraction of them already have companies they are working on," Miller said. While the school focuses on STEM, students learn about business too. Miller hopes these students leave school thinking about how they can change the world, not about what job they will get. "We are taking too narrow of a view of what the sciences are and trying to make them too technical," Miller said. In his mind, an innovator is someone who changes something so profoundly people can't remember how it was before.

"Students are the power tools of change in education," Miller said. "They are the most ignored and they have the most at stake." But, as Olin has found, when they are given free range to design, make and innovate they can be very powerful examples of what a great education can produce.

Employers' Challenge to Educators: Make School Relevant to Students' Lives

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Employers' Challenge to Educators: Make School Relevant to Students' Lives

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Business leaders and economic thinkers are worried that today's students aren't leaving school with the skills they'll need to succeed in the workplace. Representatives from tech companies and hiring experts are looking for applicants who show individuality, confidence in their abilities, ability to identify and communicate their strengths, and who are capable of thinking on their feet.

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The Atlantic: The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees

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The Atlantic: The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees

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Many companies find that skills-based pre-employment tests are better predictors of success on the job.

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

Last month, the U.K. office of the accounting firm Ernst & Young announced that, starting next year, it will no longer require new hires to have a college degree. Candidates for jobs at EY's U.K. office used to have to meet the grade baseline of a B average in college, but will soon be evaluated instead based on the results of a series of pre-employment tests.

EY said in a statement that the decision came after an internal 18-month study of 400 employees found little evidence that academic success was correlated with how well new hires performed on the job. Further, EY believes that removing these grade requirements will widen their candidate pool: "Transforming our recruitment process will open up opportunities for talented individuals regardless of their background and provide greater access to the profession," said Maggie Stillwell, EY's managing partner for talent in the U.K.

Related Story

A High School Where College is Not the Goal
Degrees and good grades have long been proxies for the kind of cognitive skills required for jobs in knowledge industries. But many say that these credentials don't meaningfully predict job performance, and companies are starting to catch onto that. "There is a long literature in psychology showing that job performance and college grades are poorly related," says Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies hiring and the American workplace. "It is remarkable how frequently companies rely on hiring criteria for which there is no evidence of it working."

America's tech sector has been the most outspoken about the irrelevance of degrees and grades when it comes to hiring: Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president of people operations, has been quoted as saying that while good grades don't hurt, they're "worthless as a criteria for hiring." The company administers sample-work tests-the best predictor of success on the job, writes Bock-and he says that they're "less concerned about grades and transcripts and more interested in how you think." One study found that pre-employment skill testing results in employees with significantly higher attendance rates and reduces turnover.

This story is part of our Next America: Workforce project, which is supported by a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

About the Author

Bourree Lam is a former staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously the editor of Freakonomics.com.

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The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees

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Many companies find that skills-based pre-employment tests are better predictors of success on the job. Last month, the U.K. office of the accounting firm Ernst & Young announced that, starting next year, it will no longer require new hires to have a college degree. Candidates for jobs at EY's U.K.

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In a survey this spring 77 percent of employers surveyed by CareerBuilder said they were seeking candidates with soft skills -- and 16 percent of the respondents considered such qualities more crucial than hard skills. Soft skills relate to the way employees relate to and interact with other people. The Multi-Generational Job Search Study 2014 by Millennial Branding said employers ranked the following as the most highly desired qualities in candidates: communication skills, a positive attitude and the ability to work in a team, all of which can be labeled soft skills or emotional intelligence.

Hard skills, on the other hand, are teachable abilities or skill sets that are easy to quantify, such as a proficiency in a foreign language or computer programming. While hard skills might be developed on the job, employees should come to an organization already in possession of soft skills. When employees lack these basic soft skills, it can hurt the overall success of the organization.

The soft skills that employers are seeking, according to CareerBuilder, Millennial Branding and others, include the following:
Related: Being Consistent Is Not the Same as Being Perfect
1. Being dependable. Employers value workers they can rely on to get the job done. There's nothing better than an employee who is available at the drop of a dime, arrives to work on time and delivers quality results.

During the interview process, hiring managers should ask candidates about their work ethic. Dependable employee are individuals who meet deadlines, are team players and stay focused at work.

2. Pulling together a presentation. Regardless of their position, most employees are expected to make presentations to management, co-workers, customers and clients in some fashion.

For example, an in-house graphic designer might receive an email from the head of the marketing department about a new client. Although this employee isn't a communications professional, she might be asked to pull together branding ideas in a presentation for the client.
Related: Want to Solve Problems More Efficiently? Do This.
3. Solving problems. Especially for fast-paced organizations, strong employees can think critically and effectively solve problems.

During the job interview, hiring managers should ask candidates about a time when they had to overcome a challenge in the workplace. This will help a hiring manager gauge the candidate's ability to solve problems, be resourceful and face obstacles at work.

4. Coaching co-workers. According to Millennial Branding report, 92 percent of employers value strong teamwork skills.

Strong employees are individuals willing to help co-workers and coach them along the way.

Let's say a new employee has been hired and added to a group project. The new employee probably doesn't have a clue about what's going on yet. In this scenario, an employee who's been on the team a while should take the new worker under his wing and coach the person through the new project.

5. Fitting into the company's culture. The Millennial Branding survey also revealed that 43 percent of employers want to hire employees who are a great cultural fit.

Cutural fit refers to when a candidate's values align with the employer's. If an employer values a balance between work and fun in the office, say, then hiring managers should search for candidates who share this outlook.
Related: How to Hire Someone Aligned With the Company's Mission
6. Voicing opinions while being open to feedback. Employees who are confident in their ideas but open to feedback can play influential roles in a workplace. During a brainstorming session, for example, such an employee would not only share ideas but also challenge others' by asking thoughtful questions. This can create a stimulating discussion and even spark innovation.

7. Being flexible and focused. Deadlines and projects can change at a moment's notice. Employees need to quickly adapt while remaining focused on meeting deadlines.

