Preparing Students for the Changing Workforce with Soft Skills Training

PRESENTERS

Patricia Buyu

Patricia Buyu is a Design Learning expert and Soft Skills Trainer who uses her creative energy and passion for youth empowerment to prepare them to succeed in the world of work. In her career, Patricia has helped over 300 youths at the tertiary levels gain successful career opportunities and expand their networks through the soft skills mentoring she provides working with a non-profit in Kenya. With a background in teacher education, Patricia firmly believes that for youths to excel in both their academics and careers, they need soft skills mentoring that allows them to be self aware, be proactive and explore their strengths.

Kelvin Ikutwa

Kelvin is a Global Youth Ambassador member, lover of African heritage stories, not to mention a Hatua alumnus. His strong belief that mentorship and a good education are a firm foundation for success is what drives him in his role at Hatua Network Organization.

TRANSCRIPT

Jenny Gordon:

Hello, and thank you so much for joining us for Reaction. I’m Jenny and I’m the VP for International Markets based in the uk. And welcome to today’s session, preparing students for the Changing workforce with soft skills training in the ever evolving job market. Soft skills are more critical than ever, and in this session we’ll explore how to develop essential competencies that empower learners to confidently navigate the workforce. We are really looking forward to gaining insights into practical strategies for fostering these skills, ensuring our students are well prepared to succeed in a rapidly changing professional landscape. So you can also collaborate with each other. You can introduce yourself through the chat functionality. Please feel free to share your thoughts and your feedback and any resources you might like to make sure that you change the message settings to everyone to share with all of the participants in this session.

So without further ado, I’m pleased and honored to introduce Patricia Bou and Kelvin Iua from the Haua Network. Patricia is the design learning and assessment expert, and Kelvin is a mentoring coordinator. Their mission at Tartu is to end generational poverty by preparing promising youth from low-income families to thrive in Kenya’s modern economy. Having just been in Nairobi for two weeks earlier this year, there are so many wonderful things happening and so much work to do as there are in many evolving economies and in many countries around the world. But I’m really looking forward to hearing what Kelvin and Patricia have got to share with us today. And so without further ado, let me turn the time over to them. Thank you.

Patricia Buyu:

Hi everyone. I’m very excited to be here today to get to present on a topic that I’m so passionate about and that is on preparing students for the changing workforce with soft skills training. Just a bit of introduction of myself. My name is Patricia Buu and I come from Mombasa, Kenya, and I work as a tertiary mentoring programs officer with a local nonprofit organization here in Mombasa, Kenya called haua Network. Basically what I do is I engage our tertiary scholars through our soft skills mentoring curriculum that help them to prepare for the change in workforce or rather to pray for the changing workforce. And I am joined by my colleague Kevin, who is going to also introduce himself and also introduce the organization. Kevin.

 Kelvin Ikutwa:

Thanks, Patricia. Hi everyone. My name is Kevin, mentoring coordinator here, the tour. Basically, I lead the mentoring programs for both our secondary and special scholars. Bit about network. Network is a nonprofit that is based in Mombasa, Kenya. It was founded in the year 2006 by founders and Peter Gome. Our mission is actually to end generational poverty. We do that by preparing youths to thrive in Kenya’s modern economy. We particularly select youths who come from low income families. These are families that survive on less than a dollar a day per person. We have three strategic objectives in a tour. One of them is to provide quality education from high school to university through the scholarships that we do provide. Second strategic objective is to provide mentoring on key soft skills, which are essential to thrive in Kenya’s modern economy. And lastly, we provide connections to professional networks for our students so that they may be able to transit from schoolwork to workforce with ease. So that is basically the brief about WAN network. Thank you, Patricia. Looking forward to this conversation.

