Nurturing Future-Ready Graduates through Holistic Education

Tom Andriola, Technology and Innovation Executive at UC Irvine

In an interview with Education Technology Insights, Tom Andriola, Technology and Innovation Executive at UC Irvine illustrates the importance of social and emotional learning (SEL) in education, bridging the gap between diploma and career readiness. Andriola advocates for preparing students holistically by combining classroom learning with real-world practice, incorporating both hard skills and soft skills necessary for their careers and overall life success.

1. In light of widespread digitalization in the education industry, new government policies are formed for academic skill development that promotes the adoption of SEL programs into every learning institution’s core curriculum. As the vice chancellor for data and information technology, at UC Irvine, what, according to you, are the major factors that are driving the need for such types of holistic learning?

What’s driving many of these factors is the gap between having a diploma and being career or workforce ready. It's not enough just to have a diploma, you have to come to the workplace ready to use the knowledge learned in your curriculum combined with an understanding of how to use the skills and technologies that are prevalent in today's work environment. You also have to develop social and emotional (soft) skills that help you to think critically about the problems that you're working on and work effectively within team structures, even when your coworkers come from different backgrounds or different areas of expertise. So preparing students holistically is about learning in the classroom, putting it into real-world practice, and blending in hard skills and soft skills that they will need not just for their career, but for their life.

2. Bringing it closer to UCI, what factors specific to UCI do you see that are driving this need?

Its what employers are telling us about where they see the gaps in today’s graduates, in terms of career readiness. We see that it's not that they don't know their engineering content well enough. It's that those soft skills are just as important, and employers judge those skills all the same in hiring.  If you think about it, for the new graduate seeking that first employment opportunity they haven't had the opportunity to demonstrate subject matter expertise or judgment yet, so articulation and demonstration of soft skills may even be more important.

“It's not enough just to have a diploma, you have to come to the workplace ready to use the knowledge learned in your curriculum combined with an understanding of how to use the skills and technologies that are prevalent in today's work environment.”

To support this need, my office has developed programs to help UCI students working towards jobs in technology bridge the gap between classroom learning, real-world application, and social & emotional learning.

Our first-generation students may not have had these skills and insights passed down in the same way as students whose parents did go to college. Given how important we know social & emotional skills to be, both career and life, we need to incorporate learning opportunities and content into what they get exposed to here at UCI. Creating this type of additional support is top of mind for us because we have a very large first-gen population within your student body.

3. As SEL helps develop essential soft skills to effectively tackle emotions and develop strong relationships with peers in the school as well as in society, what is your opinion on the long-term impact of SEL on individuals of all ages?

As I've progressed through my life, not just in my career, my soft skills are the things that helped me be effective in working with others. This transcends the workplace. It's also living in a community, dealing with your neighbors, and even figuring out how to navigate conflict in your own family. Your ability to handle conflict, figure out how to build upon someone else’s ideas, make people feel included in the conversation, and the ability to take an idea and influence it in the direction that you know is better for the overall situation - these are all skills learned through social & emotional learning.

Soft skills come into play all the time, especially as you move into roles of leadership where you stop doing so much and become a convener of people around the topic and shape people's ideas into an idea that the group can agree to move forward on. So for me soft skill development is the one that we underappreciate in the traditional learning setting that’s focusing more on content for hard skills or technical skills. In my experience, it’s the soft skills that I've seen trip people up the most when it comes to advancing themselves in a workplace setting and trying to advance their careers.

4. Would you say social and emotional learning will be key in solving the problems of tomorrow? Whether it's sustainability or any of the other big things that UCI is concerned about?

Absolutely, and one may even say that it's going to be even more important, because more and more, the breakthroughs that we need for really complex problems require people from different backgrounds (different ethnic backgrounds or community backgrounds) and fields of expertise. The ability to be empathetic and a good listener becomes important when the differences between people are larger. What I find today is whether it's in a research setting or whether it's out in the community trying to solve complex issues, like challenges with mental health or housing insecurity, you have different types of people, different backgrounds coming into the conversation, and this is where social and emotional intelligence is really important if you want to lead effectively in those situations.

5. Can you shed light on the experiences that empowered you to gain deep expertise in creating the Collaboratories at UCI, and using technology and data to advance in success through your podcast, Digital Squared?

What I have experienced, especially in this world where technology is increasingly driving the speed of change, is that we need to be able to take advantage of these advances in technology and more importantly, the data that these technologies create, to be able to realize the benefits out of them. It's not just about bringing data together; it's about bringing subject matter experts who understand the data and creating an environment for them where they can cross-pollinate with each other.

I like to use the phrase that data is the common clay that master artisans come together to create the next masterpiece. You bring your data, I bring my data, and we both understand our data from the expertise that we have. And so the concept of the Collaboratory is, ‘How do you create an environment where you can bring the data together, but as importantly, the people around the data who can create the next great insight?’

The desire to create the podcast was really about helping people understand this acceleration that's happening in our society, that these things are being created and adopted at ever-increasing speeds, and that bringing together subject matter experts who can talk about this reality and represent the good that can come out of it. This is what we try to do and tease out the benefits and the potential challenges that come along with a world that is increasingly being driven by technology and data.

6. Many SEL programs are increasingly incorporating EdTech into their toolkit to better understand where and how a learner can improve. What, according to you, are some of the new innovations in the field of SEL that can help institutions improve a student’s learning experience?

I think an important part that that we've been talking about and driving at our university is how to ensure that our students not only learn in the classroom but that they get to apply that knowledge through these experiential learning opportunities that we're creating for our students as a complement to the content that they learn in the classroom. So content, plus the application plus development of the soft skills makes an individual who leaves our university workforce ready and headed toward something I call Career proofing.

Maybe those things aren't novel. What is novel, and it gets back to this increasingly digital world we live in, is the fact that many of these things now can be captured as a digital signal, analyzed, and provide feedback. In the very way that when we're on Zoom and hit the record button, we are capturing a video of me that can be broken down into a set of files - the video file to look at the effectiveness of how I use my body and my facial expressions to communicate my message; A transcription that can be put through an analytical engine to evaluate how effective my choice of words was; A .wav file to analyze voice tonality, which we know is a huge part of the effective communication research. Research shows that actual words are a small component (8%) of effective communication. We know that body language and voice tonality have greater contributions to effective communication.

Well, these are now all data streams that someone can analyze and give the learner feedback on. I think that's one of the really interesting things about this new world. We can give people data-informed feedback that could say, “Oh, wow! I need to keep my hands still,” or “Oh, wow! I drop a lot of ‘umms’ and ‘you know’ whenever I speak.” That feedback can really be helpful for someone who wants to be more effective in their communication style, or someone who needs to learn to listen more.

7. On an ending note, what is your advice for other senior leaders and CXOs working in the social and emotional learning space?

For me, the message– and this has been a message that I've communicated to not just our learners, but also to our working professionals, is that we tend to under-appreciate the social and emotional intelligence elements of what makes us effective at the things we're putting our energy against.

The investment into learning those skills: how to be an effective communicator, how to be a good listener, how to build influence in a conversation for the best idea, how to bring 3 competing ideas into a common idea that everyone can get on board with…That is so much more important in individual and organizational effectiveness than knowing how to code in Python or knowing how to move your applications to the cloud.

And so I tell people that if you're going to invest in yourselves, double down on your investments into the social and emotional space. Those are the ones that are going to be the most enhancing to your career when you look back on them.

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