For example, an employee may have just received an assignment and deadlines for the week. But Wednesday arrives and the manager decides everything needs to be shifted to arrive a day earlier. A flexible employee would be able to quickly adapt to these changes and focus on projects with top priority.
Related: 10 Tips for Unleashing Your Creativity at Work
8. Being creative and innovative. Whether the employee is an accountant or art director, creativity is what sparks change in the workplace.

During an interview, the hiring manager should ask the candidate about a time when he or she was assigned a new project. The candidate should respond highlighting personal examples of thinking outside of the box to achieve results.

9. Developing new work processes. Employees with the ability to analyze work processes and discover new ways to complete them efficiently are valuable to employers. Not only does this save employers time, but it can also add to the bottom line.

10. Taking initiative. An employee demonstrates initiative by coming up with an idea and putting it into action.

For example, an employee might develop an idea for social-media marketing campaign that will build awareness for the organization.

After a company hires an employee, managers will want to gauge whether the employee will follow through in exhibiting soft skills. Some HR technology products let employers detect who has certain skills on the job. Talentoday is a skills assessment platform that helps employers measure soft skills and personalities through a variety of tests.
What soft skills do you believe are valuable in the workplace? Related:6 Types of People Who Are Really Hard to Talk To

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The 10 Unique Soft Skills Employers Desire in New Hires

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In a survey this spring 77 percent of employers surveyed by CareerBuilder said they were seeking candidates with soft skills -- and 16 percent of the respondents considered such qualities more crucial than hard skills. Soft skills relate to the way employees relate to and interact with other people.

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Donald Super created a developmental model which emphasized how personal experiences interact with occupational preferences in creating one's self-concept. Many theorists before him simply looked at personality and occupation and focused on a trait matching approach.

One of Super's greatest contributions to career development was his emphasis on the importance of developing a self-concept, as well as his recognition that this self-concept can change with new experiences over time. Before this, career development was mostly seen as a singular choice; however, Super viewed career development as a lifelong activity.

This might not seem groundbreaking today, but it was a marked change from the way theorists thought when Super began formulating his theoretical concepts in the 1950's. In addition to recognizing that people change over their lifetime, he also identified different areas or "life-spaces" that help make a person who they are. The six main life-spaces that make up who we are include: parent/homemaker, worker, citizen, leisurite, student, and child. So many of these roles imply that other people are involved in our lives and thus impact who we are. There are many other spaces in one's life - other than work - and Super believed that these inhabited social spaces didn't constitute a distraction but were an integral part of the rainbow of our lives. (Figure from http://career.iresearchnet.com/career-development/supers-career-development-theory/.)

Super's self-concept is the belief that our identities and by extension our career identities are a product of how we see ourselves. Our vocational choices put this concept into practice in the real world.
Super's Five Life and Career Development Stages
1. Growth (Age: birth - 14)
Characteristics: development of self-concept attitudes, and general world of work
2. Exploration (Age 15 - 24)
3. Establishment (Age 25 - 44)
4. Maintenance (Age 45 -64)
5. Decline (Age 65+)
Reduced output, preparation for retirement Continual adjustment process to improve position Entry-level skill building and stabilizing work experience Trying out classes, work, hobbies; tentative choice and skill development
The stages that Super outlined are guides looking at a macro-perspective of one's life. These stages often correlate with important events and denote a time of transition. Look at the stages and see where you fit in. Do you agree with how they are laid out? Some critics have argued or adjusted these stages and say that the language used is too deeply rooted in a 1950's perspective.

Either way, if you are looking for a key takeaway in reviewing this theory and trying to find a practical application to your life, then simply remember this. Super's work was important because his idea of the self-concept profoundly changed the field of career development. It challenged individuals to construct their own identification and understanding of their life-space identities including that of their careers. Take a moment to think about and list all of the roles (scientist, parent, yogi, dog owner, caregiver, student etc.) you assume in your life. These roles will likely change depending on your life stage. Super's theory is a good reminder that an individual's life situation changes with time and experience while noting that the concept of vocational maturity may or may not correspond with biological age. People may find themselves in the Exploration stage at 35 years-old since people tend to cycle through these stages when they go through career transitions.

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Career Development Theory Review: Super's Life-Span, Life-Space Theory

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Donald Super created a developmental model which emphasized how personal experiences interact with occupational preferences in creating one's self-concept. Many theorists before him simply looked at personality and occupation and focused on a trait matching approach. One of Super's greatest contributions to career development was his emphasis on the importance of developing a self-concept, as...

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Holland's Theory of Career Choice | Career Key

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Learn how Holland's Theory helps you choose a career, career pathway or college major that best fits you. Make a confident career choice.

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Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) is a relatively new theory that is aimed at explaining three interrelated aspects of career development: (1) how basic academic and career interests develop, (2) how educational and career choices are made, and (3) how academic and career success is obtained. The theory incorporates a variety of concepts (e.g., interests, abilities, values, environmental factors) that appear in earlier career theories and have been found to affect career development. Developed by Robert W. Lent, Steven D. Brown, and Gail Hackett in 1994, SCCT is based on Albert Bandura's general social cognitive theory, an influential theory of cognitive and motivational processes that has been extended to the study of many areas of psychosocial functioning, such as academic performance, health behavior, and organizational development.

Three intricately linked variables-self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and goals-serve as the basic building blocks of SCCT. Self-efficacy refers to an individual's personal beliefs about his or her capabilities to perform particular behaviors or courses of action. Unlike global confidence or self-esteem, self-efficacy beliefs are relatively dynamic (i.e., changeable) and are specific to particular activity domains. People vary in their self-efficacy regarding the behaviors required in different occupational domains. For example, one person might feel very confident in being able to accomplish tasks for successful entry into, and performance in, scientific fields but feel much less confident about his or her abilities in social or enterprising fields, such as sales. SCCT assumes that people are likely to become interested in, choose to pursue, and perform better at activities at which they have strong self-efficacy beliefs, as long as they also have necessary skills and environmental supports to pursue these activities.

