As a high school principal in New Jersey, Rebecca Agostino saw firsthand how much students struggled with professional skills. Many were afraid to talk to an adult on the phone or approach people they didn’t know. They worried they might mess up, so often, they didn’t try at all. 

Several years later, when she was working as a vice president for the U.K.-based apprenticeship platform Multiverse, she saw something similar. While students were getting their foot in the door with apprenticeships, many lacked previous professional experience—and employers noticed. 

“I saw this danger of students skipping all these earlier experiences and going right to apprenticeship,” says Agostino. “Employers are making a big bet and expecting ROI, so they have high expectations. If students don’t have the earlier experiences to ladder up to that, they won’t be able to deliver.” 

The Big Idea: So last year, Agostino developed her own solution: a scalable curriculum for high schoolers that teaches them durable skills and networking in a low-stakes environment. The idea behind the curriculum, which she called Prentix, is to teach students to recognize and build professional networks that already exist in their communities.

Earlier this year, Agostino piloted the curriculum at seven high schools. In an attempt to reach more students, Prentix joined forces with the education AI platform Curiously this month and is now operating under that name. This fall, Agostino and Curiously will partner with more high schools, as well as universities and workforce organizations.

The timing is prescient. Employers are increasingly voicing their need for durable skills over technical ones, which are more likely to be absorbed by AI. According to a recent research report from the Cleveland Fed analyzing more than 2,300 skills across 600 occupations, demand for soft skills topped the list.

Curiously joins a few other organizations attempting to shift the focus in education and workforce to social capital and the kind of skills you need to build and sustain it. These include Career Launch, Climb Together, Connected Scholars, and Social Capital Builders. But the field remains small.

“No one will outwardly say relationships, networks, and soft skills don’t matter, but curriculum for these things is not yet a line item for most institutions,” says Julia Freeland Fisher, the director of education at the Clayton Christensen Institute and author of the book “Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations that Expand Students’ Networks.”

“But if we’re thinking about what students—not employers—need, tools and curriculum like this are giving young people something that historically we’ve left to chance, like inheriting a network into the industry you want to break into or the getting to attend schools that offer environments where you learn these soft skills in the course of relationship-rich learning experiences.”

Building Social Capital 

Agostino launched her curriculum in the spring with a pilot cohort of seven schools and roughly 100 students in New York and Philadelphia. Over the course of the program, which was typically embedded in a college and career readiness class, students were tasked with mapping out their networks. Agostino says students routinely tell her they don’t have networks and the only professionals they can name might be their parents and one teacher. But through some prompting—getting them to think more broadly about past teachers, neighbors, coaches, and members of their religious communities—every student can eventually name 25 people. 

Research from the Christensen Institute has shown that high school students in career-connected learning programs are sitting on “highly undercapitalized networks,” Freeland Fisher says. The problem isn’t that young people don’t know anyone, but that they often don’t realize they do.

“A big challenge in the workforce space is that we’ve assumed that some groups have no social capital,” Agostino says. “As a result, we have to make all of these connections for them. But actually, students can find social capital through their own communities and local small businesses.”

This is the next step for students taking Agostino’s course. Once they’ve identified their networks and their interests, they’re asked to start reaching out to people on the phone, in person, or in email. Part of the curriculum is giving students specific tactics to do this, so they don’t freeze and shy away. Another part is learning how to handle rejection when they do reach out and no one responds or the person on the other end tells them no. 

But in the pilot cohort, Agostino found that most of the time students receive positive feedback, which encourages other students to give it a try. Nearly 70% of professionals that students in the pilot spoke with offered concrete professional support for those students. That could be in the form of a job shadow, an internship referral, or a connection to someone else in the field. The same number of professionals said they would be willing to talk to other students in the program as well. 

“That gave me the insight that as students are going out into their communities and having these conversations, they can bring that contact information back to their school, so the school can develop a database of professionals who are willing to engage with their students,” says Agostino, who stressed that schools often don’t have the resources to meaningfully build workforce pipelines singlehandedly. 

“I’m not suggesting that schools just sit back and abandon work-based learning and students do it all for them, but students can be active participants.”

On the Ground: One 10th-grade student in the pilot was interested in learning more about joining the police force. Using the list of professionals in her network, she was able to connect with police officers in her community who advised her to join a young explorer program. They also told her how and where to apply. The student brought this information back to her guidance counselor, having already done the field research, and the counselor helped her fill out the application. 

The student is now enrolled in the young explorer program this summer. Bolstered by her success, she also reached out to an elementary school principal and asked for an internship, and they also said yes. 

“She learned that you don’t have to wait for your school to provide something for you,” Agostino says. “You can just go out and ask for opportunities.”

Changing Winds

Freeland Fisher is hopeful that the increasing ROI pressure on educational institutions might indirectly incentivize the teaching of durable skills and networking, which are crucial for students getting a job in their desired field. The bottom-up approach of Agostino’s curriculum and its contemporaries could be one key piece to solving the problem for schools. 

Building employer partnerships is tough for any school or workforce organization. But Freeland Fisher says the usual approach of creating new partnerships from scratch is not only more difficult, but it’s also not efficient.

“They’re not bringing existing networks into their school,” she says. “There’s a huge opportunity to tap into these latent resources that top-down efforts tend to overlook.”