Kevin Smith

Stop Calling Them Soft Skills

Power Skills in the Age of AI

Students are told to master the hard skills, while the skills that matter most get dismissed as “soft.”

AI can now draft the report, write the code, and crunch the data in seconds. But it can’t give you confidence or the creativity to unlock your full potential. It can’t work a room, build trust across the table, or turn a stranger into a mentor. And it can’t create possibility among people who’ve never worked together before.

Kevin Smith has spent 20 years as a leadership expert, building leadership centers and institutes at universities and in companies. In this energetic, often funny keynote, he makes the case that there’s nothing soft about these skills. Communication, networking, social adaptability, and critical and creative thinking are power skills, and they grow more valuable every time AI gets smarter.

If you can’t describe what you’re doing, then you don’t know what you’re doing! Kevin empowers students with the ideas, vocabulary, and toolkits to rethink their next steps as leaders, making them more valuable and able to stand out. Students in every major, especially technical ones, will leave seeing their human skills as a competitive edge. They’ll have practical ways to build the power skills employers want most, starting this semester. And they’ll walk out ready to own their identity and author their own future.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of attending this program, students will leave understanding:

• Why “soft skills” aren’t soft at all.
• How to build the power skills employers want most.
• How to own your identity and author your future.

Who Goes First?

Collaboration, Courage, and Getting Big Things Done

On every campus, good ideas stall for one of two reasons. Either everyone waits for someone else to make the first move, or the few who do lack the skills to collaborate and build momentum.

Students have big ideas and the energy to create real change. But when momentum rests on one or two excited individuals, those ideas rarely last. Collaboration is a word we use often, but as a leadership skill it is seldom understood.

Kevin Smith has spent 20 years as a leadership expert, building leadership centers and

institutes at universities and in companies. In this keynote, he introduces the six sources of leadership power every student already carries, from expertise and relationships to access to information. He makes a simple, surprising case: collaboration begins when someone has the courage to go first and share what they hold. Others follow, and the person (or organization) who went first usually ends up with even more influence.

Students will leave with a new vocabulary for the leadership power they hold today and the confidence to use it on purpose. They’ll know how to inspire collaboration when everyone else holds back, in group projects, student organizations, and campus life. And they’ll walk out energized to go first and unlock new potential in themselves and the people around them.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of attending this program, students will learn:

• The six sources of leadership power every student carriers
• How to inspire collaboration when everyone else holds back
• The courage to go first, and what it earns you

Going Deep

Why commitment changes everything

Too often, students are taught that more is better: more clubs, more service hours, more lines on the résumé. That breadth has real value in the first year or two of college. But at some point, leaders have to narrow their focus. Scroll through social media and you’ll see people doing all kinds of things. What real change are they creating?

Think of it this way. Set a goal to hold a canned food drive, and if you succeed, you’ll have canned food. Once. Set a goal to end hunger in your community, and you will almost certainly fall short. But along the way, you might build something that powers countless food drives for years to come.

Kevin Smith has spent 20 years as a leadership expert, building leadership centers and

institutes at universities and in companies. Drawing on the National Civic Health Index, which finds that young adults ages 16 to 29 are the most at risk of disconnecting from community life, he makes the case that commitment changes everything. Going deep on one cause, one community, or one problem is where real skills develop and where students get a real chance to shine. It’s also how they build the trust, relationships, and staying power that turn good intentions into lasting change.

Students will leave knowing the difference between doing good and building something that lasts. They’ll have a simple way to choose an issue worth going deep on and set goals big enough to matter. And they’ll walk out ready to commit, knowing that even an ambitious “failure” can leave their campus and community stronger.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of attending this program, students will learn:

• Why committed leaders build what lasts
• How leaders set goals that solve problems at the root
• The leadership to go deep when everyone else stays shallow