Self-efficacy beliefs are assumed to derive from four primary sources of information: personal performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences (e.g., observing similar others), social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. Personal accomplishments (successes and failures with specific tasks) are assumed to offer a particularly compelling source of efficacy information, but the nature of the social models and reinforcing messages to which one is exposed, and the types of physiological states one experiences while engaged in particular tasks (e.g., low levels of anxiety), can all affect one's self-efficacy regarding different performance domains.

Outcome expectations refer to beliefs about the consequences or outcomes of performing particular behaviors (e.g., what will happen if I do this?). The choices that people make about the activities in which they will engage, and their effort and persistence at these activities, entail consideration of outcome as well as self-efficacy beliefs. For example, people are more likely to choose to engage in an activity to the extent that they see their involvement as leading to valued, positive outcomes (e.g., social and self-approval, tangible rewards, attractive work conditions). According to SCCT and the larger social cognitive theory, persons' engagement in activities, the effort and persistence they put into them, and their ultimate success are partly determined by both their self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations.

Personal goals may be defined as one's intentions to engage in a particular activity (e.g., to pursue a given academic major) or to attain a certain level of performance (e.g., to receive an A in a particular course). In SCCT, these two types of goals are, respectively, referred to as choice goals and performance goals. By setting goals, people help to organize and guide their own behavior and to sustain it in the absence of more immediate positive feedback and despite inevitable setbacks. Social cognitive theory posits that goals are importantly tied to both self-efficacy and outcome expectations: People tend to set goals that are consistent with their views of their personal capabilities and of the outcomes they expect to attain from pursuing a particular course of action. Success or failure in reaching personal goals, in turn, becomes important information that helps to alter or confirm self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations.

SCCT's Interests Model

Self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals play key roles in SCCT's models of educational and vocational interest development, choice making, and performance attainment. As shown in the center of the figure above, interests in career-relevant activities are seen as the outgrowth of self-efficacy and outcome expectations. Over the course of childhood and adolescence, people are exposed, directly and vicariously, to a variety of occupationally relevant activities in school, at home, and in their communities. They are also deferentially reinforced for continuing their engagement, and for developing their skills, in different activity domains. The types and variety of activities to which children and adolescents are exposed is partly a function of the context and culture in which they grow up. Depending on cultural norms, for example, girls are typically exposed to and reinforced for engaging in different types of activities than are boys.

Through continued activity exposure, practice, and feedback, people refine their skills, develop personal performance standards, form a sense of their efficacy in particular tasks, and acquire certain expectations about the outcomes of activity engagement. People are most likely to develop interest in activities at which they both feel efficacious and from which they expect positive outcomes. As people develop interest in an activity, they are likely to develop goals for sustaining or increasing their involvement in it. Further activity involvement leads to subsequent mastery or failure experiences, which, in turn, help to revise self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and, ultimately, interests within an ongoing feedback loop.

Interest development may be most fluid up until late adolescence, the point at which general interests (e.g., in art, science, social, or mechanical activities) tend to become fairly stable. At the same time, data on the stability of interests suggest that interest change does occur for some people during their post-adolescent years. SCCT posits that such changes, when they do occur, can be explained by changes in self-efficacy beliefs and/or outcome expectations-more precisely, by exposure to potent new learning experiences (e.g., parenting, technological advances, job training or restructuring) that enable people to alter their sense of self-efficacy and outcome expectations in new occupational and avocational directions.

In sum, people are likely to form enduring interest in an activity when they view themselves as competent at performing it and when they expect the activity to produce valued outcomes. Conversely, interests are unlikely to develop in activities for which people doubt their competence and expect negative outcomes. Furthermore, SCCT posits that for interests to blossom in areas for which people have talent, their environments must expose them to the types of direct, vicarious, and persuasive experiences that can give rise to robust efficacy beliefs and positive outcome expectations. Interests are impeded from developing when individuals do not have the opportunity to form strong self-efficacy and positive outcome beliefs, regardless of their level of objective talent. Indeed, findings suggest that perceived capabilities and outcome expectations form key intervening links between objective abilities and interests.

SCCT's Choice Model

SCCT's model of the career choice process, which builds on the interests model, is also embedded in the figure above. Arising largely through self-efficacy and outcome expectations, career-related interests foster particular educational and occupational choice goals (e.g., intentions to pursue a particular career path). Especially to the extent that they are clear, specific, strongly held, stated publicly, and supported by significant others, choice goals make it more likely that people will take actions to achieve their goals (e.g., seek to gain entry into a particular academic major, training program, or job). Their subsequent performance attainments (e.g., successes, failures) provide valuable feedback that can strengthen or weaken self-efficacy and outcome expectations and, ultimately, help to revise or confirm choices.

As illustrated in the same figure, SCCT also emphasizes that choice goals are sometimes influenced more directly and potently by self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, or environmental variables than they are by interests. Interests are expected to exert their greatest impact on academic and occupational choice under supportive environmental conditions, which enable people to pursue their interests. However, many adolescents and adults are not able to follow their interests either unfettered by obstacles or with the full support of important others. The choice making of these persons is constrained by such experiences as economic need, family pressures, or educational limitations. In such instances, people may need to compromise their interests and, instead, make their choices on the basis of such pragmatic considerations as the type of work that is available to them, their self-efficacy beliefs ("Can I do this type of work?"), and outcome expectations ("Will the job pay enough to make it worthwhile?"). Cultural values (e.g., the degree to which one's choices may be guided by elder family members) may also limit the role of personal interests in career choice.

SCCT posits conditions that increase the probability that people will be able to pursue their interests as well as conditions where interests may need to be compromised in making career-related choices. Collectively labeled "environmental influences" in the above figure, these conditions refer to the levels of support (e.g., family financial and emotional support), barriers (e.g., lack of finances, inadequate levels of education), and opportunities available to the individual. Simply put, SCCT hypothesizes that interests will be a more potent predictor of the types of choices people make under supportive rather than under more restrictive environmental conditions. Under the latter conditions, one's interests may need to be bypassed or compromised in favor of more pragmatic, pressing, or culturally acceptable considerations.

