By Natalie Mackenzie, director, BIS Services
We’ve seen a worrying lack of soft skills in young graduates in recent years. I’m particularly talking about resilience skills and the ability to respond to difficult situations that come from life experience.
This could be from working in a bar or a coffee shop, dealing with people’s unreasonable expectations or being shouted at because a customer’s favourite crisps aren’t in stock in Tesco.
We’ve seen a big shift in people not having these skills and the confidence that equips them to deal with challenging situations with our clients.
Obviously, brain injury work is often complex and challenging. But sometimes clients aren’t complex at all. They’re just re-learning practical, daily living skills.
Unfortunately, those soft skills around practical problem solving, like when a dishwasher isn’t rinsing properly, are often quite lacking in our psychology graduates.
Re-teaching clients how to implement independent living skills requires that you have a degree of independent living skills yourself, which some candidates don’t.
The post-Covid shift
Post-Covid, there was a noticeable change in graduates who went back home into the bosom of parents, where more things got done for them, and they weren’t able to build those skills in university like we’ve seen before.
We’ve seen a shift happen again now, though, with those living away from home taking up part-time jobs around their studies.
While we have noticed there’s now more ability to manage certain situations, we’ve also noticed that the perception of what’s challenging has become far wider.
We’re now having to look at very individualised experiences when assessing candidates and new staff.
If a person’s most difficult situation has been with an elderly person in Tesco, we have to look at how they responded to that, not how they may respond to what we would deem a much more challenging situation, because that is their threshold.
Adapting our recruitment and training practices
From the very beginning of the recruitment process, we’re looking at what people’s softer experience has been: pub work, waitressing, telesales, whatever it may be.
We’re also taking into account whether this work was online, in person or in a community setting, for example. Then we can adjust our interview processes around that.
We’ve brought in another layer to our interview processes recently, which is more gamification that can’t be bypassed by AI, which a lot of applicants are using now.
Natalie MacKenzie
This assesses things like decision making, people skills, integrity and confidence. This can help us ascertain which clients they’re suitable to work for.
Our training days, while still heavily focused on brain injury and rehab, now include much more practical problem solving.
These soft skills lead to competency to do this type of work.
There’s also an issue with insight with some newcomers.
They don’t always realise that these skills are needed because they might be seen as not relevant to the role, when actually they are integral.
The value of early work experience
I started working in a call centre at 14 where I was regularly shouted at while trying to MOTs after school. Then I worked in a bar and various restaurants.
The skills that I learned in those environments served me in good stead when I first started in this industry at 22.
If a client needed something fixed, I could help them do it which helped build the rapport needed for their rehab.
I appreciate that it’s difficult for young people to get work now. I also wonder if the university workload has increased, or if students lack the motivation to do work not relevant to their future career.
Again, maybe a lack of resilience means that they’re less inclined to take on more work alongside their studies because it’s too much.
Understanding the mental health factor
A lot of young people have grown up in a time where people are considering their mental and physical wellbeing and are not willing to be burned out.
That threshold for overwhelm and anxiety is much lower, too. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but it’s noticeable that the bar is much lower than it was 10 years ago.
But when you work with challenging clients, that threshold will often be met much sooner, which is why we put so much now into our staff wellbeing.
We’ve got lots of initiatives in place. We’ve got external provision, internal provision. We keep a very close eye on people’s hours and their wellbeing, and supervision is increased.
We do everything we can to support them because they might not have the insight to see when a problem is coming.
Looking Ahead
For candidates, I think it’s about managing expectations that things might not be as easy as they appear on paper.
You don’t know just how challenging this type of work can be until you get started. It changes day-by-day and it can be hard to find your feet.
My advice to people who want to come and work for us: don’t underestimate the experience of something that might not seem directly relevant.
We see a lot of people say, “I’ve done this, but I didn’t think it was relevant, so I didn’t put it on my CV.”
Those are the things that we now look at. Put everything on, go and get experience in anything, volunteer.
And going back to what I said about it being hard to find work: be pushy, and pick up the phone!
I see it with our CRAs who want to go on and do other things.
I actually have to set them targets to contact X amount of people per week. They’re so terrified of being told ‘no’. But I’m like, “Well, what if they say yes? You don’t know unless you try.”
And as providers, we need to be very upfront about what this work entails.
And we have to be rigorous on recruitment, so that we don’t put people into roles that they’re not suited to. The onus is on us as employers to make sure we get it right for them.
I am hopeful. And more and more I’m seeing these issues spoken about in all different sectors.
We’ve gone from lamenting about the issue to actually putting things in place to solve it.
Find out more about BIS Services at thebiss.co.uk
