Brown County students and job-seekers have skills and knowledge they’ve picked up throughout life that might not look like those on traditional resumes. But those can be marketable skills, and community members can help to identify those and help students learn the ones they might not have.

That was part of the advice that Shannon Brunton, a career coach for the Career Resource Center of Brown County, gave to the school board last month.

Last year, Brunton was one of 35 career coaches from across the state selected to participate in the state’s first ever Skillful Governor’s Coaching Corps. She attended five retreats and completed hours of additional experiments at home over the eight-month training and leadership development program.

At the Dec. 5 Brown County School Board of Trustees meeting, Brunton shared what she had learned, and she made recommendations to the district to help increase students’ job readiness skills based on her training.

Brunton works as the graduation and career coach for the Career Resource Center of Brown County. She also works at Brown County High School, aiding freshmen and sophomores who have been identified as at risk for dropping out.

At the training, Brunton worked with other coaches from workforce centers, colleges, high schools and nonprofit organizations to develop a network to better serve job seekers. They also learned how to use advanced features of tools like LinkedIn to help people find jobs.

With some encouragement from CRC Director Christy Wrighstman, Brunton decided to apply for coaching corps. “It ended up being one of the most important and significant events in my life,” she told the school board.

Skillful is a program designed to help all Americans, particularly those without a four-year college degree, to find jobs in a “changing economy,” according to Brunton’s presentation.

“Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, summed up the situation that we find ourselves in right now: There are 7.3 million fewer jobs in United States than there were in 1989. At the same time, 6 million jobs in our country go unfilled,” Brunton said about current jobs in the country.

Skillful has partnered with companies like Microsoft, LinkedIn, Walmart and Goodwill to work on an initiative to fill the job gap and put people back to work, Brunton said. Using a five-prong approach, Skillful works with job seekers, employers, career coaches like Brunton, policy makers and educators.

Indiana is one of only two states to implement the Skillful project, so it’s still in its infancy, Brunton said. “It’s a game changer,” she said.

“We learned everything from leadership to coaching techniques. We learned a lot about the population of job seekers that seem to be having the most difficulty finding good work.”

How does this apply to Brown County students?

Brunton’s recommendation is for local career coaches, educators, employers and community members to help youth identify their skills for building a life after high school. She called skills “the new currency.”

“We’re moving away from the degree language. It’s not about having a Ph.D or a master’s degree, necessarily. It matters, it really does, but it’s more about the skills that are encompassed within those degrees,” Brunton said.

“It’s also about the skills a single mother has who is just coming back into the job market, or the young senior who hasn’t quite worked yet, but he’s been working to split wood on his father’s farm for decades. … It’s those types of skills we’re promoting. I’d like to believe that our students do have these skill sets. A lot of them just don’t know it yet, and it would be our job to help them discover those.”

After those skills are identified, they can recognize and fill any gaps that remain — “things we need to improve on and helping them to become more marketable for their futures, their transitions into the workforce,” she said.

Brunton recommended that the district develop a skills-based portfolio that “promotes graduating students’ workforce readiness to local and statewide employers.”

She also recommended that the district help spread the word to students and families that the “college for all” mentality has been replaced with a focus on having diverse, skills-based, vocational and technical pathways. “Their pathways don’t look anything remotely like ours,” she said.

Brunton said she had been on a field trip recently and heard a girl say that she had been fired from her job because of her attitude.

“I got to thinking, did she know the attitude might get her fired? So, I went back and asked her. We got to talking. She didn’t. Nobody had really mentioned that might be a thing,” Brunton said.

“There’s just a real lack of awareness, I think, that is going on with our kids. School is school. They’ve been doing school for a long time, and employment is a whole other game. There’s a whole other set of rules and they need to be knitting it together.”

Wrightsman said last month that the CRC is changing its intake process of new students there to include an interview with Brunton. She will be able to ask questions and introduce students to Naviance, an online college and career readiness program that helps students align their strengths and interests with their goals after high school. “In that, she is really able to do some career coaching,” Wrightsman said.

Brunton’s participation in the coaching corps will also allow for the district to apply for future college and career coaching grants, said Debbie Harman, director of student learning for the school district.