SCCT's Performance Model

SCCT's performance model is concerned with predicting and explaining two primary aspects of performance: the level of success that people attain in educational and occupational pursuits and the degree to which they persist in the face of obstacles. SCCT focuses on the influences of ability, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and performance goals on success and persistence. Ability (as reflected by past achievement and aptitudes) is assumed to affect performance via two primary pathways. First, ability influences performance and persistence directly. For example, students with higher aptitude in a particular subject tend to do better and persist longer in that subject than do students with lesser aptitude. (Ability or aptitude may be thought of as a composite of innate potential and acquired knowledge.) Second, ability is hypothesized to influence performance and persistence indirectly though the intervening paths of self-efficacy and outcome expectations.

In other words, performance involves both ability and motivation. SCCT emphasizes the motivational roles of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and performance goals. Specifically, SCCT suggests that self-efficacy and outcome expectations work in concert with ability, in part by influencing the types of performance goals that people set for themselves. Controlling for level of ability, students and workers with higher self-efficacy and more positive outcome expectations will be more likely to establish higher performance goals for themselves (i.e., aim for more challenging attainments), to organize their skills more effectively, and to persist longer in the face of setbacks. As a result, they may achieve higher levels of success than those with lower self-efficacy and less positive outcome expectations. Thus favorable self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and goals help people to make the best possible use of their ability.

It should be emphasized that self-efficacy is seen as complementing, not substituting for, ability. Indeed, SCCT does not assume that self-efficacy will compensate for inadequate task ability. It does, however, predict that the performance of individuals at the same ability level will be facilitated by stronger versus weaker self-efficacy beliefs. For example, academically able adolescents who underestimate their academic talents, compared to their equally able peers with more optimistic self-efficacy beliefs, are likely to set lower goals for themselves, experience undue performance anxiety, give up more quickly in the face of obstacles, challenge themselves less academically, and consequently experience less academic success.

Social cognitive theory notes that large overestimates of self-efficacy can also be self-defeating. For example, job trainees whose self-efficacy drastically overshoots their current skills are likely to set unrealistically high performance goals and to take on job tasks that are beyond their current grasp, which may occasion failure and discouragement. According to Bandura, self-efficacy beliefs that modestly exceed current capabilities are probably optimum because they are likely to lead people to set challenging (but attainable) performance goals and to engage in activities that stretch their skills and that further strengthen their self-efficacy and positive outcome expectations.

Empirical Support and Practical Applications

A substantial body of research has accumulated suggesting that SCCT and its major elements offer a useful framework for explaining educational and vocational interest development, choice making, and performance. Sufficient data have, in fact, accumulated to yield several meta-analyses relevant to SCCT. Meta-analysis is a research strategy that can be used to integrate findings and draw conclusions about the strength of hypothesized relations among variables. Meta-analyses of SCCT's interest model have revealed substantial support for its major hypotheses. In particular, self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations have each been found to account for a sizable amount of the variation in vocational and educational interests.

Meta-analyses have also supported SCCT's choice hypotheses. For example, it has been shown that career-related choices are strongly predicted by interests and, to a lesser extent, self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations. Consistent with SCCT's assumptions about the importance of environmental and cultural influences, some recent research also suggests that interests may play a smaller role in the choice-making process of adolescents and young adults from particular cultures. Specifically, those from a culture characterized by collective decision making were more inclined to choose a career path that was consistent with the preferences of their family members and with their self-efficacy beliefs rather than one that necessarily fit their personal interests. Other research supports SCCT's hypotheses that interests are more likely to translate into goals, and goals are more likely to promote choice actions, when people are faced with choice-supportive environmental conditions (e.g., relatively low barriers and high supports for their preferred educational/occupational path).

Meta-analyses relevant to SCCT's performance hypotheses have found that self-efficacy is a useful predictor of both academic and occupational performance. Research on the sources of information, or learning experiences, from which self-efficacy beliefs are assumed to derive has found that performance accomplishments typically show the strongest relations with self-efficacy in corresponding activity domains (e.g., successful performance in math-related classes is associated with higher math self-efficacy). The other (vicarious, persuasion, emotional) sources have also been found to relate to self-efficacy, although typically to a more modest degree than personal accomplishments.

Finally, SCCT has sparked a number of efforts to design and test interventions aimed at various facets of career development. In particular, SCCT suggests a number of targets at which educational and career programs can be directed. These include efforts to expand interests and nurture career aspirations in children and adolescents, facilitate career goal setting and implementation in adolescents and young adults, and promote successful work adjustment (e.g., satisfaction, performance) in adult workers. Reflecting the central role that SCCT accords to self-efficacy and outcome expectations, the interventions that have been proposed or tested to this point tend to rely heavily on experiences that promote these expectations (e.g., exposure to personal mastery experiences and support, access to accurate information about work conditions and outcomes). Extensions of the theory to a number of subpopulations (e.g., women of color, gay and lesbian workers, persons with disabilities) have appeared, and the theory has been applied to the study of career behavior in a number of countries and cultural contexts.

See also:

References:

1. Bandura, A. 1986. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

2. Bandura, A. 1997. Self-efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.

3. Brown, S. D. and Lent, R. W. 1996. "A Social Cognitive Framework for Career Choice Counseling." Career Development Quarterly 44:354-366.

4. Hackett, G. and Betz, N. E. 1981. "A Self-efficacy Approach to the Career Development of Women." Journal of Vocational Behavior 18:326-336.

5. Hackett, G. and Byars, A. M. 1996. "Social Cognitive Theory and the Career Development of African American Women." Career Development Quarterly 44:322-340.

6. Lent, R. W. 2005. "A Social Cognitive View of Career Development and Counseling." Pp. 101-127 in Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work, edited by S. D. Brown and R. W. Lent. New York: Wiley.

7. Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D. and Hackett, G. 1994. "Toward a Unifying Social Cognitive Theory of Career and Academic Interest, Choice, and Performance" [Monograph]. Journal of Vocational Behavior 45:79-122.

8. Lent, R. W., Brown, S. D. and Hackett, G. 2000. "Contextual Supports and Barriers to Career Choice: A Social Cognitive Analysis." Journal of Counseling Psychology 47:36-49.

