Version 0.7 created by Noah Arney based on Canada’s Skills for Success, more information available at: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/training/initiatives/skills-success/learning-steps.html
Click here for a direct link to the assessment.
What is it
A self-assessment method for formative assessment to identify and improve on your level of ability in five key transferable skills: Communication, Creativity & Innovation, Problem Solving, Collaboration, and Adaptability. Being able to identify and reflect on skills is a key part of the experiential learning cycle.
Why make it
Most of the components of the Skills for Success are assessed on a modified version of the assessments from the Essential Skills Framework. However, the addition of new skills into the framework means that several of them don’t have assessment methods.
This ‘subjective reports assessment’ is a formative assessment for the transferable skills of Problem Solving, Creativity & Innovation, Communication, Collaboration, and Adaptability based off of the Skills for Success framework. The key to the assessment method is that it is a persons reflection on their specific practice, such as during a work-integrated learning period, their work in their ongoing employment, their work at academic courses, etc. The results from the assessments are a starting point for reflection on yourself and your displayed skills.
Background
The Skills for Success framework (2021) has now spread through most of the Canadian skills development ecosystem and is beginning to be used in more career development and labour market information resources. The early reports on it identified where assessments were robust or lacking, primarily, several of the skills have robust assessment models that were easily converted over from the prior Essential Skills Framework or were adapted from other skill assessments. Some of the skills though, the ones often called social and emotional or transversal, are much more complex to assess. These skills are displayed in practice, but difficult to assess outside of practice.
To support it, and to support students at Thompson Rivers University’s Co-Op program, I developed an assessment rubric for transferable skills that allows students and employers to reflect on their skill levels and determine where they need to work on improving them. The basic version here is for self-assessment to improve your own understanding of your skills, and the next version is currently being validated for use with an employer.
The intent of the assessment is to provide a place for self improvement and development in the one being assessed, in a formative way, rather than as a way of judging completion or competency achievement in a summative way.
Next steps
Once the validation research has been completed the full version will be launched under a Creative Commons license. The rest of the content of this site, and the current 0.7 version of the framework and rubric, is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license to allow remixing and using of the content for any noncommercial use. This license allows those interested in the framework and rubric to use it with students and clients as long as there is not an additional charge specifically for the use of the assessment.
The next version will also include guidance on the use of the tool in workplace and work-integrated learning settings and additional tools and reflective components.