It's hard enough to teach kids what they need to know about reading, writing and arithmetic these days.
Soon, Georgia high schools will have to teach them how to wake up on time and hitch up their pants.
A new state law authorizes the Georgia governor's office to establish certification in so-called "soft skills." HB 186 will have high school students graduating with a certificate that says they can show up for work on time, get along with colleagues and look up information.
This may sound basic, but the law is responding to employer complaints about misconceptions of workplace culture. With the jobs outlook grim, graduates need to learn quickly, said Melvin Everson, executive director of the Georgia Office of Workforce Development, the agency charged with implementing the new law.
Everson said he hopes to have mandatory soft skills testing implemented at high schools across Georgia by the start of the next school year. He said the state may issue a request for bids from the private sector next month to create the testing system.
On Aug. 8, he held the first of 31 town hall meetings across the state. Business people, educators, nonprofit groups and government officials have attended, and they've complained about a lack of punctuality, unprofessional attire, bad attitudes and poor communication skills.
Everson said the Internet is partially to blame. Youths who grew up interacting with text messages and online discussions have a warped sense of what's appropriate in the workplace. Several businesses complained at a recent town hall meeting about job applications that were submitted in "cyberlanguage," with bad grammar and spelling and inscrutable acronyms, Everson said.
The leading teachers group in Georgia agrees with the goals of the new law, especially the part that focuses on intellectual skills, such as applied mathematics, reading for information and locating information. Tim Callahan, the spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, said young workers today hold titles, such as digital engineer, that didn't exist when they were in kindergarten.
"We're preparing kids for job descriptions that don't exist yet," Callahan said, "so they're going to need to learn how to learn on the job." He was less enthusiastic about some of the other soft skill measures: "How do you certify someone pulling up their pants?" But he said educators welcomed the push to prepare students for the real world.
The law's primary author, Randy Nix, R-LaGrange, traces the soft skills requirement to a roundtable meeting at automaker Kia's training facility in West Point. Business leaders complained that they often had to fire new employees because they failed to respect the clock, he said.
"They couldn't show up on time, even when they were working and they went on break," Nix recalled hearing.
Randy Jackson, a vice president of human resources at Kia, was the first speaker at that event. He said he wasn't among those who complained about punctuality. Indeed, he praised the quality of Georgia's high school graduates. Most of Kia's employees at the auto plant are from Georgia, and they know how to work diligently, he said.
"We have one of the best attendance records in the industry," Jackson said.
Still, many businesses do lament job seeker attitudes, said Rebecca Long, a spokeswoman for Chattahoochee Technical College. She attended recent soft skills town hall meetings at the college's campuses in Marietta and Jasper and said she heard plenty of discouraging complaints: A fast food restaurant representative said people asked for job applications at the drive-through window, a judge said parolees turned up for job interviews -- and for court hearings -- wearing baseball caps and one employer said job candidates sent post-interview thank you notes via text message.
"There was a lot of discussion of, well, where are they learning that it's OK to do these things," Long said. Yet she wondered how the state will certify that students have learned soft skills.
"The question in my mind," she said, "is do people really not know these things, or do they know them and just ignore them?"
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The Governor's Office of Workforce Development has held a third of the 31 soft skills town hall meetings planned across Georgia, including one in Cobb County and another in DeKalb County. Upcoming meetings in metro Atlanta include Sept. 15 at West Georgia Technical College, Oct. 20 at Gwinnett Technical College and Oct. 27 at Atlanta Technical College. Meetings start at 6:30 p.m.
