Navigating Life Skills At WeHaKee
As a member of the WeHaKee camp community, our campers learn valuable life skills – also known as soft skills. These are the qualities and skills necessary to successfully navigate life. They include things like resiliency, grit, independence, problem-solving, self-regulation, and effective communication. But they also include adaptability, curiosity, ethics, vision and empathy. Coincidently, skills that many of today’s employers are bemoaning that recent college grads coming to them are woefully lacking.
Why are so many college students failing to gain job skills before graduation? (The Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2015) explores why the void of soft skills exists in our college graduates today. He shares the findings of a study that exposes a disconnect between what job skills college seniors think they have gained at college and what employers think they have. The study exposes some remarkable disparities in their perspectives!
“On a range of nearly 20 skills, employers consistently rated students much lower than they judged themselves.
While 57 percent of students said they were creative and innovative, for example, just 25 percent of employers agreed.”
But the good news is that a camp experience is shown to offset this gap in skill sets in a variety of ways. In the November, 2013 issue of Camping Magazine, Stephen Gray Wallace, MS Ed, explores his research into the power of camp in helping campers gain the soft skills to be successful later in life. In the article entitled Ready, Set, Go: How Camp Prepares Children for Lives of Success he highlights what camps can and are doing to enhance these critical skills in youth today.
Attending a camp like WeHaKee Camp for Girls is a whole lot of fun and that is what draws most campers to the experience. But camper parents will consistently state that the experience is so much more. Their children return home from camp with a greater sense of independence, confidence, responsibility, resiliency and this all translates to improved academic success and overall happiness. And even the most initially reluctant parent will confess that camp gave their child a world of good on so many levels!
As always, thanks for joining us and we hope you have a wonderful week!