Patricia Buyu:

Thank you, Kevin. So let’s quickly get into our session agenda. But before that, I’d like us to just look at the topic that is PRI in the modern workforce through building essential soft skills. And I would like us to just get into the session agenda. And we are going to be looking at the changing workforce, particularly in Kenya. And just like the rest of the world, Kenya has also experienced major changes to the current modern workforce. And we are also going to look at the critical role that soft skills play in this changing workforce. And finally, we are going to look at the practical strategies that HAT has implemented to make sure that its scholars are ready and fully competent for the modern workforce. So very quickly when I think about the changing workforce, I think about it in these three categories. And these are basically the job hunt category.

We have the interview category and we also have the workplace category. And I feel like these three categories basically fully encompass the changing workforce experience. And for particularly our scholars, our tertiary scholars, they basically go through these three experiences so that they’re able to fully have that full experience of the modern workforce, and of course they get to gain opportunities within their careers. So let’s look at the job hunt category and as a tertiary mentoring programs officer, this particular level is such a critical period for tertiary students. And as we have mentioned, preparing our youths for the changing workforce also needs us to be well updated with the current trends or strategies, the current effective strategies that are implemented when it comes to looking for opportunities. And one of the strategies under the job hunt category is basically the professional branding. And as we all understand is that your brand basically speaks about who you are and what you can contribute to the world of work.

And we need our youth, our tertiary scholars to be able to understand this. So for them to be able to communicate their brand, to be able to communicate their abilities, to be able to communicate what they have done, basically strategically positions them for the opportunities that are great for opportunities that help them grow in their careers. We also have activities like connecting with potential employers or recruiters. That is through platforms like LinkedIn. You also understand that recruiters basically go to LinkedIn to be able to screen candidates for job opportunities. We also have activities like networking, customizing applications through ai. Of course, we want to make sure our scholars are well equipped with competent or cutting edge skills such as using AI to be able to customize their cvs, their application letters for the dream jobs or opportunities that they want or they have been able to identify.

We also have our second category that is the interview stage. And particularly we have a lot of changes in this category and things like the virtual interviews. We also have practical interviews. We have competency assessment and aptitude tests that basically look at specific soft skills such as problem solving, abilities, leadership, teamwork, communication, and adaptability. We also have at the workplace stage a lot of changes such as hybrid work and remote work that’s called for a lot of responsibility. They call for a high level of emotional intelligence. Communication is very critical to be able to communicate work progress, problem solving abilities. Whenever you have been able to encounter a problem as a remote worker or even a hybrid worker, you’re able to approach the challenge in a way that is effective. Also, particularly for hybrid work, employers are realizing that for employees, they’re still able to work either remotely or physically at their workspaces and still be able to deliver high quality results.

And we are proud to say that our tertiary students, some of them or even our recent alumni are able to experience this and they’re able to understand some of the changes that are happening in their industries. We also have work diversity, soft skills, demand, and the wellness wellness skills. So for professional branding for this particular area last year as an organization, we were able to hold an annual tertiary bootcamp that we usually hold it every year. And the last year in August, our main theme basically looked at being proactive about my career while still in tertiary. So our scholars were able to look at their LinkedIn profiles, they were able to learn about how to optimize their LinkedIn. They were also able to identify different resources that they have from school to the networks. They have the close friends, they have family members, and they were also able to practice networking skills.

And all this basically ties down to the professional brand basically understanding, being able to strategically place themselves in opportunities in areas or expose themselves to activities that will help them grow in their careers and will also help them to basically gain opportunities that they have been dreaming of. And I’m happy to say that as a result, we’re able to have our more than 200 college students now at 300 being able to revamp their LinkedIn profiles and also increase connection while connecting with their dream career companies. So I cannot talk about current changes in the workforce without talking about the current pattern trends. We have things like the current job trends where we have AI and digital skills. We have hybrid and remote work, we have healthcare and we have the gig economy. And also for the soft skills side, we have a high rise of soft skills demand, especially with the changes in the workforce in the modern workforce skills like flexibility, adaptability, communication, collaboration, and teamwork.

