SYRACUSE — A Loretto staff member believes soft skills — especially emotional intelligence and managing relationships — are among the most important skills that a professional can possess. 

But what if a job candidate never developed these soft skills? Loretto says it’s a trend that’s linked to Gen Z workers, or those born between 1997 and 2012. 

Loretto cited a December 2022 article “9 Future Work Trends for 2023” on the website of Gartner, which indicated 46 percent of Gen Z employees that it surveyed said the pandemic made pursuing their educational or career goals “more difficult,” and 51 percent said that their education has “not prepared them to enter the workforce.” 

Gartner is an information-services firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Johaun Jackson, Loretto’s director of nursing education and development for skilled nursing, developed a paid training program that teaches emotional intelligence and managerial skills in addition to the necessary medical curricula as well. 

Jackson spoke with CNYBJ in a March 27 phone interview.

The nonprofit Loretto is a health-care organization providing services for older adults throughout Central New York. It serves close to 10,000 individuals each year through 19 locations in Onondaga and Cayuga counties.

Younger generation

Loretto’s training programs typically include participants who Jackson describes as African-American females, single mothers between the ages of 25 and 35.

“That would represent a majority of the population that we’ve been serving in our training programs. But that Gen-Z population [also] comprises a lot [as well] … be they male, female or from other countries or different denominations,” says Jackson. 

Those who were born or raised within that generation “communicate much differently” than people from earlier generations, he added.

“…where a handshake had value; where a discussion had value; and they find themselves, unfortunately, in a place of emotional destitution,” says Jackson.

He went on to say the unfortunate part of that is almost 90 percent of our communication has an “emotional component.” When Gen-Z employees enter an organization with co-workers who are older and supervisors who are also older and have that emotional component as a part of their decision-making process, they view the Gen-Z employee as “detached or uninterested.”

“In my estimation, what needs to happen … we put into place mechanisms that allow for an older generation to be able to receive, understand, and accept the younger generation, so that way we can bridge that communication gap,” says Jackson.

Developing the training program

Jackson says he developed the training program after he started working for Loretto in 2019.

He was tasked with creating a bridge program that coincides with the LPN (licensed practical nurse) program at OCM BOCES. Loretto wanted to build a nursing apprenticeship program.

The only way that federal recognition through the U.S. Department of Labor could happen is if the program worked in conjunction with state curriculum-approved nursing programs. Jackson says he had some choices to make. 

“Do I create a program that duplicates the services that a student will receive in a nursing program, or can I … design a program that gives something to the student/employee that they will not receive from a nursing program,” he explained.

Educators focus on three particular domains of education that they can teach in: cognitive domain; the psychomotor domain; and the affective domain, or as Jackson put it, “what you know, what you can do, and how you feel.”

Instructors in nursing programs teach cognitive and psychomotor domains “ad nauseum,” says Jackson. 

“We test you to death and we throw you out there into the fire in front of the patient … so you can show us that you have skills,” he adds.

But the affective domain, because it is so difficult to measure, is typically abandoned in all nursing curricula. “We do not measure how a student feels, or how they respond in terms of their feeling,” he notes,

With that in mind, Jackson says he decided to write a curriculum that focused on teaching in the affective domain, and over the last four years, Loretto had almost 97 percent compliance and success in its LPN graduates.

Loretto’s nursing-apprenticeship program spans over the course of the time that those involved are in the OCM BOCES program. “We teach it slowly over the course of 11 months,” says Jackson.

When asked about the results of the training program, he tells CNYBJ, “We have graduated successfully 34 students, 22 of them still remain, so we have 66 percent of our class still operating in the licensed roles … that’s over four years.” 

Emotional intelligence

He went on to say that Loretto is injecting emotional intelligence into many of its discussions with new employees and its other training programs, such as the nurse’s aide training program and its EDGE program, which involves training leaders coming into the organization.

“One of the things I hear more often than not is the term soft skill,” he says. “It makes for a microcosm of insanity because the skills are not necessarily soft. The skills are integrated into everything that a person does.”

Jackson went on to say that if you’re describing a person’s efficacy in an organization and put it on a scale of 100 percent … 10 percent would come from the person’s education; 20 percent would come from previous experiences.

“But 70 percent of an individual’s efficacy on a job or in an organization stems from the way that they make connections with other people. How they engage effectively, and we typically engage one another emotionally, so emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It is an essential skill and it commonly overlooked and overshadowed by what individuals can do cognitively.” 

Jackson describes what he does as “empowering talent for battle,” saying he sees working on the frontlines in health care as literally going to battle because nurses are dealing with a lot. That includes managing care for their patients; needing to have difficult conversations with patients’ families; and making sure they’re able to deal with all the pressure of the job, so they can continue handling the workload.

“On one side of the line, you have the health-care [workers] and they are fighting off, warding off sickness and death,” Jackson says. “On the opposite side of that line, that is exactly what you have … the presence of sickness and death and if those individuals are not frequently replenished … we just end recycling individuals and creating a conveyor belt, per se, of new employees. They need to be replenished in their ability to remain resilient and stay.”