My first job as a summer camp director was for Wellspring New York weight loss camp. We were located on the Paul Smiths College campus so I was just a couple miles down the road from Camp Regis Applejack. I actually started as the ropes course and trips director, and then when the director left after my first summer, a friend and I took over as co-directors.

The CEO/founder of Wellspring Camps was a brilliant and hard-working guy named Ryan Craig. He helped build Wellspring from a single camp to 15 camps and 2 year-round boarding schools.  Unfortunately, after Ryan left the company things went sideways and eventually Wellspring went out of business. He now runs a venture capital firm that invests in higher education called University Ventures. He writes a monthly newsletter in which he analyzes trends and challenges in higher ed. In one of his recent newsletters, he discussed summer camps (his own 3 boys go to a camp in his home country of Canada) and the fact that summer camps are among the best places in the world to develop soft skills that so many current employers report that their employees lack.

This is exactly the type of development we work to achieve at Camp Regis Applejack.  As Ryan quotes: “traditional summer camps are a much-needed bootcamp for soft skills… The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) has found that the soft skills gap consists primarily of communication skills, problem-solving skills, and work ethic.” But teamwork, communication and work ethic are already inherently built into summer camps.

Campers learn from the first day at camp, and continue to learn, that in order to have the most fun you have to work together. Whether this relates to the campers taking turns being the setters at a meal, thus allowing others to take a “day off” from this chore, to working together to paddle a canoe across the lake. Ryan argues in his article that this teamwork is also a foot in the door to the building of customer service and communication skills, which are imperative to being a productive member of the workforce.

Interested to read Ryan’s article, you can find it here.