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In an increasingly competitive and evolving job market, soft skills are becoming the skills most expected by recruiters. A 2019 LinkedIn study found that 92% of HR professionals and business leaders consider soft-skills to be as important as, or even more important than, technical skills. That's why it's becoming increasingly urgent for students to master these crucial skills upon graduation, in order to successfully enter the workforce.
What's more, research shows that individuals with a high command of skills such as adaptability and management are 24% more likely to get a job and 41% more likely to earn a high income (McKinsey & Company).
However, although companies have recognized the importance of this subject by making it their number 1 criterion, higher education establishments do not yet have the tools to respond effectively.
To understand these issues, Rising up was asked by Europe 1's "La France s'engage" program to highlight French initiatives that are revolutionizing the soft skills sector in higher education.
Our co-founder and scientific director Nawal Abboub rightly pointed out that our mission since 2017 has been to fill the soft skills gap to get careers off the ground.
Nawal described how we help students develop their soft skills during their studies. She insisted on the methodology for doing so, unlike standard theoretical courses on a precise soft skill like communication, Rising up decided to take the opposite tack by offering an ultra-personalized approach with the creation of a program that perfectly fills their soft skills gap. But Nawal didn't just focus on the program for the students, she also presented how Rising Up uses its intelligent THE LAB. platform, based on the latest research in cognitive science and AI, to feed back the most relevant data to educational managers in order to better steer training. Educational managers and program directors can track students' progress, map skills according to curriculum and certify soft-skills for the diploma in question.
Read the full transcript below to find out more about Rising Up's game-changing approach and how it can transform your future. 👇🏼
Europe 1: Nawal Abboub, co-founder of Rising Up. Your company has been around since 2017, right? You were a forerunner because soft skills weren't talked about as much. You created them with your brother 7 years ago. You're originally a neuroscientist. How did you get into entrepreneurship, Nawal?
Nawal Abboub: Well, I think the first word is commitment. I committed myself to science, a scientific career, to serve the progress of our society and of human beings. And the more I discovered incredible things about our brain's learning capacities, the more I realised just how little this knowledge was being used in society. And that's what made me want to become an entrepreneur. My brother was already an entrepreneur, but I wasn't really into it at all, I was really the scientist in the family. And it was when we met that we said, well, we're going to set up a company together, based on our complementary skills.
Europe 1: So, thanks to your company, you can identify, enrich and certify these famous soft skills. You're going to make a presentation, and then we're going to go into more detail to better understand what you're proposing with your Rising Up solution. Are you ready?
Nawal Abboub: I'm ready. Here we go. In fact, our mission at Rising Up is to boost career opportunities for students and promote their employability. To achieve this, we've developed a solution that, on the one hand, identifies students' key skills and, on the other, fills in any gaps that may be lacking, depending on the diploma they're aiming for, so that they can acquire all the skills they need to enter the professional world. That's for students. And on the other hand, for everything that concerns pedagogical managers, program directors, enabling them to better manage their training programs, since thanks to our platform and the data we retrieve, we're able to map the competencies of a given training program and then certify these competencies, since up until now, soft skills have been a rather vague entity, a little difficult to grasp. Thanks to this solution, we're now in a position to say what kind of percentage you have in these skills, and to have very precise measurements.
Europe1: Thank you for taking part, Nawal Abboub, co-founder of Rising Up. So, finally, if I understand correctly, this is a scientific measure that enables us, well, the students, to measure these famous soft skills. Could you give us some examples to help us understand even better, Nawal?
Nawal Abboub: For example, critical thinking, logical reasoning, perseverance, autonomy and curiosity are all core skills in our eyes. So, we've reworked them a little, you know, scientists are always changing definitions, but we wanted to give a little more clarity and credibility to these skills, because in reality, these core skills are the adaptive capacities of our brain that help us to perform better, to fit into a company, an organization, to know how to collaborate, to know how to adapt to sometimes uncertain contexts where we don't have all the information. So it's all these skills that we really wanted to measure. So, it's a platform and if you're a student, you say to yourself, I'm going to have to develop my skills for this job, I need to have a critical mind, a spirit of openness and curiosity. How are you going to be able to measure that if I've got it or if the student hasn't got it, then you need to know that we've spent 5 years developing this solution, we're part of the Neuroscientists, right?
So, it's been 5 years of research, ah yes, 5 years of really intense research to try and find the right measures. Because in reality, it's really difficult in the scientific literature, it's soft skills, it's a world that's really complex to identify. So, we spent 5 years really trying to understand what type of measurement we could do, what type of skill we should measure, because that too, we had to say to ourselves, we selected 25 on the basis of studies of skills repositories that existed in companies to try and align the skills demanded by recruiters and the skills that students should have at the end of their schooling to enable them to really align. And so, we built this solution using this methodology. We have around twenty tests on a range of subjects, including operational efficiency, innovation, communication, collaboration and leadership. And depending on the diploma you're aiming for and so on, we'll pick out certain tests that will enable us to do just that.
Europe1: So, your customers are the students?
Nawal Abboub: Our end users are students, but our customers are higher education establishments.
Europe 1: Ah, so it could be the University of Paris 1?
Nawal Abboub: Exactly. In fact, we've already worked with Paris 1 and IAE.
Europe 1: Christine Neau-Leduc, President of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, with us tonight on Europe 1, what's your view?
Christine Neau-Leduc: It's really important and interesting, and I must admit I'm new to the startup. But no, no, it's very interesting. I think that, beyond AI, since you've already worked with them, you should come and see us, make presentations to see what we can do together. It's extremely important, and precisely because we were talking about AI, soft skills and these competencies will be really important for students to adapt throughout their professional lives.
Europe 1: So, your customers are the higher education establishments that will be making your solution available to their students, but also to those in charge of teaching? That's very important, teachers who will use this platform to get very precise measurements of their level. What are the teachers going to do?
Nawal Abboub: Well, it will enable them to monitor their career path and see where they're lacking. For example, they'll identify, and say to themselves, finally, in this marketing part, we know that influence is important, we know that communication is important. And depending on the level of the students, this will enable them to say, ah, we can see that this is what they're missing, so we'll add an extra program. So we offer a solution that goes beyond identifying their skills, and fills in those skills. And we've developed pedagogical content.
Europe 1: like what?
Nawal Abboub: For example, for leadership - and this is a module that works very well, and is often recommended because it's a major factor in training teams - one of the subjects we work on a lot is typically in decision-making contexts. How emotions come into play, how to identify these emotions to make better decisions. This is a module that works very well, because we wanted to use the knowledge and scientific advances we'd made on how our brain makes decisions, and how we're influenced by certain things. And by becoming aware of these unconscious mechanisms at work within us, it enables them to be more enlightened and to progress, and to help teachers progress too.
Europe 1: Recruiters are obviously paying attention - that's why there are start-ups like Rising up tonight - to these famous soft skills, these human qualities in their recruitment process. Yes, a study has shown that over 60% of managers and executives are prepared to recruit candidates primarily on these famous soft skills. According to darès, 60% of the criteria for getting a job are soft skills. This puts the human element back at the heart of the recruitment process, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, which is used to create recruitment files, CVs and cover letters. Yeah, it's going to make us all grow, isn't it, and we're all going to evolve thanks to these famous soft skills that are at the heart of the process. It's not just the CV, uh, it's not just the cover letter, it's who you are, and that's really important. Christine Neau-Leduc, President of Paris Panthéon Sorbonne University, and Nawal Abboub, co-founder of Rising Up.
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