Hope House participants started with The IRIS Survey and then joined a class designed using IRIS’s in-person curriculum.

The Hope House staff used the results of The IRIS Survey to understand the Career Readiness, Imperatives and personal self-sufficiency of the participants before the class began. Career Readiness and Imperatives are two targets created by IRIS. The Imperatives Target is a set of eight attributes that most strongly support an individual’s ability to grow in more complex areas like Critical Thinking or other interpersonal skills. The Readiness Target is a set of twenty attributes that are foundational to career readiness. IRIS recommends that organizations help individuals develop gaps to the Imperatives Target first. Once they establish a solid foundation, they can move on to gaps to the Readiness Target and other job-specific targets.

Jenny Macias, the Program Director at Hope House, noted how easy it was to align Hope House’s personal self-sufficiency metric with soft skills measured by IRIS. “The IRIS staff helped us create targets that aligned with the personal domains we measure in our moms. So, we love that we now have a more concrete and objective way to measure our teen mom’s personal self-sufficiency growth, along with concrete action steps they can take to continue to help them grow.”

During the course, the participants also used IRIS’s in-person soft skills curriculum to develop in areas of noted skill gaps. Each of the 102 soft skill attributes that IRIS measures come with a PowerPoint presentation, activities to help facilitate growth, and handouts for the participants.

The curriculum provided resources and information for all the soft skills on which Hope House focuses. Their Job Upgrade class spends the first week focused on Emotional Self-Awareness, the base of the Imperatives. They then tailored the remaining three weeks to the group currently enrolled, using the results from The IRIS Survey to understand which overall gaps to address.