What Workforce Readiness Actually Looks Like
Employers consistently identify communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, collaboration, and other durable (or "soft") skills among the capabilities they value most. Educators work to develop these competencies throughout a student's learning experience. Yet an important challenge remains:
What does proficiency actually look like in a modern workplace, and how can learners develop and demonstrate those skills before entering it?
The Essential Skills Summit moves the conversation beyond simply naming the skills employers want. Through the lenses of data analytics, data storytelling, and artificial intelligence, we'll examine how durable skills show up in real workplace decisions, problems, conversations, and responsibilities. Employers, educators, and students will then work together to identify practical opportunities to strengthen how these skills are developed and demonstrated throughout the education-to-workforce continuum.
Employers should attend to help define what durable-skill proficiency actually looks like in their professions and workplaces.
Educators should attend to connect workplace examples with how students already develop, practice, and demonstrate these behaviors through learning.
Students should attend to help us understand their experiences while gaining first-hand insight on the skills employers value.
Participate in the Essential Skills Summit
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Sponsor
Every partnership helps strengthen the conversations, connections, and collaborations that prepare Northwest Ohio’s workforce for what’s next. Whether your organization seeks to create impact, inspire innovation, or foster insight, your investment helps make the Essential Skills Summit possible.
The Workforce Knowledge Center (our idea of an exhibitor’s area) connects employers and trainees with Ohio’s leading providers of AI, data, and workforce training. Showcase your organization’s programs, credentials, and learning solutions while building relationships with employers actively investing in workforce development.
Exhibit
Essential Skill 1
Data Analytics
Analytics Is a Way of Reasoning
Data is everywhere. Dashboards, KPIs, real-time reporting, visualizations, and predictive models give today's professionals access to more information than ever before. But access to more data doesn't automatically lead to better decisions.
The real differentiator is what people can do with the information in front of them. Can they recognize what matters? Ask the right questions? Challenge assumptions? Identify missing information? Distinguish correlation from causation? Understand uncertainty? Draw a reasonable conclusion and determine what to do next?
That's where data analytics becomes more than a technical skill. It becomes a demonstration of critical thinking, problem-solving, curiosity, judgment, and digital fluency.
At the Essential Skills Summit, we'll explore how these durable skills show up when professionals work with data, what proficiency actually looks like in the workplace, and how students can more intentionally recognize, develop, and demonstrate these same capabilities through the learning experiences they already have.
Keynote
8:45am-9:15am
Employer Panel
9:15am-9:45am
Action Lab
9:45am-10:00am
Essential Skill 2
Data Storytelling
Blending Technical Skills with Narrative Skills and Critical Thinking
Finding an answer is only part of the job. Increasingly, professionals must take complex information and make it understandable, relevant, and useful to someone else.
We consume information quickly through dashboards, charts, presentations, infographics, reports, and short summaries. That creates an important challenge: How do we simplify information without distorting it? Effective data storytelling requires more than an attractive visualization. It requires understanding the evidence, recognizing what matters, considering the audience, communicating uncertainty, and presenting information in a way that supports sound decisions.
Underneath those abilities are durable skills employers consistently value: communication, critical thinking, audience awareness, information literacy, creativity, ethical reasoning, and judgment.
At the Essential Skills Summit, we'll examine what strong data storytelling looks like across professions and how existing learning experiences can help students recognize, practice, and demonstrate the durable skills required to turn information into understanding and understanding into action.
Keynote
10:15am-10:45am
Employer Panel
10:45am-11:15am
Action Lab
11:15am-11:30am
Essential Skill 3
Artificial Intelligence
AI’s Role: Can AI Accurately Find Patterns and Tell Stories?
Generative AI has fundamentally changed our relationship with information. Increasingly, we can ask a question and receive a polished, confident response in seconds. The answer may arrive before we've done any of the reasoning required to produce it ourselves.
That makes human judgment more important, not less. Is the response accurate? What evidence supports it? What's missing? What assumptions were made? Is the source reliable? Does the conclusion make sense in context? And should we act on it?
AI can analyze information, identify patterns, generate visualizations, and communicate conclusions. But plausibility is not the same as accuracy. Knowing how and when to question, verify, adapt, and take responsibility for an AI-generated response requires durable skills including critical thinking, problem-solving, digital fluency, adaptability, ethical reasoning, curiosity, and judgment.
At the Essential Skills Summit, we'll explore what happens to workforce readiness when technology can perform parts of the thinking and communication process for us, and how we can ensure learners develop the human capabilities needed to use AI thoughtfully, responsibly, and effectively.
Keynote
12:15pm-12:45pm
Expert Panel
12:45pm-1:15pm
Action Lab
1:15pm-1:30pm
Current State
Education in Action
Preparing Students for What's Next: A Conversation Across the Education Continuum
Every great idea builds on work already in progress. This conversation features K–12 and post-secondary educators discussing how these essential skills are currently being developed. By understanding today's successes, challenges, and emerging opportunities, attendees will be better equipped to identify where our region should grow existing efforts, strengthen partnerships, or create something entirely new.
K-12 Panel
1:30pm-1:50pm
Post-Secondary Panel
1:50pm-2:20pm
Action Labs
Your Voice Shapes the Future of Workforce Learning in Northwest Ohio
Throughout the day, you’ll participate in three Action Labs (one after data analytics, data storytelling, and AI) to develop practical ideas for building today’s essential workforce skills into K-12 and post-secondary education.
Location
University of Findlay
Stewart Center
1000 North Main Street
Findlay, OH 45840
