Background:

Employers from high-growth sectors in Sacramento, throughout California, and across the nation have identified inter-related skills which workers must master if businesses are to increase their competitiveness and fully realize the potential of their employees. A lack of these often misnamed “soft skills,” better defined as “next generation” or “Next Skills”, often prevent employees from remaining employed, being promoted, or pursuing career paths. A review of eleven workforce studies identified eight categories of skills that were most frequently reported by 64%-82% of employers surveyed as “most important.”  These eight categories have now been developed into the following eight, 8-hour (not-for-credit) training modules:

Next Skills Training Modules: (Click here for course descriptions.)

1. Creativity and Innovation for Everyone
2. Valuing Diversity at Work
3. Navigating Technology @ Work (Aka “CANDO” = Computers, Applications, Networking, Devices-on-the-go, and Operating safely)
4. Effective Listening
5. Verbal Communication for Working Professionals
6. Employability Skills
7. Service Orientation
8. Interpersonal Skills for Building Teamwork

The Next Skills curriculum is unique:

• The curriculum is customized for the diversity of Greater Sacramento & California.  In not only the Diversity course, but also the Listening and Interpersonal Skills courses, participants see the link between people’s differences and the value those differences offer.
• It combines, upgrades, and re-introduces soft skills usually offered individually in similar programs, like critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, and collaboration.
• It adds two, key, higher-level skill areas: creativity and technology and introduces future skills workers will need, like emotional intelligence.
• The dynamic training materials are enriched by abundant hands-on activities, case studies, engaging videos, discussions, surveys and checklists.

Target Audience:
People who…

• need certain skills to retain their jobs
• want advancement opportunities, or
• who want to have jobs

Course content is…

• contextual
• workplace-relevant, and
• immediately applicable

Benefits and Value for Employers:

• Increased job productivity and employee retention
• Less conflict and tension on the job
• Reduced expenses for recruiting and training
• Having a pool of actual or potential employees who are certified in the Next Skills Proficiencies

Certification:
By the end of training, only those participants who demonstrate to the instructor that they have mastered the content and skills taught in all eight Next Skills modules will receive the Certificate of Next Skills Proficiency.  (Mastery is determined by a combination of objective pre-/post-tests AND instructor evaluation of behavioral class activities.) Employers are asked to support and value this certification by providing a competitive advantage to certificate holders in terms of hiring, promotion, salary increases, or other recognition.

Scheduling:
Modules can be taken in any order, and sessions can be scheduled any day and at a time that is most convenient to the client.  Each session can be offered as one eight-hour day (recommended) or divided into smaller time blocks and offered over the course of days or weeks.

Pricing:
On-site training is provided at an hourly instructional rate plus the cost of materials. ETP-funded training may be available for qualifying employers.

For More Information:
Contact Next Skills Institute / Workplace Learning Director Valerie Carrigan
(916) 563-3253 carrigv@losrios.edu

(Click here for NSI FAQs.)