9. Lent, R. W., Hackett, G. and Brown, S. D. 1999. "A Social Cognitive View of School-to-Work Transition." Career Development Quarterly 44:297-311.

10. Stajkovic, A. D. and Luthans, F. 1998. "Self-efficacy and Work-related Performance: A Meta-analysis." Psychological Bulletin 124:240-261.

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Social Cognitive Career Theory - Career Development - IResearchNet

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Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) is a relatively new theory that is aimed at explaining three interrelated aspects of career development: (1) how basic academic and career interests develop, (2) how educational and career choices are made, and (3) how academic and career success is obtained.

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World of Work - Institute for Entrepreneurship in Education - University of San Diego

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The Cajon Valley Union School District (CVUSD) and the IEE share a common goal to ensure all students have access to practices and environments that promote active, inquiry-based learning to: 1) strengthen their social-emotional skills, including persistence, resiliency, creativity, problem-solving and collaboration; 2) build students' competence and self-efficacy in Science,

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Insights From Socializing the World of Work

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Insights From Socializing the World of Work

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Ed Hidalgo & Amy McCammon on LinkedIn

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artwork by @bryanMMathers

By Ed Hidalgo and Amy McCammon
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Teachers develop students' strengths, interests and values
Over the past six months we've had the privilege of working with more than 900 teachers, principals, administrators, and staff members in the 26 K-8 schools that make up the Cajon Valley Union School District in El Cajon, California. Our work has focused on supporting educators as they gain an understanding into the World of Work Initiative launched by the Superintendent and Board in October, 2016. This initiative was developed as part of the greater effort to make the Cajon Valley community the best place to live, work, play and raise a family. Central to the mission is the importance of jobs, and the goal of helping all children find their place in the world. This means helping students discover their unique strengths, interests and values, building skills and aligning them to authentic experiences in the classroom to prepare them for the world of work.

Here are some takeaways from our journey:

The development of individual strengths, interests and values is a personal process that continues throughout each person's life. As we learn and grow, the people around us begin to see those unique qualities developing. How unique are we? Gallup, the organization that studies strengths, claims that the likelihood of having the same combination of top 5 strengths themes as another person is 1 in 33 million.
Career Development is a Human Process
Many of the teachers we visited with were excited about their students' unique qualities, and were looking for ways to focus on encouraging what they do well and supporting them in areas where they struggle. Top teachers developed relationships that lead to a deeper understanding of each individual student and they tailored methods to differentiate instruction, which helped the students know they are unique and special.

Teachers are an important catalyst for developing students' strengths, interests and values and key to driving career development and preparing students for the world of work.

What do we mean by 'human process?' We mean that we learn more about ourselves when we invest in dialogue, collaboration and learning experiences with other people. When teachers, parents and mentors help us think more deeply about who we are and who we want to become, we develop more authentic answers to these questions.
For many teachers, the evolving world of work is unfamiliar
When career development takes the form of computer time, we can lose that important human interaction. And as good as any computerized career development assessment may be, the greatest value is in the interpretation or conversation that follows.

A teacher has about 180 days in a school year to help students consider their place in the world and how their talents and interests connect to the world of work. Career development is accelerated when teachers support students as they explore the possibilities for how they might fit in the world.

Many teachers enter the field of education right out of college and stay in the field until they retire. The teachers we met with are interested in the data and want to know more about the changing world of work.

Together we looked at research recapping the 2016 Pew Research Center facts about American Workers, resources from the OECD regarding the state of the global economy and data from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce about the changing world of work. The statistics were sometimes overwhelming to teachers. They learned that there are approximately 120 million workers in the US with a growing number of freelance workers living in the gig economy and a plethora of jobs in the US with not enough Americans to fill them. 50 percent of STEM jobs (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) don't require a four-year degree, which raises the question: does everyone need to go to college? They discovered that there is a shortage of skilled workers, and that many of the current skilled workers are nearing retirement age.
Everyone has a story about someone who is confused about the world of work
And then the clincher: there are currently 1.2 billion people in India, and if just 10% of the population is highly skilled and educated, that would be nearly the same number of workers in the whole of the United States - and we didn't mention China's population.

After these discussions, we ensured teachers that these statistics might seem disheartening, but that the first step to helping their students enter the world of work is for them to understand the world of work.

Near the end of each workshop, we provided teachers with the chance to consider how they might integrate career development in their own classrooms. We had them explore their own strengths, interests and values through a facilitated activity based on John Holland's RIASEC theory, in which the teachers self-reported their interests. Then they took the SuperStrong assessment, a 15 minute version of the Strong Interest Inventory, so they could cross-reference their self reports with their reported assessment data. For most teachers, it was the first time learning about John Holland and the Holland Codes also known as Holland Occupational Themes.
Teachers are already incorporating World of Work explorations and simulations into their lessons
The experience provided them a new lens through which to see their students, and connected how their own interests can align to the world of work.

However, it also triggered a number of requests to use this process with their own friends and families. We heard stories about family members unsure of their college majors, unsure about their career paths, unsure about next steps, lost, confused and seeking help. For those teachers, the world of work provided an even deeper understanding and a relevance that connected them to real challenges for people they know and care about.

We ended each workshop with the same question: "What is already happening in your classrooms that makes a connection to what you heard today?" We heard that some teachers were using the website Mystery Science to introduce students to science related occupations. At Naranca Elementary School, 3rd grade students were studying the Stormy Skies unit. When the unit was over, some students wanted to continue studying the weather. The students wanted to explore what it means to be a Meteorologists, and at the same time, other students were very clearly uninterested in continuing the work.
Career development is good for everyone in the organization
The idea that some students were already foreclosing at such an early age around career roles was fascinating for teachers. We provided an overview of this reality based on the career theory research of Linda Gottfredson: " Where do interests, abilities, and other determinants of vocational choice come from? " Research indicates that this choice is affected by various factors. Interests, attitudes, and skills are influenced by environments we share with others and, certainly, there is a relationship between genetics and our environment. As we interact with our environments, our genetically based temperaments become more stable. As we repeat experiences, interests develop. These interests and other qualities gradually become a more stable expression of who we are.

