How High School Students Use Extracurricular Activity to Build the Soft Skills to Succeed Now, In College, In Career

Your student started developing these skills before learning to walk. The skill basics are there, but using them with confidence in challenging situations, demonstrating their strength, and accumulating examples to describe in college essays, all take real-life practice. Your student must learn to transfer the basics to success in new and more challenging situations.  

Soft skills include knowledge, but colleges and employers expect that your student has practiced using that known-and-knowable information to the skill of applying them to problem-solving and working with others.

Participate in Clubs, Teams & Other School Activities

Extracurricular activities develop a wide range of soft skills, from teamwork to leadership. Joining clubs, sports teams or cultural organizations allows students to collaborate, communicate and solve problems in diverse settings.

Choose Opportunities that Align with Your Interests

By following their own interests as they search for opportunities, students also create the experiences to test whether their personal interests can lead them to a career. Activity connected personal passions also will create networks of people with common interest, and with a little luck, connected professionals who will recognize your student’s potential and help to guide their career or open opportunities.

Volunteer in Your Community

Getting out in the community to work among diverse groups, solve community problems, and build interpersonal relationships will give students experience among adults from whom they can learn, allow them to impact causes meaningful to them, and build those adult contacts that can provide reference, contacts, and introductions on which a career will depend. These environments offer real-world experiences with genuine consequences that high school clubs can’t accomplish.

Take on Internships and Part-Time Jobs

Internships and part-time jobs provide hands-on experience that builds both hard and soft skills. These roles teach students how to navigate workplace environments, manage time and communicate effectively with coworkers and supervisors. Employers highly value these experiences because they demonstrate a candidate's ability to apply classroom knowledge to real-world situations​.

Seek Leadership Roles

Help your student to use discretion as they seek leadership positions. Look for those that offer the opportunity to develop and demonstrate the essential soft skills. An empty title will not hone skills and will not impress recruiters.

Many times, informal leadership among peers or without the authority of office demand that teens learn the subtle arts of communication, influence, problem-solving and more.

Practice Speaking Up

Using their voice, informed by their problem-solving and other soft skills, will gain your student both practice at stating ideas, supporting them, and handling feedback as well as building confidence and ease when attention is focused on them and their ideas.

Cultivate Feedback

As teens participate in any situation that demands these soft skills, coach them to not only remain open to feedback but to seek out those who can help evaluate strengths and weaknesses. Your student should learn how to rely on strengths while working to improve elsewhere.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

Be cautious to balance supportive environments where your student’s skills meet expectations with opportunities to challenge themself. Not only does the brain recognize that it needs to “wake up and focus” in challenging situations, but that pressure imbeds the knowledge gained while challenged in more readily accessible memory.

Finally, Plan Commitment Wisely

Young people need frequent reminders that life is long, and opportunities will come again. Help them to carefully plan their time so that they can invest in each opportunity. A discerning employer will recognize the schedule of a student who did many light activities and will want to know more about the student that picked meaningful challenges that created constant learning opportunities that your student tackled with relish.