In a sense, people look to match their skills with the skill demand of a particular job. With his theory, people are not necessarily limited by their training or degrees to look for certain types of jobs. Just like any other person, college students are gaining new skills all the time. They are figuring out what they like to do, what they dislike, what they are good at, etc. This exercise is designed to help students begin the process of identifying functional skills that they have used, and to perhaps begin identifying themes across situations.
Functional skills are the skills that employers like to hear about.
Functional skills are skills that are transferable from one job to another. I think that a common misconception of college students, and youth in general, is that they don't have any functional skills. So, we need to take a backdoor approach in identifying these skills. We can typically do this through storytelling and extracting information from the stories. Students need to be able to converse with an employer about their functional skills.