Employability Skills Project
The Employability Skills Project reviews the evidence of best practice principles for teaching and assessing employability skills. It examines definitions of employability skills and the success of approaches to teaching and assessment in a variety of settings, from early years, through to schools, higher education and welfare to work programmes.
Employability Skills Project (PDF, 1.2 Mb)
Published June 2008
The term ‘employability skills’ is best understood and most widely used in the employment programme setting where ‘employability’ has been a key theme in supply-side Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) over recent years.
However, in this context the term is most often associated with ‘job readiness’ through demonstration of some elements of the personal characteristics inherent in the draft UKCES definition (time keeping, responsibility, basic social interaction etc) but less associated with creative thinking and problem solving skills.
The term ‘employability skills’ is also in circulation in other settings, notably Higher Education. In this setting the definitions in use are highly consistent with the UKCES draft definition with the emphasis being explicitly on functioning while in employment rather than merely the ability to credibly search for work.
In several of the other settings the term is not generally used in relation to a specific set of skills but the draft definition overlaps considerably with embedded and formalized elements of the curriculum and associated skills/competency frameworks.
In early years settings for instance, there is a significant overlap between the draft definition and the curriculum framework emphasis on personal, social and emotional development; communication, language and literacy; mathematical development, knowledge and understanding of the world; and creative development.
In the secondary school curriculum there are synergies between several areas of the curriculum, notably Work Related Learning (WRL) (including enterprise education), key skills and the new vocational pathways. Throughout both primary and secondary school settings the relatively new but widely adopted Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) framework also provides some linkages to the draft UKCES definition.
Please note that there are no hard copies of this publication available.
