Civil Dialogue Is a Workforce Skill

When we talk about preparing students for the workforce, we focus on resumes and credentials. Employers focus on something different: whether graduates can listen well, navigate disagreement, and solve problems across differences. And most students graduate without structured practice in exactly these skills. According to AAC&U's 2025 employer survey, The Agility Imperative: How Employers View Preparation for an Uncertain Future, 96% of employers say the ability to engage in constructive dialogue across disagreement is essential to today's workplace. Yet only 80% believe colleges are successfully building those competencies. As polarization deepens, self-censorship rises, and AI transforms the workplace, the preparation gap is poised to grow.

SHRM estimates workplace incivility costs employers over $2 billion per day in lost productivity, disengagement, and turnover. Closing the gap between employer demand and students' opportunity to practice is critical. Unify America's Civic Gym, a series of scalable, peer-to-peer dialogue programs, gives students structured practice in exactly these skills before the stakes are high.

Civic Gym: Peer-to-Peer Practice at Scale

The Civic Gym connects students across ideological and geographic differences through two programs: the Unify Challenge and the Deep Dive. Both are peer-to-peer experiences with no preparation required and no facilitator present: just two strangers and a series of carefully designed prompts.

In the Unify Challenge, students discuss a series of goal statements on complex issues facing America, from mental healthcare and gun policy to immigration and the economy. After each statement, they explain their reasoning, then work through follow-up questions designed to surface values, trade-offs, and competing concerns.

The prompts teach durable skills:

• Active listening: In the Deep Dive, students practice paraphrasing: "In your own words, take turns summarizing your partner's point of view. You're not judging. You're just paraphrasing."
• Perspective-taking: "If you agreed, why might others see this differently? What concerns could they have?"
• Weighing trade-offs: "What worries you more: harm caused by false information, or harm caused by punishing free expression?"
• Collaborative problem-solving: "What does 'fair share' mean to you? Do the two of you agree on a definition?"

In the Civic Gym sessions, students are not sitting through a lecture on communication theory. They practice skills in real time, with a real person who sees the world differently. The structure allows for disagreement while modeling the habits employers need: explaining reasoning, integrating others' viewpoints, and staying focused when conversations become difficult.

The Deep Dive goes further. Students meet a new partner, receive factual information on one topic, work through a scenario together, and collaborate to explore solutions. In a Deep Dive on free speech and hate speech, for example, students discuss who should define hate speech, then role-play as a university president facing a controversial speaker decision. The prompts push them to challenge each other respectfully, ask follow-up questions, and integrate multiple perspectives into their reasoning.

Students Report Strong Gains in Workplace Confidence

Engineers must defend design decisions under scrutiny. Nurses navigate emotionally charged conversations with patients and families. Flight crews challenge one another clearly and respectfully to ensure safety. When the stakes are high, avoiding disagreement is not an option. Managing it well is essential.

In Fall 2025, nearly 4,800 students completed post-Unify Challenge assessment surveys. "The whole idea is about marketplace readiness," says Dr. Mikelle Barberi-Weil, a business communication professor at Weber State University who implemented the Unify Challenge across 18+ majors. The data backs her up.

• More than 88% agreed or strongly agreed that the Unify Challenge helped them practice communication, listening, and collaboration skills relevant to their future careers.
• 74% of students report the Unify Challenge made them more confident discussing complex issues with someone who holds different views.
• More than 75% of students rated their partner's perspective as valuable or highly valuable, signaling a shift from merely tolerating difference to learning from it. 

By practicing how to integrate diverse viewpoints into shared solutions, students build habits that translate directly to team meetings, feedback conversations, and cross-functional collaboration.

Every Major Needs These Skills

Because these competencies are transferable, the Unify Challenge benefits students across majors. The goal is not to train students for one profession. It is to build the communication habits and judgment that every profession requires.

In Fall 2025, participants reported more than 650 distinct fields of study, from nursing and mechanical engineering to criminal justice, elementary education, biomedical sciences, and graphic design. The breadth reinforces a clear pattern: regardless of major, students often lack structured practice navigating difficult conversations in live contexts. The Civic Gym gives students in any field the opportunity to strengthen skills that translate directly to the workplace.

Practice Makes Prepared

College exists to prepare students for what comes next. But for the skills employers say they need most, like listening across differences, navigating disagreement, and staying constructive under pressure, most students graduate without a single structured opportunity to practice. The Civic Gym is that opportunity.

This preparation matters more, not less, as AI transforms the workplace. The technical skills that once took years to develop are increasingly accessible and in some cases automated. What AI can't do is sit across from someone who sees the world differently and actually work something out. Those skills don't come from a course. They come from doing it, with a real person, across real distance, in real time.

The Civic Gym is ably equipping students with the skills employers need most and the confidence graduates need to succeed.