Growing numbers of people have personal abilities that are not being well-developed at home, in schools, in the workplace, and in our communities.  These abilities include making quality choices, thinking about solving problems, interacting with others, communicating effectively, and more.  Underdeveloped personal abilities are of no value to anyone.

Personal abilities need to be purposely developed into solid personal skills for each of us to be valuable to ourselves and to others.  By making the teaching, training, and learning of personal skills less complicated and more trustworthy, we can solve many of today’s problems directly connected to increasingly poor personal skill levels.

Main Street Pilot has created new, original, innovative educational and training concepts and developmental frameworks to help educators, employers, and skill companies more effectively transform the personal abilities of their learning audiences into valuable personal skills.

We named our company with the idea of positively impacting every life that crosses Main Street.  Our research and product development strategy became focused on enabling the personal skills necessary to take more control of a positive personal or professional journey across Main Street, at home, in school, at work, and in the community.

Because pilots are developed and trained with the responsibility for positive outcomes in life-and-death situations every day, and they know how to take control of a journey, we modeled our progressive personal skill development concepts with selected pilot training methodologies in mind.

We concluded that more money and attention is spent on hard skill development because getting to personal skill competency has been historically tricky, complicated, emotional, ever changing.  No one wants to admit that they can’t effectively teach personal skills.  However, most educators and trainers cannot with the concepts and methodologies in place today.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) agrees that personal skills are the hardest to teach and, increasingly, the hardest to find (HR’s Hard Challenge).  We like to ask the question, “What would it mean individually and collectively if personal skills were easier to teach and easier to acquire?” Amazing would become more possible and predictable in all that we do!

Building anything without a foundation is almost impossible. Personal skills are the same. The challenge for educators, employers, and skill companies is that consistent, foundational skills are missing within their audiences. Sustainable personal skill knowledge transfer is becoming impossible.

A progressive skill development methodology that quickly establishes agreeable and trustworthy concept foundations is critical for developmental success.  One of our example foundations is to reject anything that is not in pursuit of better outcomes in a self-respecting or honorable way.  Behavior changes when everyone is standing on solid ground that is easy to understand and simple to confirm.

Building hard skill confidence and competence can often progress via simple repetition, application, and testing.  Personal skills are notorious for being too vague, subjective, philosophical, and unmeasurable for the satisfaction of hard skill development professionals and experts.

Personal skill confidence and competence now is shaping up to become repeatably progressive with microlearing, visible through directed applications, and scored in unique ways to measure and demonstrate progress. Not everyone has the aptitude for all hard skills.  Everyone has the aptitude for personal skill confidence and competence.

Main Street Pilot has discovered and addressed the impact of “confusion in thinking” as a primary driver of being in control or out of control. “In control” suggests that a person is not afraid of what might be ahead and has a reasonable opportunity to navigate a situation with a positive outcome.

Thinking is influenced heavily by developmental language and teaching or training vocabulary.  In the United States, personal skill confusion is introduced through the misuse or incorrect application of key concept language and vocabulary. By taking control of developmental language in critical concepts, teaching and learning can become highly impactful quickly, and can have direct effect on positive behaviors.