Development of the employability skills assessment

Abstract

The 21st Century skills, also known as employability or soft skills, are a set of skills that recent graduates and other employees should possess to be successful in the workplace. They include skills, such as problem solving, teamwork and communication. Internationally, numerous organisations have repeatedly stressed the importance of these skills for workplace success, and at the same time pointed to a misalignment between the skill set of recent graduates and what is needed by industry employers. The challenge facing universities and industry is that these employability skills are notoriously difficult to teach and assess. Currently, there is no trustworthy method available to industry for assessing this set of skills. In this article, the authors describe the initial development of the employability skills assessment (ESA), a tool designed for industry to use in the assessment of these skills amongst their new employees. Through a pilot implementation with information technology students at a national university, results indicate that student groups performed at or near the expected level, but also that the assessment tool requires further modification, so that meaningful performance at the individual level can be measured.