For this reason, it is important for students to have many experiences with the world of work over their educational journey. This gives them a wide range of experiences to make better choices about their interests and the possibilities that exist for them through education and the world of work.

During several all-school meetings we asked the question, "How many of you got into teaching because it was a calling and how many of you fell into it?" About 50% of the teachers stated that it was a calling, the other 50% fell into teaching for different reasons. Among the 50% that fell into teaching, about half continued to be passionate about their career, the other half wished they had chosen another profession.

There were many great conversations that surfaced as we explored topics of career management, choice and purpose with teachers. We even heard from some who were preparing for retirement and how we'd caused them to think about new possibilities in their retirement years. Some where now even seeking career counseling.

This left us thinking - how could we help teachers align their interests to their work so they could uncover or rediscover the purpose in their work?

According to the Gallup Student Poll, children are 30 times more likely to be engaged in school if the school focuses on their strengths, and they have teachers who get them excited in school.
Thank you Cajon Valley USD and all the Amazing Teachers for Exploring the World of Work with us.
As we know, adults are important role models for children in learning about the world of work, and in developing their own self concept. There are many key figures, including parents, teachers, elected officials, athletes and people they meet in their own communities, that play a role in shaping students' aspirations. But teachers have the most unique opportunity to help students self-differentiate, role play, explore, dream, verbalize, and test their realities, in order to help them develop a self-concept, and figure out how they can fit into the world.

Our single most important takeaway, as we consider the importance of career development for students and the world of work, is that America's teachers play the lead role in ensuring that America has the talent necessary to compete on the global stage.

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Insights From Socializing the World of Work Initiative

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By Ed Hidalgo and Amy McCammon Over the past six months we've had the privilege of working with more than 900 teachers, principals, administrators,

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KQED - How Cross-cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy

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KQED - How Cross-cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy

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Often adolescents hold strong opinions, but they don't always know where and how they came to those beliefs. When a teacher pushes them to think critically about why they feel the way they do, it's easy for students to ignore them. But, when video conferencing with a teenager from another country who genuinely wants to know the answer, students often respond more thoughtfully.
HOW IT WORKS
A teacher interested in using Generation Global must register the school with the program first. Then he or she can access free lesson plans to introduce the basics of dialogue. Davis said one of his favorite elements of the product is its flexibility. Teachers can modify the lesson plans easily while still maintaining the spirit of the lesson.

"They trust that you know your students best," Davis said. "The lessons are designed so you can get at the heart of the meaning of the lesson without following the lesson prescriptively."

Students practice dialogue skills like active listening and speaking from the "I" perspective with one another in class. Thus, not only do students have the ability to dialogue about the personal experiences, values and beliefs of peers across the world, but in the lead-up they do the same with students who they've sat next to for years, but still might not know very well.

After students have been introduced to the skills involved in productive dialogue, the teacher can set up various types of interactions with classes in one of the 20 countries where schools have signed up for Generation Global. This can be done through the site and is painless, according to Davis. Teachers can choose a one-to-one dialogue with another class or they can choose to participate in a multipoint dialogue, where up to four classes are participating. All the dialogues are moderated by a trained facilitator who keeps the conversation moving, helps move past the awkward beginning and makes sure that everyone feel safe within the dialogue. The dialogues are all in English.

Additionally, Generation Global has a secure online dialogue feature that allows two classes to commit to a longer dialogue on a series of questions. The site groups students for a more intimate experience and they respond to one another in writing. Teachers and facilitators can see all these interactions, and the technology offers teachers a dashboard on their students' participation, too.

"The great thing about dialogue is it enables you to get inside someone else's perspective," said Ian Jamison, head of education for Generation Global. "So you explore not knowledge, but experiences, values and beliefs."

He stresses that the dialogue topics are usually not about specific curriculum because, while there is some overlap in the curricula of different countries, it can also vary widely. Instead, the program staff at Generation Global are interested in how students can build empathy for one another by learning about personal experiences of culture and the world.

The goal is to make the exotic familiar. "One of the side effects of familiarity is it makes it very hard to hang on to prejudice," Jamison said. He described one video conference he facilitated between a class in Pakistan and a class in the U.K. In the course of the conversation one of the students in Pakistan said that Islam was illegal in the U.K. He was surprised to hear from a U.K. student of Pakistani descent that actually he was himself a Muslim and attended a mosque in Birmingham.

"That's the kind of misinformed comment that doesn't help people get on with one another," Jamison said. But when the students could look one another in the eye and hear a different narrative about a place they'd never been, it started to change their views about the world.

"One of the things we often take for granted is we often think of ourselves as ordinary and the other as exotic," Jamison said. But every person can be exotic to someone living in a different culture, and these global dialogues can have a huge impact on the many biases and stereotypes that get passed around almost unconsciously.
SAFETY AND SECURITY
Generation Global takes safety and security seriously both because its staff know that students must feel emotionally safe to open up about personal experiences, but also because they know parents worry about student safety online. The schools that participate have been vetted by Generation Global and the video conferences and online chats take place in a secure environment that is never shared.

In many ways this program asks students to do something that many adults aren't modeling well -- how to be respectful of someone with a different lived experience and opinion. The dialogue skills are particularly important when people disagree strongly.

"As a teacher it was so refreshing to have a facilitator make sure that safe space for dialogue and conversation was kept," Davis said. Conversations can still get heated, but if a student gets worked up the facilitator will stop the conversation, ask participants to take a moment, and then work to re-establish safety before continuing the conversation.

Jamison sees the online dialogue as an equally important element of helping adolescents to develop positive habits around interactions online, something that again many adults do not model well for students.

"What we want to end up with are young people who are able to take part confidently in dialogue," Jamison said.

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How Cross-Cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy

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Often adolescents hold strong opinions, but they don't always know where and how they came to those beliefs. When a teacher pushes them to think critically about why they feel the way they do, it's easy for students to ignore them.

