Revolutionizing Skills Credentials with Peer Feedback

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kelly:   Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, the podcast where we discover what skills can help you live your best life. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey, and each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful. You’ll get a firsthand account of how they develop those skills, as well as their innovative approaches to improving skills-based hiring and learning around the world.

Now let’s talk about skills, baby. My guests today are Randy Bitting and Jake Burke.

Kelly Bailey: Randy Bitting is a co-founder of the Career Readiness Project, a national pilot program to assess and measure students’ proficiency in the eight NAC competencies.

NAC stands for National Association of Colleges and under his leadership, the Career Readiness Project launched at more [00:01:00] than 150 institutions in 18 months and was recognized as the best competency-based education solution in the 2019 Ed Tech Breakthrough awards. Previously, Randy joined Handshake as Chief Strategy Officer and played a lead role in helping Handshake grow from five to 500 plus universities in three years.

Pioneered the video interviewing category in 2003, as Founder and CEO of Interview Stream. Named Inc. Magazine’s top 30 under 30 as well. Randy and I also both share Alma Mater College of Charlestown.

And to introduce Jake. Jake is the VP of Sales for Skill Survey. He has been a sales professional for over 20 years and has spent all that time in the education vertical.

 Prior to his career in sales, Jake was an higher education administrator in residence life, admissions, orientation, and career services.

When not working [00:02:00] with his team at Skill Survey, Jake works at a nonprofit he co-founded with his wife called Cure NF With Jack. Randy, Jake, thank you guys so much for joining us today. This has been such a long time coming as we discussed before we hit record and we’ve known each other for a really long time. It’s just been such a pleasure and I’m just really excited to jump in. So maybe we can start off with, how have skills shaped your life journey?

Randy: Thanks for having us Kelly. I think I’ll get started. My skills journey has been an interesting one. I think similar to you, never really went to the career center when I was in college and that kind of started my serial entrepreneur career.

When you look at skills, I would always say that I wasn’t the best student, but always street smart and adaptable and that’s why I started my first company and it was the first video interview company in the market.

And trying to launch video interviewing back in 2003, it was [00:03:00] interesting because not anyone had no one had webcams yet. And we shipped thousands of webcams across the globe, interviewed in 10 languages. And it really set off my career as an entrepreneur. It got more interesting from there because when I’m working in this space, I’d never went on an interview.

And I never have had an official resume. But I guess I’m overqualified in that sense. When I transitioned to help launch Handshake, which is the largest early talent network, just took my skills into again, helping millions of college students find jobs and when we ended up starting this national project with the National Association of Colleges employers, that really kind of focused on skills primarily and competencies.

And what we found is that no one really had hard data on soft skills. And Skill Survey has been doing this about 20 years and [00:04:00] has billions of data points on these core behaviors that predict outcomes for job candidates who were later hired.

Kelly Bailey: That’s really fascinating, Randy. I want to get into what those are as well, but let’s give Jake a moment to answer the same question, if you don’t mind.

Jake Burke: Yeah. It’s a tough act to follow. Randy and I have been colleagues for 10 years and friends for just about that long and similar journeys, similar stops along the way, both at Interview Stream and Handshake, and now finding ourselves at Skill Survey.

But for me, my skills journey, I would say started back before college in high school. Probably the most important role that I had in terms of work and skills was at a convenience store while I was in high school.

And then into college to try and help pay the bills as many, many students do. And I learned about people and I learned how to understand people and empathize with people. And that singular skill has played out for me across these many years, 30 something years later in my [00:05:00] role as a sales professional, but that was not what my career path was going to be.

As you alluded to in my bio, I was in higher education administration and loving every minute of it. But as life happens  people influence you and you get to meet people and they take you in a direction and see things in you that you might not. And that person for me was David Backrack, who was the founder of a internet company before Google came along and said you’d be really good at sales.

And I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. But what he meant was that I was good with people. I understood problems. I understood solutions. And I asked a lot of questions. What if? And that even play out to the most recent time here at Skill Survey. When I first got here a couple of years ago, talking to my CEO saying, what if we could do what we do with our flagship solution and do something around skills assessment for college and universities?

And the first person that came to mind to help us do that, of course was Randy. And that’s how we all came together. So that’s [00:06:00] what my journey has been up until this point.

Kelly Bailey: That’s amazing. And I love that you pointed out some of the most important skills. I’m sure we’ll get into this more, but for those of you that are not viewing the video and just listening, and I want to point out that Randy is wearing the most perfect shirt for this podcast today. So Randy, what does that shirt say?

