The Skills Needed for Successful Employees Today and in the Future Develop in Early Childhood

Human resource (HR) leaders bring a unique professional perspective on the needs of their organizations’ workforce and future hiring demands. Supporting current employees and developing the workforce of the future both call for a high-quality, affordable, and accessible early childhood sector. Two ReadyNation Illinois members from the HR field share their observations about hiring and retention challenges, organizational culture, and skills that help employees be successful.

Joni Duncan serves as the Vice President of People and Culture at the Greater Chicago Food Depository (GCFD) – a mid-sized Chicago non-profit where she feels a strong connection to the mission and its goal to tackle hunger. She has been a member of ReadyNation since 2016, including her time as the head of human resources at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Among her several contributions to ReadyNation’s work, Duncan helped with the release of a 2021 report on the value of boosting racial equity in early childhood investments to help increase fairness in adult- workforce outcomes.

Duncan found her professional path to human resources while in business school and one of her courses made her “light up,” inspiring her to pursue a master’s degree in Human Resources. She has been in human resource leadership for more than 30 years and enjoys tackling small and big organizational issues. Over the last two years since joining the GCFD, she has devoted substantial time and attention to increasing employee retention through key initiatives like raising wages and providing flexibility through remote work options – an effective way to help reduce staff stress and, for some, to ease the costs of child care. Developing a “thriving wage” approach to compensation is one of her goals and helping move the organization towards this goal has been very satisfying.

Rachel Collins has been a ReadyNation member for four years and is the Director of Human Resources at Stevens Industries, Inc., a manufacturing company in Teutopolis in southern Illinois. She was drawn to HR because she loves connecting with people, and it is a field where one can have an immediate impact on both a company and its people. Collins has more than 25 years of experience in staffing, recruiting, and human resources leadership. During her almost three years at Stevens, she has focused on improving new employee retention by overseeing the development of a more robust onboarding program and striving to create a climate that makes people want to work there. Some of her major accomplishments include adapting policies that better serve today’s workforce, like a four-day schedule of 10-hour days in the production facility and helping to start an on-site child care center last fall.

The company’s on-site center was featured in ReadyNation’s January 2023 report and webinar on public and private sector roles in solving the child care crisis. Collins provided ReadyNation staff with a tour of the facility shortly before its opening and helped broaden understanding of Stevens’ internal process in developing child care services for its workers. Addressing child care is a top priority in her role at Stevens because it has been “a barrier for many people, women especially, to keep a full-time job and have it be affordable enough, so it makes sense for them to work.”

Despite the organizational and geographical differences, both Duncan and Collins made similar observations about some of the challenges they face. One area of high need for employees, both currently and in the future, is “soft” or “executive functioning” skills – especially resolving problems, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, perseverance, and working with people from different backgrounds. In addition, these HR professionals have already seen the rising need for technical skills, including the ability to work with a range of computerized systems and the technical abilities specific to manufacturing. Rachel adds, ”and just as important are data-analytic skill sets in more and more of our positions.”

Looking forward, Collins and Duncan see a growing demand for work-life balance and employees’ desire to work in a positive work culture where they feel valued. This might be tied to a more recent trend that both observed: the rising number of employees reporting mental health needs and undue levels of stress. Creating a work culture that is responsive to the more holistic needs of employees seems to be a growing trend in HR approaches – whether that is flexibility in scheduling, remote work, child care assistance, or ensuring that jobs at all levels of the organization are valued.