So I’d like us to also look at what critical role that soft skills play in these changes in the modern workforce. And before that, I’d like us to just quickly try to understand or even define what soft skills are. And whenever I think about soft skills, I think about these three types of growth. I think about career growth, I think about personal growth, and I also think about overall wellbeing. And we all understand that soft skills play a major role when it comes to personal growth, career growth, and of course just the mental wellbeing skills, like being able to be organized skills that being able to collaborate with different stakeholders or even fellow employees or even different departments so that you’re able to contribute positively to the organization, basically help an individual to really grow in their profession. They also experience personal growth and of course their mental state, of course, at some level is able to be well taken care of because they’re able to deliver at work.

But on top of that, we also understand we do need professional counseling when it comes to mental health matters. So looking at the critical role that soft skills play, what better way than to look at it in a story or in a scenario? So here we have Layla and she’s a 21-year-old business student who starts her in at a fast paced marketing agency, excited, but unprepared for the speed and collaboration, she quickly falls behind. So Layla is assigned to create a social media content and spends hours crafting a polished can back presentation only to discover the team by devote to a TikTok and Instagram real strategy, brainstorming ideas on Miro. When asked to switch gears, Layla hesitates clinging to her original slides. In brainstorming sessions on Slack hurdles, she stays quiet, doubting her ideas. Later a teammate shares a similar concept and gets praised. Layla realizes she missed her moment.

Next, she drafts marketing emails in a traditional and aware her team uses MailChimp with dynamic, visually engaging templates. Her supervisor dismisses the drafts as outdated for a group project. Leila partners with Aisha to create a social media content calendar on notion, assuming she’d work faster alone, Layla builds a version without syncing up their ideas conflict. And Aisha confronts her by week three. Layla is overwhelmed, trailing and behind. What do you think Layla should do? So I’d like us to quickly look at some of the things or some of the skills that Layla is missing to implement in her internship. And for just a brief context, Layla is basically, Layla’s situation mirrors some of our situations, either our current situations or our past career situations. And for Layla, coming from our public university, say she comes from a public university here in Kenya where the teaching style, the training style is more traditional and does not really adapt or even evolve with the changing times.

So Layla is used to this traditional way of doing things and she finds herself doing an internship in a fast paced marketing agency that is really quick to understand what are the new trends, what sort of tools or strategies we can apply in terms of enhancing our marketing operations. So for Layla, she basically struggles with flexibility. She struggles with adaptability, communication, creativity in innovativeness, collaboration and resilience. These are some of the key soft skills that are barring Layla from, she’s stagnated where she is not because she’s not able to learn about the new trends, the new tools, no, because she’s unable to adapt to whatever new trends that are there. She’s unable to change her mindset. She’s on a fixed mindset and she finds a lot of challenge or difficulties to be flexible enough. She’s also not able to communicate even with the ideas that she has.

She decides to keep quiet because she’s demotivated. But later on a colleague of hers is able to share the same ideas and get praised. So what do you think Layla should do? Definitely Layla should create a recovery plan. She should also reset and reconnect, adapt and create, collaborate and innovate and also reflect and refine. So Layla, I’ll pick one example. Basically being able to adapt and create is very key, especially when working in a modern setup in a company that is very fast paced, being able to adapt to the new trends, basically having that open mindset or being excited to learn about what is happening, what are the people doing? What sort of skills do I need to learn? Where are the ways the knowledge, what sort of platforms should I go to so that I’m able to learn how to use these tools? So here’s some very important data that also mirrors Leila situation.

And this data was gotten from employers across different countries in Africa. And this data was a survey actually done by the African Leadership University. A 2025 survey report dubbed Africa Workforce Readiness. And these were 8,000 employers across different enterprises, corporate institutions, and basically this is what they shared in terms of the key skills that they feel are lacking among you in the workforce. So 22% of the 8,000 employers say problem solving. And you can see with Layla’s situation, Layla is unable to even acknowledge her problem or her challenge and be able to brainstorm possible solutions to it. 21% say leadership mindset is lacking with leadership. Mindset also comes with the motivation to take up initiative and to take up responsibility and accountability. And 20% say self-direction is lacking. So lack of self-awareness, understanding basically Layla, understanding that she has weaknesses in areas such as flexibility and adaptability and being able to basically reset or reflect on that and be able to understand that she needs to have a clear plan and that will help her to understand where her weaknesses are and also be able to connect with her strengths and be able to have a clear self-direction.