Randy: Yeah, Kelly. It says “critical thinking, the other national deficit.” It’s true. With our national project with NAC, we found that critical thinking, according to NAC’s research and their employer membership, they deemed that competency as the most essential competency.

 But when we had, over 30,000 students from 150 institutions measured on certain behaviors and observed on behaviors that tie to that competency, by far they were rated lowest in those behaviors that tied to the most essential competency, according to employers.

Kelly Bailey: I’m not really [00:07:00] surprised to hear that. It’s fascinating that Jake, you pointed out, in this early job experience that that amongst problem-solving and empathy and some other soft skills were really the skills that you learned in that experience. And it’s really how to interact with people.

So maybe we can go in a little bit deeper into these competencies, cause I’d love everyone to hear what you guys discovered in this beyond critical thinking is one of those most important skills.

Randy: Yeah, Kelly. It was a fascinating project that we took on with NAC. We didn’t know what we were getting into, we adapted our HR platform that’s been used a million times as being used by over 3000 organizations. And what we did is we took the same concept and we really focused on behaviors and not necessarily the competency.

And we tied about three to five behaviors to each competency. And what we noticed was all these college students, they’re trying to get work wherever they can get it and get [00:08:00] that experience. And there’s not much data out there on internships and it’s very decentralized.

It’s amazing that large campuses also have student employment and the student employment programs are trying to adapt for those students and cater to them because they can’t always take on low paid and unpaid internships.

And they’re all gaining valuable skills on these work experiences, but the missing component was no one’s being evaluated. No one’s getting feedback and if they are getting feedback, it’s a lot of times on paper forms that end up in a drawer somewhere. And so we teamed up with ouS  fantastic group of PhD IO psychologist internally here at Skill Survey.

And we worked with NAC to map those behaviors to those competencies. And that’s kind of been the really interesting part, is even if you can impact one behavior for a college student or any job candidate, it’s amazing how it can [00:09:00] really set their career off in a different way. And sometimes they don’t even know they’re falling short in certain behaviors or competencies.

Kelly Bailey: That’s a really good point.

Jake Burke: If I could add to that, that last point is very significant. As a former career services practitioner, the gap between who oneself thinks they are and how they present to the world oftentimes can be very different. And what the career readiness solution shows the students are the areas where they’re on target, if you would, in areas where they think that they’re better than they actually are.

And it’s the role of the career services or practitioner or the student employment supervisor to point those things out and have a learning experience that the student can then take with them along their career journey and along the way to their first full time job and beyond. And that’s been lacking in my experience for a long time.

And the trend is the trend is data, right? I mean, the trend is data and the data that we’re collecting to help students [00:10:00] and career folks understand, in a micro level, at the individual student level is one thing. But also in the macro level, as a campus, how is UMass Lowell or how is the College of Charleston preparing their students for that world of work, and measuring in a very scientific and validated way. Those skillsets that, not that we want, not that we’re asking for, but what the employers are asking for.

And that’s what’s been really, really key.

Randy: And what’s important to point out is, it’s based on the observations of others. So there’s a lot of data out there. There’s LinkedIn profiles, there’s resumes, there’s personality tests, there’s even students and job seekers that are great at interviewing.

But you don’t know where they’re falling short because you’re not getting that hard data on somebody that sees and sees how at the extent that they demonstrate these behaviors in the workplace.

And then you have the latest trend of [00:11:00] AI, which is very helpful. But it’s trying to predict before even observing a student or a job candidate, whether they’re going to be successful in that workplace. And so we collected this national data based on the observations of others and really the best predictor of future performance is past performance.

And that’s what we rely on.

Yeah.

Kelly Bailey: I love that you pointed that out. Because it’s fascinating how someone can react and utilize their skills very differently, depending on what environment they’re in. And oftentimes, we’ll think Hey, I’ve named that I have some skill on my LinkedIn profile or someone’s endorsed me for some skill. It’s whether or not I know them, that’s a whole other story.

Right. But how do we really know that works the way that that employer as an employer, I would want it to in my environment, is always a question. And it’s really fascinating that you guys went to this level. I do have one question that I think we all likely have heard many [00:12:00] times, but I think it’s good to clarify your thoughts on this especially through this project so that our audience can understand.

We often hear the question, what is the difference between skill competency and behavior? And sometimes I say, this is the most frustrating question that I hear it’s completely based on any one person’s opinion. But I’m just curious how you guys think about it this way as our audience hears this story and what work that you’re doing, they understand how you’re coming at it.

Randy: Wow. Wow Yeah, I would point out that the big shift that we’re seeing is the shift from hard skills to soft skills. And many of us throw around soft skills, and if you look online there’s tons of different definitions of that. Right? And when you look at the transition, we describe it from what you know, the hard skills. To how you act.

