By Tom Scales --
The Advisory Group for
Southside Virginia Community College’s Agribusiness and Business programs meet every year. It is made up of business and industry leaders throughout SVCC’s 11 county service area. Every year people tell us that the need for the “soft skills” is often greater than their need for job skills when hiring people. A dairy farmer can teach people about cattle fairly easily because cattle are their livelihood. But it’s a different ballgame for that farmer to teach people about time management, politeness, neatness, communication, work ethic, motivation, responsibility, etc. Often, they will tell us, “we hire for attitude and then train for skills.”
Thus, they ask us to prepare our graduates for better attitude, willingness, and communication. For some, they see soft skills as more important than the actual job-related ones. (The milking machine they’d use on the job is probably different from the one I’d teach them on, so the farmer would have to teach them the different equipment anyway.)
So, when the dust settles, our agribusiness program is being asked to teach less agriculture and more about how to be a good employee and a conscientious person. In class last fall, we explored how to deal with some of the day-to-day friction that happens as we interact with other people. This was done as part of a Plan-Do-Study-Act project.
Each week,the students and I would explore a different scenario—things like “the boss’ father gave one of your co-workers poor instructions,” “one of your co-workers smells really bad thanks to their all-fruit diet,” or “one of your employees repeatedly comes to work late.” The discussions dig through the different sides of the situation. What should you do? What should the boss do? And so on. The idea is to get people to not only think about these issues so they’re better prepared if they come up but to also consider multiple points of view. There may be a really good reason that the really good worker can’t make it in at 8 a.m. Maybe they have to get their kid on the bus. A conversation and compromise might let you keep a good worker instead of simply firing someone who didn’t follow the rules. It’s also a good idea to consider how our decisions impact others. Coming in late to work puts pressure on others to cover the slack.
We explored these scenarios in person and online—a live class discussion in the seated class and as a comments thread for online students. These discussions let the students offer up suggestions, ideas, and strategies, as well as to hear and build off of ideas from others. This activity let them hear and consider multiple perspectives that they might never have considered. Even though I was the one who proposed and tweaked these scenarios, almost every discussion pulled out things I wasn’t expecting! The discussion format had the added benefit of bringing out some of these other soft-skills as the students had to deal with; people interrupting them, waiting their turn, speaking in front of a group, having the courage to risk sharing their ideas, and so on. In the online discussions, the students also had to work on writing their thoughts clearly and dealing with the frustrations of trying to decipher posts that weren’t written clearly.
The scenario idea started with a series of Agriculture Career Scenario cards by RealityWorks. As the semester went on, I started creating my own scenarios. Going forward, I will be using my own. RealityWorks used the same role, that of a middle-manager on a farm, and I like more flexibility, especially since I have some non-agriculture students.
I ran a trial of these scenario discussions in the Agribusiness Marketing class in the fall semester. The intention was to start class with a 5 minute scenario discussion, and it would serve as an ice-breaker as well. When the dust settled, the shortest in-class discussion we had was 10 minutes. These discussions took up too much time in a course they really weren’t ideally suited for. Also, the marketing class only met once each week and had a fairly rigid timeline to accommodate a semester-long marketing project. I ended the trial run at the midpoint of the semester.
Overall, the enthusiasm was great, and I was surprised by some of the input and the directions of the conversations. I surveyed the students before the semester began to measure their “emotional temperature” when dealing with workplace conflicts and issues, and then I surveyed them again after we finished the discussions. On a scale of 1-10, their skill level rose from a 6.69 average to a 7.17 average, and their comfort level rose from a 6.9 to a 7.25 average. On a scale of 1-10, when asked “describe the change, if any, to your feelings about dealing with difficult work situations after doing these scenarios in class.” The score was 9.0, which showed that the respondents all felt they’re better prepared.
This semester, I am using the scenarios discussion again with the AGR 144 Agriculture Human Resources class, where the scenarios fit better. Also, this class has a more flexible schedule. It will be interesting to see how the students progress in their discussions. To learn more about this project and strategies for incorporating scenario discussions into the curriculum, please email me at tom.scales@southside.edu.
Acknowledgments
Coartney, J. S. (2023). Workplace scenarios graphic (graphic).
Fauxels. (2019). Photo of people having fist bump (photograph). Pexels.com. https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-people-having-fist-bump-3228684/
Fuentes, D. (2017). Person planting on hanged pots (photograph). https://unsplash.com/photos/TyLw3IQALMs
McLearnon, A. (2018). White and black cow on grass field (photograph). Unsplash.com. https://unsplash.com/photos/P_t9mRLFoRs
Schaeffer, Z. (2021). Greenhouse worker. Unsplash.com. https://unsplash.com/photos/siD6uufCyt8
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