Can teaching social skills improve social mobility?

Social mobility has stalled in America and Britain. And since the COVID-19 pandemic many young people face new disadvantages hindering their educational and professional prospects. Could social skills be the key to improving their opportunities, and kickstarting social mobility? Karina Robinson looks at the arguments for businesses and governments investing in how we interact with each other.

The Cambridge Business Dictionary defines “small talk” as “polite conversation about things that are not important.” What this does not tell you is that it is a learnable skill, and the key to unlocking the door to professional advancement.

At a meeting on social mobility hosted by the Lord Mayor’s Appeal, the boss of an investment firm said about discussing art, philosophy and books that she hadn’t read, “I was smart enough to do the job but lost my voice in those conversations.”

Nicole Williams wasn’t intimidated by the legal knowledge and intelligence necessary for the high-powered job she held. She, and many others, are intimidated by the social prerequisites and what she called the ‘’unspoken rules of the City.”

It is time to put social skills front and centre in all social mobility policies. Not least because low economic growth, the COVID-19 pandemic and artificial intelligence (AI) are leading to ever worse outcomes for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Social mobility is getting worse

According to Britain’s Department for Education the latest results of GCSEs, the exams at the end of secondary schools in England and Wales, show a disadvantage gap index at 3.92. The index, which tracks the difference in educational outcomes for those from different backgrounds, is close to the highest it has been in a decade. It had previously dropped to a low of 3.66 in 2019 and 2020. The pandemic and lack of school funding then set it on an upward trend.

The freezing of social mobility extends beyond Britain. According to Opportunity Insights, 90 per cent of Americans born in 1940 earned more than their parents but children born in the mid-1980s only have a 50 per cent chance of doing so.

Opportunity Insights promotes policy changes to revive the “American dream” of social mobility, such as subsidised housing vouchers to help parents move neighbourhoods.  But while their experiment was successful, such interventions are too expensive for governments to fund on a large scale.

AI is set to exacerbate social inequality. AI-driven productivity boosts are likely to be skewed towards high-income rather than lower-wage workers, argues Sam Manning of the Brookings Institution, and AI-driven automation could increase the share of income going to capital at the expense of labour. What does this mean? That the wealthier in society will benefit from the productivity gains, while the poorer will lose out.

Additionally, large language models learn from existing data, worsening biases in models that are being used ever more widely for credit decisions and recruitment.

How social skills can improve social mobility

The British government’s Schools White Paper, published in February, aims to halve the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers over the next decade.

Speaking about the planned reforms Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, called them “a golden opportunity to cut the link between background and success”. But the reality is not so simple.

Governments and charity programmes aiming to boost social mobility do have an impact. And companies aiming to increase the social diversity of their workforce are told to create wider hiring paths, internal social mobility networks and extra training in hard skills. A report by The Inclusion Initiative at LSE, in association with bank HSBC and Progress Together, a social mobility charity, created a five-point blueprint to change management behaviour. These include making unwritten rules explicit, reviewing any biases in advancement opportunities and making a concerted effort to ensure diverse voices are heard in meetings.

But none of these interventions focus on a realistic solution to the biggest issue in social mobility at work: networking is as important as school, apprenticeship or professional qualifications.

Grace Lordan of The Inclusion Initiative notes that workers from lower socio-economic backgrounds often lack “web of contacts”, such as networks and mentors, that help others advance. She calls for companies and schools to explicitly teach these soft skills to all colleagues and students – from small talk to approaching senior colleagues – to level the playing field.

Lifelong learning at work is a necessity in our accelerated world

Businesses are generally eager for their staff to take courses ranging from AI to compliance.  It is time to add networking to the mix.

Training in social skills is not the equivalent of denying a social background. Instead, it teaches how to change the subject to an area of mutual interest, how to approach a senior figure in the workplace and how to build your network.

Jon Hammant, who ran a $6 billion business for Amazon Web Services, described a time when, during a meeting at a consulting firm, “the other managing directors were discussing their weekend grouse shooting plans. Growing up in social housing, the only shootings I’d ever heard about were of a very different kind. That cultural gap doesn’t close on its own – we need to teach people how to navigate the room, not just hope they figure it out.”

Why is teaching social skills important?

Education in social skills is not new. John D. Rockefeller claimed that the ability to deal with people is “as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee” and hugely valuable. And for hundreds of years finishing schools taught upper class girls how to behave in social situations.

But the training that I am suggesting will help others, such as pandemic-era students whose communication skills, whatever their background, are underdeveloped; the shy; and those with mild autism. Bill Gates credits his sociable mother with forcing her withdrawn, geeky son to interact with adults, a skill that proved invaluable in his interaction with powerful individuals, ultimately leading to the creation of one of the most valuable companies in the world. 

So an added benefit to the training will be transitioning from fear to finding enjoyment in social occasions that are intrinsic to a career and, just as much, to life.