And one’s really easy to measure, and [00:13:00] one’s very fluid and highly personalized. And the hard skills is typically what you’re hired for, and the soft skills and the behaviors and the behavioral competencies are why you’re let go, or why you grow in a certain position over the years.

Jake Burke: I love that example of hard skills for why you’re hired and the soft skills are lack thereof or why you  might be let go. I mean, you can have someone who is a spectacular communicator but a terrible team member, narcissistic, arrogant or whatever the case may be.

So the skill is there, the competency is there. The behavior, who might not be. So I just wanted to reiterate that piece, that Randy was.

Kelly Bailey: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that.

 So, what I really wanted to dig into are, because some people might not be familiar with the eight NAC competencies, so I wanted to call those out. But then also just to dig in a little bit further,  how you might see this as a student and maybe even from every angle, right? Because [00:14:00] someone on my assumption is an employer interacts with this, a student might interact with this, and it sounds like college administrators or someone in the career services office might interact with this.

Randy: With the eight NAC competencies, I’ll quickly list them off. They’re professionalism, communication, digital technology, teamwork, critical thinking, career management, and there’s what just transitioned from global intercultural fluency to equity and inclusion. So, they recently got updated based on the research that we did with NAC and these observations of behaviors that are connected to the competencies.

Kelly Bailey: That’s really helpful, Randy. So maybe we can go into now how each audience might interact with this tool?

Randy: So currently we work with a hundreds of Universities  and we’re starting to expand that outside of universities with workforce development and a few high school or K through 12 are using this and it’s based off of work experience. So again, I mentioned [00:15:00] that it’s based on the observations of others.

So each student or job candidate that goes out on any type of work experience, they are rated on 20 to 30 behavioral items. They also rate themselves, which is really important because you get a report back that you can see how you were rated by your evaluators. And typically this is a 360 for the first time, so they can have multiple raters.

So you can have peers, colleagues, coworkers, supervisors, similar to the job reference, right. When you look at that and you compare it to how you rated yourself, that’s one interesting data point. And we find that there’s about 25% of students that are overestimating their skills. So they’re rating themselves higher than their evaluators.

And then also we norm. We have a norm group that we can compare and show you hard data on [00:16:00] how you were rated by your evaluators and supervisors and coworkers, compared to help thousands and thousands of other students were rated or job candidates were rated by their former managers and coworkers.

It gives you that numeric score, but it also puts it in perspective as what category you in, how are you doing and how were you rated compared to others?

Jake Burke: Because of the percentiles really tell the story. Right, Randy. I mean, it’s just not the whole number. The career readiness overall score, but it’s the overall rating. It’s also compared how are you doing is a 6.2 out of seven? Is that great?

It might be. Let’s take a look at your cohort. Let’s look at your colleagues and see where that puts you percentile wise. So it just digs in a little bit deeper than just, “oh, okay. I’ve got a six out of seven. That’s cool.” It tells a much deeper story and what I’m excited about is that it becomes part of the student’s career portfolio, but it’s not just for the [00:17:00] students.

It’s for the future employer. It’s been influenced by the current employer, the current co-worker that has given this objective feedback on the student’s performance. And that’s really neat and we’re starting to see students putting it into their LinkedIn profiles, right, Randy? As a certification. And unlike some other things that are out there, I guess I’ll use the term subjective at best, not necessarily validated. Someone said I’m good at this, so I’m going to put it on there. Well, okay. Where’s the data behind that? The career readiness report is a little bit different and we’re starting to see students leverage that as part of their program.

Randy: To that point, Jake it’s really evidence that they’ve demonstrated these behaviors and it’s not what they’re saying. It’s what somebody observed them saying in the workplace. And when you look at the industry and the market, there’s 2 or 300,000 badges out there, there’s over a million credentials.

A lot of them are participation awards. There’s not a lot of [00:18:00] equity between those badges and credentials.

Kelly Bailey: When they add this to their LinkedIn profile, does that come up under education? Is that a formal certification that they can add there?

Randy: Yeah, well, it’s under credentials. It’s up to them to post it. Not all assessments or career readiness reports are great. A lot of campuses are using this as a way for student intervention. And especially we found those students that are rating themselves much higher than their evaluators, there’s one confidential question on this feedback. It is would you work with this person again?

And it’s a red flag for an institution when that comes back and you see that the student’s not self-aware the rating themselves sevens and their evaluators are rating them fours and fives. There’s  a greater probability that they would say no, that they wouldn’t work with that student again and that’s a good place to intervene. 

