SNHU Doozy

Problem: Youth participation in the workforce is an elixir for undesirable psychological, economic and health risks. Yet the outlook for youth employment is unstable with growing automation of entry-level sales and service roles. 

Solution: Doozy provides youth with employer-recognized training, assessment and credentials that leverage digital games and simulations to provide youth with the critical-five soft skills needed for joining and staying in the workforce.

Impact: Doozy-trained youth will master the critical-five soft skills most demanded by employers; be able to confidently speak with others about their skills and strengths as employees and community members; and engage in ongoing training to improve their uniquely social skills. As a result, youth will have increased opportunities for work and be able to keep their jobs longer.

Doozy is an attempt to upskill youth in order to improve their employment opportunities in the face of algorithmic displacement. 

Three themes arise from our research on youth employment and Gen Z in particular. First, the traditional first job in retail or food service as we know it is becoming a thing of the past. According to McKinsey (2019), roughly 14.7 million U.S. workers under age 34 could be displaced by automation. In OECD countries, that number expands to 52 million global youth. This is one sign of things to come as the youth workforce is impacted by algorithmic displacement. 

Second, U.S. employers are consistently reporting that the critical-five soft skills (problem solving, adaptability, time management, organization and oral communication) will be increasingly in demand amidst automation. 

Lastly, Gen Z has garnered broad criticism for their lack of these same soft skills, especially soft skills relating to face-to-face interactions. McDonald’s recently released Workforce Preparedness study identifies poor soft skills as the most pressing barrier to youth employment. SNHU’s own research on Gen Z reveals that large numbers of youth also report feeling uncomfortable presenting themselves in interview situations.

SNHU Doozy will serve Gen Z youth ages 14-24 who are experiencing poverty, truancy from school, low family income and/or are first generation to attend college in their families. Doozy youth are living in geographic areas most at risk for employment displacement due to automation according to surveys gathered by research conducted at MIT (Frank, Sun, Sebrian and Rahwan, 2019). These communities include New Orleans, Louisiana and Birmingham, Alabama. 

SNHU has partnered with Kairos Future on a study of Gen Z youth in order to better understand their needs as learners. Central to this research was interviewing and surveying a broad sample of young adults living in areas at risk for extensive automation to ensure future learning solutions reflect their voice.

The Doozy solution will address the needs of targeted Gen Z youth by helping them conveniently cultivate and communicate their soft skills in a forum informed and accessed by employers. While the future of work remains a moving target, the soft skills employers seek are expected to endure. SNHU’s proposed solution allows young adults to get their foot in the door at work and then pursue future education in a lifelong learning ecosystem centered around their success.

The word “doozy” describes something truly extraordinary, be it the wicked problem of adapting to an ever-evolving world of work or the incredible talents of Gen Z youth themselves. SNHU Doozy is both a response to the challenges encountered by young adults entering the new workforce as well as the opportunity to empower them to thrive in the new economy by providing game-based and simulation-based soft skills training, assessment and credentials.

We envision our solution serving as an onramp to adulthood for young people. As digital natives, Gen Z live and breathe social media. Previous forays into workforce skill development have shown our team that it is difficult to motivate youth to access platforms organically. To scale, we need to find a way to motivate them to want to engage on their own. For that reason, a social media component is key. Using the three self-directed learning activity zones of HOMAGO (Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out) as a guide, we propose building a global skills development ecosystem where youth can develop, prove and share their workforce-related soft skills.

Using the Crisis in Space game-based assessment of problem solving skills from the SNHU’s Google.org grant project “FEATuring You” as a prototype, we plan to first create a new game-based assessment of oral communication skills. This solution will be aligned to the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Oral Communication VALUE rubric. The game will prompt learners to respond verbally to various professional workplace situations and provide them with feedback on their communication organization, language choices, communication delivery, supporting material, and central message in real time, as well as suggesting actionable strategies. Ultimately, learners who pass the assessment will be awarded a digital credential that will be recognized by employers. In the long term, SNHU endeavors to optimize the portability of this digital credential by seeking its recognition for college credit by the University’s registrar.

Beyond the oral communication skills game, it is our hope to tap into Gen Z’s propensity for content creation in order to further their professional skill development. Connected to the same LRNG platform that hosts the Future Employment Assessment Tool, SNHU Doozy will be a skills development ecosystem that aligns to LRNG’s four intervention levels: exploration and awareness, preparation, training and immersion, and advancement. The digital ecosystem will host different video challenges in which young people will be called upon to prove their skills.

SNHU Doozy is unique in the resources it brings together to create a workforce solution tailored to Gen Z’s needs and interests that no one else can provide. The program draws upon SNHU’s work in helping opportunity youth disconnected from school and employment learn and credential their soft skills through game-based and simulation-based experiences delivered to youth on the existing LRNG online platform. As one of the nation’s largest undergraduate institutions, the University’s relationships with employers and interest in providing youth with college credit for their credentials are additional benefits. We recognize the urgency of the current moment and are ready to get started building out the foundation of this ecosystem solution to ensure it is able to scale successfully.

SNHU Doozy effects short-term changes in individual Gen Z youth to drive longer-term impact throughout the entire generation. 

Imagine a 15-year-old high school student named Gerard. Bombarded by grim headlines every day, he’s nervous about his future. Gerard sees his sister, a recent college graduate, struggle to get hired. Photography is Gerard’s favorite class, but he doesn’t know he can make a career out of it. Outside of school, Gerard enjoys hanging out with his friends and creating Tik Tok videos.

Gerard enjoys using SNHU Doozy, an app he heard about from a friend a couple of months ago. He can play a game to get feedback on his communication skills. In the past, Gerard has had trouble speaking up in difficult situations. Participating in SNHU Doozy each week has incrementally increased his confidence. 

Gerard loves seeing the creative things his peers come up with to respond to the same challenge. He just got a notification that one of his favorite brands is sponsoring an upcoming challenge asking Doozers to pitch ideas for marketing a new product. Gerard doesn’t know a ton about marketing, but he’s interested in trying the challenge. 

Fast forward a couple of months, and Gerard learns he has won the marketing ideas challenge. His prize is an internship at the brand’s headquarters, which gives Gerard some real world work experience and helps Gerard envision new career pathways for himself.

Within the past year, sixty eight young adults have engaged in Crisis in Space, our team’s game-based assessment of problem solving skills. It is our intention to use Crisis in Space as a prototype for future skills development games. 

In over a year, we expect to be in a pilot phase in which we will test out the updated game with Gen Z youth. Our goal during this phase is to share SNHU Doozy with at least 100 play testers.

Five years down the road, we expect to be at scale, serving at least 1 million active monthly users.

Our goal is to develop a quality solution that can scale. In the first two years our goal is to develop the oral communication skills game as further proof of concept, building off of previous lessons learned from the Google.org funded “FEATuring You” project.

In year one, we aim to have completed a cycle of development and playtesting for the proposed communication skills game. Five years from now, we hope to be at scale with SNHU Doozy being a regular part of Gen Z (and Gen Alpha)’s regular social media routines.

Reaching the youth targeted for participation in SNHU Doozy is difficult. 

At SNHU, the University leadership is committed to supporting this type of work, but we will also take into account future self-sustaining business models. 

In order to to attract and enroll youth we will be leveraging our own and our partners' community networks. Currently our community partners include LRNG which has a presence in several major urban centers in the United States and Duet which is working with the same target population across the East Coast.

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We do not currently have ready-made plans to expand to Latin America.