Additionally, employers also say that they seek communication skills that is 7% of them and 29% say they seek innovation and creativity. And finally, 27% say they seek analytical thinking.

So here is Layla’s story two, version two, and I’d like us to look at Layla in a different light. So Layla, again, a 21-year-old business student start her internship at a fast paced marketing agency after falling behind, stuck on a Canva presentation where the team by votes to TikTok, she realizes she needs to adapt. She learns cap cut and TikTok trends, pitching new ideas in mirror that earn her supervisor’s approval in Slack hurdles, she pushes past self-doubt suggesting a behind the scenes series that sparks a full campaign. Layla revamps her email drops using MailChimp templates, finally capturing the brand’s voice for a project with Aisha. She collaborates on motion, blending the ideas seamlessly. By week three, Layla leads a content brainstorm with confidence. Her supervisor smiles, she walks out energized, no longer struggling but thriving. So we have some bit of data also here again by African Leadership University, the Africa Workforce Readiness survey report.

And these again are from the 8,000 employers who basically are sharing feedback on what they believe higher education institutions should teach. So 63% say higher education institutions need to teach or have their tertiary scholars develop leadership skills. As you can see with Layla being able to have that accountability, that sense of accountability and responsibility and being able to take up the initiative to learn new trends shows her leadership capabilities. And 47% of them say they need to develop technical skills. And of course 45% of them say they need to partner with employers. And additionally, higher education institution also need to prioritize soft skills including communication and teamwork. Very critical. You could see Layla in version two of her story being able to understand what our supervisor needs in terms of email communication and being able to draft the emails that align with her supervisor’s interests and needs. And also being able to collaborate with Aisha or notion and basically seamlessly merging the ideas. So you can see that soft skills apart from just technical skills, they are very much there. They serve basically to supplement whatever technical skills that Natasha Scholar might have and also helps one to have that open mindset, that open and positive attitudes to learn and also to just develop and grow in their careers. So at this point I would like to let my colleague, Kevin, continue with his presentation. Kevin,

 Kelvin Ikutwa:

Thank you Patricia for that presentation. I would like

Us to look at key practical strategies for building and strengthening workforce readiness skills. And even before we dive into that, the outcome of a well developed workforce readiness program skills program look like. What are the potential benefits?

So with me, it is

A data that was collected or research that were conducted by different organizations. The first draft is data. That was a research that was conducted by African Development Bank where they did a research and found out that the average length of employment search in Africa for most countries is actually 14 months. Ideally, that’s the time when a graduate takes from the time that they finish their college or university education until the time when they are able to join the workforce. Ideally 14 months in Kenya, we have government body, Kenya Bureau of Statistics, which who conducted also research and found out that it I dedicated nine months for a budget to transit into workforce In us. Five months is the estimated of average length of employment such according to United States Bureau of Statistics. Now our key interest is HAT Tour Network. What we have continuously reported over the years is our graduates check nearly two or less than a month to transit from school into workforce. Now that is an interesting number because even at times you find ourselves that half of our students, even before graduation, they probably have already been engaged into workforce. This is probably most of the time after the attachments and the internship that we get to do employers express interest to continue and onboard ’em in many entry level positions.

Before we look at the strategies, let’s explore on why workforce readiness matters. Number one, we need to be aware and come to the realization that the job market constantly evolves and Patricia has done justice to that. The pathway of the presentation when the transition that we have seen over the years when it comes to workforce and of importance, especially in Africa and in Kenya, we’ve actually realized that education has not evolved or adapt to the changes that are happening in the job market. And so it keeps on laing behind this means producing graduates who are not well equipped to be able to thrive in the current job market. So then it creates a need for workforce readiness training for all these graduates. Another thing that we’ve actually noticed is currently employers have prioritized soft skills alongside the technical skills that students get from academics or theory that they’re actually doing in school.

