Indigenous 
During her recent sabbatical, Denise Nielsen, Professor of Applied Communication, explored how communication, critical thinking, adaptability and judgment can help prepare students for a rapidly changing workplace. We caught up with Denise to learn what she discovered, how AI is raising the importance of human skills, and how her research could inform teaching and learning at SLC. Read our Q & A with Denise.
What made you want to focus your sabbatical on helping students build skills for the future workplace?
I’ve spent my entire career in communication, and know the value of critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, and good judgment. Communication is a continuum, not a single course. In semester one, students build the foundations of clear communication and in following semesters, apply those skills to their own field, whether that's a care conversation in a healthcare program or a job site briefing in the trades. Then they graduate and meet the workplace, and that is where I wanted to look for gaps. What happens when a new nurse has to raise concerns with a senior colleague? When a new technician has to push back on unsafe instruction? Or when a new hire has to decide whether an AI draft sounds like them? In our PAC meetings and communities, we still hear that new graduates aren’t always demonstrating those skills effectively.
Workplace communication is considerably more complicated than knowing how to write an email or give a presentation. It involves reading a situation, understanding an audience, navigating disagreement, making judgments about what to say and how to say it, working with people who think differently, and increasingly, knowing when and how to use AI and understanding the impact AI has on communication in the workplace. My sabbatical explored how some of these skills could be adapted for students in courses or microcredits that are short, practical, and intended for reaching new graduates and early career workers.
When you talk about “future-proof” skills, what does that mean to you and which skills do you think will be especially important for students moving into their careers?
To me, future proof means durable: skills that hold their value even as technology, workplaces and specific job requirements keep changing. We need to define communication more broadly than we traditionally have. Students need to be able to listen, ask useful questions, explain complex ideas clearly, give and receive feedback, handle difficult conversations, and communicate with people who have different perspectives and experiences.
They also need judgment, which is becoming one of the most important skills of all. AI can generate an answer, but it cannot take responsibility for whether that answer is appropriate, ethical, accurate, or useful in a particular situation. Students need to be able to question information, evaluate AI-generated content, recognize when something is missing, and make decisions when there isn’t a perfect answer sitting in front of them.
What did you discover through your research about areas like digital literacy, AI, communication, soft skills, and social-emotional intelligence? Was there anything that surprised you?
One of the things that interested me most was how much overlap there is between these areas. We tend to put them into separate categories: digital literacy over here, communication over there, AI skills somewhere else. In practice, they are increasingly intertwined.
I have mixed feelings about the phrase "soft skills” as there is nothing soft about managing a conflict with a colleague, persuading someone who disagrees with you, making an ethical decision under pressure or communicating clearly when the stakes are high...these are all hard things to do well, and they're hard for machines to replicate well.
I expected my research to reinforce the importance of digital and AI literacy, but what became abundantly clear was that AI raises the standard for human skills. When anyone can generate a competent-looking email, report or presentation in seconds, the value is knowing what to ask for, recognizing what is missing, exercising judgment, and taking responsibility for the result. And on the other side of this is trust and credibility...when someone produces something, do you trust that person and believe they have the understanding, integrity and discernment behind the work? I think this will become more important than ever.
Can you tell us about some of the learning modules or resources you developed and how you see faculty using or adapting them with students?
Research shows there are gaps in various areas including areas such as difficult conversations, communicating across differences, workplace communication, persuasion and storytelling, and ethical decision-making when AI is involved. I saw potential for these ideas to become post-graduate micro-credentials to support career success, or resources that faculty could adapt within their own programs and courses as appropriate.
This semester, I’m working with a fully asynchronous communications course for the first time, and it has given me an opportunity to see in real time what happens when learning moves into an online environment. I am seeing how the design matters as much as the content—students need various kinds of structure, interaction, practice and feedback, and learning activities have to be designed with that environment in mind.
That experience has made me think differently about the resources coming out of my sabbatical. Rather than creating a collection of materials that faculty simply pick up and deliver, I’m interested in developing adaptable learning experiences that can work in different contexts and formats. There is more work to do in figuring out what those designs should look like, and that’s part of what I’m continuing to refine on my own time now that my sabbatical is over.
On a personal level, what was the sabbatical experience like for you? What did you enjoy, find challenging, or learn about yourself along the way?
Joyful. I spent the entire 8 months on the East Coast where the salt water and the salt air make everything better and being by the ocean seems to change the pace of life. It reminded me that good thinking and effective communication need room to breathe. I found some time to write and did quite a bit of watercolour painting as well.
I also enjoyed being a learner again. Some of the most interesting parts of the sabbatical came from realizing that my assumptions needed to change as I dug deeper into the research, particularly around AI and the way communication is changing.
The challenging part was that there isn’t a neat endpoint to this work. The workplace is changing quickly, and research into future skills can become outdated fast. I came away thinking less about creating a definitive list of skills and more about how we can help students become people who can keep learning, questioning, and adapting as the context changes.
I also learned that I really do enjoy the space between teaching, research, and curriculum design. I like stepping back from an individual assignment or course and asking what we are trying to prepare students to do, and whether what we are asking them to practice resembles the world they are about to enter.
Now that your sabbatical is complete, what are you most excited about? How do you hope this work will benefit students and teaching and learning at SLC?
I’m excited about bringing the work back into the classroom and continuing the conversation with colleagues across programs. Communication is everybody’s business, and these skills matter whether a student is heading into healthcare, business, policing, the trades, early childhood education or another field entirely.
I’d like to see us give students more chances to practice the communication and judgment they will need at work, and to make those expectations more visible. There is a significant difference between telling students that communication is important and creating situations in which they have to demonstrate it.
This also gives us an opportunity to rethink how we talk about employability. The goal shouldn’t be to predict exactly what the workplace will look like five or ten years from now. It should be to give students a strong enough foundation so that they can enter that workplace, understand what is changing, make good decisions, and continue to develop.
Students are entering a world where technology can do more of the technical production of communication, while the human decisions surrounding that communication become more consequential. Preparing students for that world is going to require us to keep evolving what we teach and how we teach it.