But then there’s excellent reports out there. You can see all the behaviors, you can see how the [00:19:00] multiple evaluators supervisors and coworkers gave feedback. And it’s not only quantitative, it’s qualitative as well. There’s open-ended feedback on the top three ways that they can improve. And also their top areas of strength.

Kelly Bailey: I want to talk maybe a little bit more about the intervention that would happen, because that was my second question that I was thinking of was, what happens when that employer might give some negative feedback and that student might have a different awareness of themselves?

Randy: Well, it’s really the first time anyone’s had hard data on soft skills when it comes to, I mentioned that,  you have profiles, you have people students embellishing other resume or coming in and getting advised, but it’s always what the student says.  We build out several reports over two years.

Just because this is the first time a lot of students and job candidates are getting that type of 360 feedback. They are going to get used to that when they get into the workplace and also go through the job reference [00:20:00] process.

But to see this feedback for the first time, and have that rapport where an advisor or faculty member, or even in the aggregate, a lot of campuses like Allborne, for example, they’re using it for accreditation. Because it’s not what the faculty members are saying or in the classroom, it’s outside data of thousands of students that are out on internships and co-ops.

And they can seek it out where their students are falling short, where they’re doing really well, and they can address their programs and enhance their programs based on, where do we need to address certain competencies and behaviors?

Jake Burke: What’s really great about that piece is, a student walks into the career center and says help me. Well where do we start? Do we help you with your interview skills? And these are the interview stream. Do we help you with developing your resume? Where do we help?

If they come in now with the career ready report on their experience, [00:21:00] we’re going to as a career service person seeing that, okay professionalism or work ethic, you’re really on the left-hand side of the curve here. Do you know that we have workshops with the the college of liberal arts in English department to talk about communication skills?

It just becomes geared toward the need of that individual student but also a picture of the campus and where there are these deficiencies. And also, where they’re doing really well. I mean, seeing a student who does really well on critical thinking, well, maybe he or she should be invited to be some sort of peer advisor.

If there are programs going on like that on campus and these reports for the first time, inform those decisions and can guide the leadership on campus with career services, leading the way with the data to say, Hey, We need to work on this and we’re doing really well here.

So the implications are tremendous and it’s, as I said earlier, it’s data. It’s not opinion. It’s not “I think so.” It’s data.

Kelly Bailey: Yeah, this seems [00:22:00] like it can be really valuable to not only the students, but the schools as well. And I love the idea that you can really personalize the way that you might support a student with this kind of information, but also as Randy mentioned, getting them ready for what to expect in the workplace.

I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I go back to my first role out of college. And even though I was a working student, which funny enough there are a number of things that you might learn the hard way as a young person. And one of the things that I learned the hard way when I first went into my corporate cubicle job was that just doing your everyday job, doesn’t necessarily get you ahead.

My first in review situation, they actually ended up just leaving me at my same level, because I wasn’t going above and beyond and taking the extra courses that they offered and those things. And it’s interesting.

It’s just something that I didn’t understand or know, and I did have to learn that the [00:23:00] hard way. But imagine if you could pull that back into your formal college experience, and then you’re walking into that environment with really that understanding that, Hey, you know, me. Showing up and being here is not exactly all that you have to do.

Randy: Showing up and being there is very important. But we found that things that you mentioned, taking the initiative is one of the top trends and things that we’ve gathered from the data. And we’ve seen even students and job candidates, they’re not asking questions or they’re asking questions too quickly.

And it’s amazing in the top 10 kind of themes that we’ve seen is, is punctuality and attendance and just showing up and showing up on time, it is in the top 10 of areas that students and job candidates need to improve nationwide.

And it’s amazing. Yeah, you got to show up and you got to show up on time and that’s half the battle and it’s a huge predictor of future [00:24:00] success.

Kelly Bailey: Thanks for pointing that out, Randy. It is a really good point. I sometimes forget that you just reminded me of, a number of conversations that I’ve had with education administrators over the years in two year and four year schools that talk about sort of the basics when it comes to employment. They even talk a lot about just making sure you’re dressed appropriately and things we take for granted now that we know what we know, but it is a really good point.

Randy: And professionalism as a huge predictor of future success in the workplace. And that’s why it’s the heaviest weighted competency that we have the most behaviors connected to because if you go back 40 or 50 years and I’ll research it, that predictor is there. And it’s sometimes forgotten when it comes to students.

And especially when you’re working remotely now, we found that showing up and showing up  on time and just time management is so critical that it’s a skill that we really focused on and competency [00:25:00] that we really focused on in our latest research. Because we studied about 13,000 behaviors and our team of four PhD IO psychologists looked at these behaviors.