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Carol Dweck Explains the "False" Growth Mindset

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Carol Dweck has become the closest thing to an education celebrity because of her work on growth mindset. Her research shows that children who have a growth mindset welcome challenges as opportunities to improve, believing that their abilities can change with focused effort. Kids with fixed mindsets, on the other hand, believe they have a finite amount of talent that can't be altered and shy away from challenges that might reveal their inabilities.

Dweck believes educators flocked to her work because many were tired of drilling kids for high-stakes tests and recognized that student motivation and love for learning was being lost in the process. But Dweck is worried that as her research became more popular, many people oversimplified its message.

In an interview with The Atlantic , Dweck explained to reporter Christine Gross-Loh all the ways she sees growth mindset being misappropriated. She says often teachers and parents aren't willing to take the longer, more difficult path of helping students identify strategies and connect success to those strategies. Instead, her complicated psychological research has gotten boiled down to, "praise the effort, not the outcome." Dweck also explained what she means by a "false" growth mindset:

False growth mindset is saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it or you don't really understand [what it is]. It's also false in the sense that nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait. Something really challenging and outside your comfort zone can trigger it, or, if you encounter someone who is much better than you at something you pride yourself on, you can think "Oh, that person has ability, not me." So I think we all, students and adults, have to look for our fixed-mindset triggers and understand when we are falling into that mindset.

I think a lot of what happened [with false growth mindset among educators] is that instead of taking this long and difficult journey, where you work on understanding your triggers, working with them, and over time being able to stay in a growth mindset more and more, many educators just said, "Oh yeah, I have a growth mindset" because either they know it's the right mindset to have or they understood it in a way that made it seem easy.

The interview is full of tips for parents and educators, including the differences between young children and older ones.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/

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Carol Dweck Explains The 'False' Growth Mindset That Worries Her | KQED

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Carol Dweck has become the closest thing to an education celebrity because of her work on growth mindset. Her research shows that children who have a growth mindset welcome challenges as opportunities to improve, believing that their abilities can change with focused effort.

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Mindshift: Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress to Change Student Mindsets

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Mindshift: Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress to Change Student Mindsets

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iStock

Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and its power to help people view challenges as opportunities to improve has helped many students understand their beliefs about themselves. When empowered with the understanding that intelligence is malleable, students can develop how they approach school and life. But the revelations around mindsets don't end there - they apply to other areas of education, including how students view and react to stress.

There is a lot of research about how stress negatively impacts health, cognitive functioning and self-control, but less often discussed are how those findings change when people see their stress as a positive motivator. "In a number of situations, accepting and embracing the stress instead of trying to calm down helped students to do better," said Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University at a Learning and the Brain conference on mindsets.

'If you are able to look back on your life and tell yourself a story about your stress that includes how you learned from it, it continues to create a narrative of strength, learning and growth.' Kelly McGonigal, Stanford lecturer, author

McGonigal defines stress as "what arises in your body, in your brain and in your community when something you care about is at stake." She acknowledges that stress can make some people feel paralyzed and might lead them to underperform. She calls that reaction a "threat response" to stress, but says if educators can help students to have a "challenge response" to stress, which includes the realization that they have the resources to handle the situation, the stress can actually energize students to do better.

This more positive approach doesn't negate the very real effects on the brain from constant high levels of stress. McGonigal is clear that the first priority in any situation is to relieve suffering. She says it's useful to help students learn tactics to calm down in the moment, like mindfulness or other cortisol-reduction exercises, but those strategies aren't enough on their own. Life is stressful in big and small ways; rather than trying to erase stress from life, it may be beneficial to approach inevitable stress more positively.

"There is almost no relationship between the amount of stress you are under and your stress mindset," said McGonigal. Learning tactics to change one's outlook on stress can be beneficial for anyone. "How you think about stress seems to influence how you cope with stress," she said.

When people try to avoid stress or stressful situations, they often behave in escapist ways. They look for distractions or use coping mechanisms like drinking to deal with the stress they feel. Conversely, people who have a more balanced or welcoming approach to stress tend to be more proactive. When they start to feel stressed out, they are more likely to address the source of the stress, ask for help, talk about their stress or even find the humor in it.

Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case.

When students learn to think about stress in this more positive way, they can actually use it to improve learning, to find purpose and to form stronger emotional connections to others, McGonigal said. In her popular TED talk, McGonigal describes how the stress hormone oxytocin primes people to take action and makes them crave closeness. Even as the body is releasing adrenaline and cortisol that produce anxious feelings, it is also releasing oxytocin, which can help people build resiliency against that anxiety.

McGonigal views the dual nature of the body's stress response as an opportunity. She suggests three interventions to help students (or anyone) change their approach to stress and create resiliency in the face of anxiety.
#1 Caring for others builds resiliency against stress
To help people reset their mindsets about stress, encourage them to care for others. The biological reaction to stress naturally includes a desire to connect with others. Nurturing that inclination can dramatically reduce the harmful negative effects of stress.

A study done at Yale in 2015 asked 77 adults to report every stressful event that happened to them each day, including work, school, interpersonal or financial stresses. They also kept track of all the times they helped someone throughout the day. Finally, every day the subjects took a mental health well-being test because researchers wanted to see how caring behavior affected well-being. They found that on stressful days when the person had engaged in few acts of kindness, mental health tanked. But when the person experienced a lot of stress, but also helped others, often their well-being stayed even.

Another study done at the University of British Columbia and Northwestern with 106 10th-graders found that kids who were randomly assigned to offer acts of kindness throughout the day had lower levels of toxic stress. They had less inflammation, lower cholesterol, and better heart and metabolic health. In their summary of results, the authors write, "Preliminary analyses within the intervention group suggest that those who increased the most in empathy and altruistic behaviors, and who decreased the most in negative mood, also showed the greatest decreases in cardiovascular risk over time."