So there’s that need for a student not only to be conversant in the hard skills or expertise that actually taught in school, but also to be conversant with the soft skills that will help them apply in the workforce. We’ve also noticed that with this training, it has a potential to fast the employment transitions leading to economic growth. And this is of interest, especially in our context of the tour because the kind of students that we actually have reached to our programs, these are students who come from low income families. So then being able to transit into workforce quickly, it enables them to support their sibling, the education, sometimes even they support their parents, let’s say to pay rent and such kind of things. So it’s really important for students to be able to get transit fast enough into employment and also just to meet their needs and also to be able to grow in employment as quickly as they can. Now, our two network strategies have shortened the jobs that time significantly as you’ve seen, less than two months or sometimes even a month. And there are different strategies that we’ve actually employed in order for us to achieve that. And let’s just quickly go over the strategies that we actually employ in.

Number one is e-learning. We have developed an in-house practice curriculum, which it’s tailored to train students on these competency competencies that employers have also expressed as them as being important for any student who has started their workforce journey. This includes collaboration, communication, emotional intelligence, responsibility and problem solving. And underneath all these competencies, there are key sub competencies that we’ve also incorporated into our soft skills curriculum. So students are able to learn on a video based platforms such as Moodle. They’re able to be assessed by, after looking at the videos and doing the assignments that they’ve been assigned to do all those assessments that are done through the framework, the competency framework or what we call a rubric. We are able to assess the proficiency level every year in their university. They normally move from year one to year four. We are able to track how they’re progressing in terms of proficiency levels in these key competency areas.

So the structure of our e-learning mostly focuses on communication and leadership. Also some bits on problem solving, which are also very important for a student who is joining workforce digital courses that are available and accessible at any time For these students when they in their school, they’re able to access these courses in their laptops or their phones to be able to learn these soft skills. And we have integrated real world scenarios like the ones that Patricia was taking us through in the curriculum, either through videos or different scenarios that actually outlined in our platform in the module platform. And one of the results we’ve actually seen is increased efficiency and employability in our students. Employers have been able to express interest in the skills that we’re developing in our students and how they’ve grown over time is one of the reports that we actually get from employers.

Certainly. Number two is ary internships. In Kenya, every student is required to do at least one internship at a time when they complete their university education. But in a tour we emphasize that it’s important for all our students to at least have two internships or sometimes what we call attachments. So this enables them to gain practical work experience even before their graduation. And also on top of that, they’re able to gain industry exposure and skill development since they report to someone and they’re able to experience work even before they graduate from their institution. Internships have proven to be a crucial resource or tool tool to bridge the gap between what students learn in school and the professional work. So it’s really important because as we’d say that the job market keeps on evolving and new things keep on coming up. And these internships provide that platform for students to be able to bridge that gap. Because education keeps on, it slows down, it doesn’t adapt quickly to the changes in workforce. And these internships have led to potential job from many host companies that we place our students to do their attachments for internships. So the referrals that we get the students get normally impressive and they’re able to secure these jobs even before they graduate from their tertiary courses.

Strategy number three is mentor mentee peers. This is a mentorship program that we run for our tertiary students. This is just a platform where there is one-on-one guidance from professional. So we pair how we do this. We look for a professional who is in the same field as what our student is pursuing in school. So let’s say we have a student that pursues law, we pair that student with a lawyer who is currently practicing. So they get to work that journey. They’re able to provide career advice, industry specific insights, networking opportunities because professionals get to attend different networking events. They’re able to tag their mentee along and also BOL setting support for every year to be able to help a student navigate their career journey from the time that they start their goals until the time when they actually graduate. And alongside that, a student is able to gain also personal development through the reins from the mentor that we always encourage our mentors to do.