And we have a section of the report that now points out the behaviors that are critical for the ability to work remotely successfully. And it’s amazing just to see that. And it doesn’t mean that you’re just working from home, we define it a little bit different. You’re not working under direct supervision all the time, which is a lot of different roles that you’ll most likely serve in and work in over the years.

Kelly Bailey: I’m glad you added that in because it’s so important, it is definitely a different structure to working. So do you guys offer this just to four year schools or are there community colleges that also use it? I can imagine that it could be very useful for any institution.

Randy: Yes, community [00:26:00] colleges use it and four year institutions, graduate programs. We’re moving into a other workforce development and apprenticeships. Also high schools. According to NAC’s research, they found that work experience is the number one top differentiator between two equally qualified candidates.

And it’s just amazing that a lot of these students and job candidates, aren’t getting this feedback and there there’s no feedback loop there on these behavioral behavioral competencies. And it’s critical for them to at least know kind of where they’re falling short.

Kelly Bailey: I absolutely love to hear that you’re expanding into workforce boards as well as K through 12.  Maybe more on the older side of that, but I think it’s just so important. A lot of times we’re not introduced to this as a young person until later. As we mentioned with my story, it just wasn’t something, even though I was a working person,that was giving me that type of [00:27:00] feedback.

And it’s just amazing that we don’t typically talk about this at the younger ages. Of course, we’re talking about it right now from a higher education perspective, but project based learning internships, work experience, like you said, it’s so important. And now you can bring this to those environments and really open people’s eyes to what things they can be working on and learning throughout their time.

Randy: Yeah. And we found that a nice balance. Even having no work experience can negate a GPA of 3.0 or above. And more and more employers are looking at demonstrable skills that if you’ve worked on and you’ve had these rich experiences and how are you going to document that and provide evidence of that because.

There students working in high school all the way through college, and then afterwards, and it’s, it’s really important.  Employers less and less are looking at major, what type of school you [00:28:00] went to, and also GPA. They’re looking towards these work experiences..

Kelly Bailey: I feel like that’s such an amazing note to end on because I wholeheartedly agree. This to me, as we’re chatting through our conversation here today, what’s really struck me is that not only can students and educators really find this valuable, what would you guys suggest as maybe for our parting thoughts?

What type of action students or educators might take? I know our audience will be listening in. And what would be the best way for them to consider this type of information and maybe the going back to those interventions a little bit to help them move along?

Randy: That’s a great question. Go ahead.

Jake Burke: It’s fairly simple for me. We were saying earlier, how the conversation might blend into the personal, it’s starting to walk the walk and not just [00:29:00] talk the talk. My children are 16, 14, and 10, and we sat around the table about three weeks ago and I pulled out the career readiness report.

 And I went through eight of the eight competencies and Grace is 10 and she’s kind of like, yeah, dad, whatever. But my older two boys were interested in understanding what daddy does, but also, what we mean by competencies.

They’re not too young to start developing those things and as their teachers and as they’re mentors and as their future professors at school and in college, and of course their future managers, it’s their responsibility and it’s all of our responsibility to help mentor these young people toward achieving these competencies and doing well in those competencies.

And so I would just say to anybody listening out there, who’s in a position to make a change in a positive way to young people, as part of their education is to stop talking about it. And start doing it. And start leveraging tools like the career readiness [00:30:00] solution to do that.

A thousand mile journey starts with one step. That’s a real good first step in my view.

Randy: Yeah. It’s all about data and there’s a great quote from Peter Drucker, that if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. And that’s where higher education, this big change that is going on with what happened over the last year with COVID. It’s been amazing to see that outcomes data and first destination data of where students are getting jobs is not as good as it used to be.

And how are they going to prove the ROI that they’re really focused on the skills that are going to translate to success in the workplace. And it starts with data because if you don’t know where you’re at and where you’re falling short and you can’t prove it to prospective students and employers or parents of those students, it’s going to be [00:31:00] tough if you have no data to back that up.

Kelly Bailey: Absolutely. Well, thank you guys so much for both joining me today and having this wonderful discussion. I just want to let everyone know where to find out more information, skillsurvey.com/career-readiness is where you need to head to. Skill Survey is also available on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Jake and Randy are both most active on LinkedIn. So please feel free to reach out and continue this wonderful discussion with anyone. 

Kelly: You’ve been listening to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby, a Growth Network Podcasts production. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and share it with your community. Ratings, reviews and suggestions are great sources of feedback and always appreciated. Please reach out and connect with me on social at Kelly Ryan Bailey.

I’d love to meet [00:32:00] you and continue the conversation. we’ll be back next week with a new episode. So until then keep growing your skills and have a great day.