Even something as simple as a visual reminder, like a wristband, to be compassionate toward others can have surprising results. It reminds kids that their teachers and parents value caring as much as academics, and gives them a sanctioned reason to point out compassionate behavior in others, as well as practicing it themselves.
#2 Purpose in life reduces stress
At the University of Illinois researchers studied how purpose in life related to happiness and mood in 222 college students. They found that students with low life-purpose were satisfied with their lives when they were happy, but very unsatisfied when their mood was low. In contrast, students with high life-purpose were satisfied with their lives whether or not they were having a bad day. Their purpose created resiliency.

"People who have a meaningful life worry more and have more stress than people with a less meaningful life," McGonigal said. But that isn't necessarily bad. People feel stress around things they care about, so when they have a high sense of purpose they naturally experience more stress. "Stress and meaning go together," she said. She's convinced that how we think about stress in relationship to meaning will determine whether we're on the stress-induced heart attack side of stress or the energized, motivated side of stress.

To increase students' sense of purpose, McGonigal suggests teachers simply ask students to reflect on a series of questions that help illuminate their values.

What quality or strength do you value about yourself? (This is different than what a teacher or adult would value about you.)

What activity, role or relationship brings you meaning, satisfaction or joy? McGonigal says students often point out things like sports, art or being a sibling. The point is to get at something bigger than self.

What mission, purpose or community do you serve? This question expands the sense of self and gets at what a student cares about.

Why are these important to you?

Studies on simple self-affirmation exercises like this one can have dramatic impacts on how students view their ability to handle difficult situations. "It has been shown to increase students' ability to see the meaning when they face stress or adversity and have a sense of themselves as adequate to the challenge," McGonigal said.
#3 Focus on how stress can help students grow
Here's where growth mindset comes back into the story, because thinking of challenges - no matter the context - as learning opportunities can reframe even the toughest experiences.

'Typically, human beings learn and grow from even the experiences we'd want to protect them from.'

Researchers at the University of Southern California asked 564 alternative high school students about the worst experience of their lives. Many teenagers have already experienced really terrible things, including sexual abuse, cancer and homelessness. "Kids in the study had experienced real adversity, in additional to typical teenage adversity," McGonigal said. The students were then asked how that experience affected their personal strength, compassion, activities, closeness to others, spiritual understanding, handling difficulties, direction in life and appreciation for life. On every measure students reported a positive change because of the terrible experience.

"Typically, human beings learn and grow from even the experiences we'd want to protect them from," McGonigal said. Carol Dweck's work has shown how important this growth can be in the academic world, but it can be true about stressful life events, too.

A study at Hope College asked students to think about an experience that was personally painful, bothersome or embarrassing. An experimental group was told doing this was an opportunity to learn, grow and become stronger. "This was not hard for people to do, no matter what the experience was," McGonigal said. "And when they did it, they shifted into a different stress state, one that looked more like resilience."

The group that thought about that painful experience without the intervention, however, exhibited signs of toxic stress. All these studies demonstrate that how students think about and perceive their experiences are very important to how their bodies react to the resulting stress.

"If you are able to look back on your life and tell yourself a story about your stress that includes how you learned from it, it continues to create a narrative of strength, learning and growth," McGonigal said.

An easy intervention to help students build a growth mindset about stressful situations is to break into small groups and share stories of facing challenges and persevering through them. The stories don't have to be academic, but it should be a time when the student got better at that skill or learned something. Then students can write about the strengths they drew on, reflect on who or what supported them, and think about what they learned and how they grew. This is particularly powerful when adults share, too.

Sharing with a group can help students see that struggle is common to everyone. It can also help highlight different strategies people used in those moments of adversity and how productive challenges can be.

"The most effective mindset interventions start with a new idea, some science, and then you have people talk about it," McGonigal said. When students can relate the idea to their own experiences, it becomes much more powerful.

"When we are anxious, stop interpreting it as a sign we are inadequate and start seeing it as a way we can rise to the challenge," McGonigal said.

To her, the best of these three interventions is that they can help convert mindsets about stress, even when a person isn't conscious of it. Like mindfulness training, these strategies can shift the narrative and subtly color experiences of stress going forward.

How Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress Can Change Student Mindsets

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How Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress Can Change Student Mindsets

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Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and its power to help people view challenges as opportunities to improve has helped many students understand their beliefs about themselves. When empowered with the understanding that intelligence is malleable, students can develop how they approach school and life.

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World Economic Forum: 8 Digital Life Skills All Children Need

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World Economic Forum: 8 Digital Life Skills All Children Need

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8 digital life skills all children need - and a plan for teaching them

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We need to teach our children these eight skills as part of their education in digital citizenship.

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Eduardo Briceno's Talk on Growth Mindset

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The Power of belief -- mindset and success | Eduardo Briceno | TEDxManhattanBeach

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the power (and peril) of praising your kids

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new york magazine cover story  (how not to talk to your kids) on carol
dweck’s work

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the power (and peril) of praising your kids

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MindSet: A Book written by Carol Dweck. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.

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The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids

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Sesame Street: Bruno Mars: Don't Give Up

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Implementation of The Good Project Lesson Plans

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The Power of Yet: A quick, fun way to teach growth mindset

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The Power of Yet: A quick, fun way to teach growth mindset

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Sesame Street: Episode #4520: J. Monae Power of Yet (HBO Kids)

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How to get better at the things you care about

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Eduardo Briceño: How to get better at the things you care about

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Working hard but not improving? You're not alone. Eduardo Briceño reveals a simple way to think about getting better at the things you do, whether that's work, parenting or creative hobbies. And he shares some useful techniques so you can keep learning and always feel like you're moving forward.

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Qualcomm Thinkabit Lab Presents: World of Work

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Join a group of middle schools students as they try and figure out what kind of jobs will best suit them. Qualcomm has developed tools to help students identify their strengths, interests and values so they can start thinking about their future in the world of work.

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Connecting the World of Work to K12 Education with Ed Hidalgo (Career Talk Audio) - UCSD-TV - University of California Television

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As the Director of the World of Work initiative at the University of San Diego's Mobile Technology Learning Center, Ed Hidalgo leads the exploration of ways to connect the world of work to K12 education. His current role reflects many of the initiatives he drove at Qualcomm over the past decade where he worked in staffing/HR and government affairs.