Students Will Need Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and SEARCH Skills

By putting the burden for employer recruitment on the student, we shifted the emphasis from learning during the internship itself to learning during the process of acquiring the internship. That self-acquisition process forces participants to go light years beyond the standard internship experience in which an employee of the school district finds hosting companies and pairs students with those companies.

That means we are putting equal emphasis on the three key skills workers will need: hard skills (academic knowledge that will help students get a job and be core job activities), soft skills (that will be the attitudes students will need to keep the jobs they get), and search skills, that will become more essential as the average length of time for employment in a single job decreases.