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Today, teachers throughout the United States are focusing more on prepping their students for their future careers. Some teachers do this by creating a life skills curriculum. Others make a soft skills curriculum. Sometimes, they made a career skills or employability skills curriculum. Surprisingly, all of these teachers mean the same thing – they just have different ways of saying it! That means some wires got crossed somewhere.

Good customer service skills are crucial to success in any career path. Unfortunately, teaching customer service in high school isn’t easy, especially when you want to engage your students! These five points will show you the best ways to teach customer service skills to high school students:

Have you been giving fair and deliberate attention to the importance of soft skills in your courses? Do you buy in to the importance of soft skills? They're crucial for any individual's professional development. The sooner someone can learn soft skills, the better they'll adapt to a job, career, and workplace.  But that's only the beginning. Soft skills have thousands of applications in the workplace, and they're just as useful as "hard" skills.  Here's why.

Is the pressure on you to better prepare students with work readiness skills? Join the club of teachers looking to develop or expand their workplace readiness skills curriculum. I once compared my daughter's soccer team's lack of conditioning to skipping out on soft skills in the classroom. "Sadly, their awesome soccer skills have little value on the field if they don’t have the speed or endurance to play the game. In the same way, leaving soft skills lesson plans out of your courses puts your students at a disadvantage in the workplace." Make sure your students are going to be able to compete in the workplace!

When I was preparing to enter the work force, I distinctly recall a complete absence of any instruction regarding interviewing skills. Today, job openings are competitive situations and the resume/cover letter are just the first part. Once they have that foot in the door, your students need to be able to prove that they are capable and are the best candidate for the position. CTE teachers are actively seeking curriculum for teaching interview skills to high school students. How do I know? They frequently ask me where to find interview content.

Teachers sometimes come to us when they are seeking materials to help students learn customer service soft skills. I wanted to take some time to help teachers that are struggling to find ideas and resources to cover this important topic. We have a Customer Service module within Business&ITCenter21, but we know sometimes you just want one activity to cover the basics. Feel free to use these ideas with your students and let me know if you have feedback or ideas to enhance my suggestions.