There’s stronger industry connections for mentees that they actually obtain from these mentorship programs because a mentor is able to introduce them to their colleagues. And this is actually how our mentorship program looks like. And at the beginning, after we’ve done the pairing, we normally encourage and advise the mentor and the mentoree to do their introductory meeting. They could do this through let’s say a Zoom meeting or just an introductory emails, any form of any channel of communication that they prefer to do the introduction, they can actually do that. After that, the MENT normally invites the mentee to their place of work and introduces them to the different professionals. These are colleagues or even sometimes friends, so that a student may expand on their networks. Thirdly, we encourage mentors to provide or give the mentees assignments. They could ask the mentee to revise the CV or research places where they can actually do attachment or internships or sometimes when they review a book, this is just a coaching relationship.

So they a mentor providing these assignments to students is able to keep a student on track as far as their career journey is actually concerned. And lastly, what we also see from our mentors is what we call job shadowing. They invite also the mentee to their places of work and they give the mentee some doable work related tasks such as that entry and any other that the mentee is able to do. So that also exposes the student to the changes that are happening in the industry. And at the time that they graduate, they’re well conversant with the changes that have happened and the new ways of working that they were able to see from job shadowing.

This is how professional introductions happen, and this is the reason why we actually emphasize on professional introductions is because in our two, as I said earlier, we select students who come from low income families. And probably when you look at their background, look at the people, the connection that they currently have. This is their parents, their siblings, their friends. Normally they all come from places where the kind of jobs that they do is just informal, informal setups or small businesses. And they’re not really coming from a place where they’re involved in workforce from a professional point of view. So when we provide students with mentors and them being able to be introduced to different people in that kind of field, it exposes these students to the kind of field that they want to pursue. It shows them where they’re actually heading, how it looks like, and exposes them to that field. And they have someone or people that they can actually look up to as far as their career journey is concerned. That is a picture of one of our alumni, one of our alum, Degi being introduced to a founder because DE is one of our alums that is an entrepreneur.

The fourth strategy that we employ here at is budget networking. At the time when they graduate from the institutions of high learning, we normally have a networking event that invites human resource managers and different people, different professionals to meet our students that have graduated that particular year. Now, this is a chance for our students or our alums to meet potential employers and the conversations that normally happen at that particular time. The human, the HR, is able to see the kind of students that we actually produce as Adams students that are not only conversant in technical expertise, but also in soft skills that are very important. This is communication, collaboration, problem solving. And most of the success stories that we’ve actually had is students getting jobs from these networking events that we actually provide them with. And alumni are able to gain the industry expert engagements from such networking events. And that’s the reason why we always expand our employer partnership pool. That is we are always on the lookout to look for these companies and organizations that they keep on hiring me in year out so that they come as part of employer partners, stakeholders in a tour, and they constantly absorb our students after their graduation.

At Tour’s. Impact is 90% plus students graduating and being able to secure jobs within a month. We’ve seen strong employability skills among our graduates, especially with the transition rates that we are actually reporting these coming. We are able to achieve that mainly because of the partnerships that we have with key industry players. These are the different employers within Mombasa and Kenya at large, and the collaboration that we get to do with these stakeholders have provided that successful blueprint for a tour to be able to hack that transition and to reduce it to those significant level of less than a month or two. What we are calling companies and institutions of higher learning is to continue collaborate with employers and policy makers in order to ensure that the kind of graduates that we produce are able to transition into workforce quickly enough. So we are asking every company to join us in shaping the future of workforce Asana. That’s everyone for thank you.

Jenny Gordon:

Thank you so very much Patricia and Calvin for sharing your work with us. We are so grateful for everything that you’ve contributed to the Reaction Conference this year. Please join us in 15 minutes for the closing keynote with Cole Hooker. The next break is the last chance to visit the expo, so be sure to check it out for a chance to win a pair of AirPods. We also encourage you to take a short survey about reaction. We love feedback. Let us know what you liked, what you didn’t, what was great, and what can be improved. The link is in the chat and we’ll also send an email after the closing keynote. Thank you so much for participating. We’ve loved spending the last two days with you.