I’ve been doing more reading today on approaches to assessing soft skills. Among this was a paper arguing the need for a common framework for assessing soft skills - agreeing on a defined list and agreeing on a common approach to assessing peoples skills based on this list. I’m not sure about the avenue it took though, which was to get to a point of being able to ‘accredit’ people in soft skills - that seems to me almost like trying to turn soft skills into hard skills - becoming something you would evidence on paper almost like you would your academic qualifications (although its interesting that arguably some of the current ‘accreditations’ in youth work almost attempt this already?

The two approaches to assessment I’ve been reading about most are:

• Having a set standard to achieve (based on various indicators)
• Measuring distance traveled

I don’t think we’re interested in number 1, and I think attempts to do this are very questionable. Number 2 is much more relevant to us but I have a concern over this. My concern is that in both cases the ‘measurable element’ does result in a ‘final score’.

For example, we’re not trying to help people assess how skilled somebody actually is in communication, what we do want to achieve is that people recognise when they have an opportunity to develop or work on their soft skills, and to recognise the progress they make as the result of them participating in a project/activity/goal.

The problem with having a ‘final score’ is that inevitably people will compare their results and this will lessen the effectiveness of the system. An example being that if you take part in a personality test purely for your own benefit and with no intention to share the results its much more likely that you’ll give honest answers than if you feel you have something to gain by ‘answering correctly’.

So the challenge for us is that we somehow want to help people measure their ‘distance traveled’ and we also want to provide them with a ‘report’ to help them recognise the progress they’ve made, but we need to provide these reports in a manner that doesn’t allow them to be compared or used as some kind of leaderboard.

Kate made a suggestion related to making the experience feel more ‘game like’ and although we don’t yet know what this means or have any practical ideas to achieve this I think its a good way of thinking out of the box about how we can help people recognise their gains but in a purely personal way……more thinking required!

I promised Ana to get her a list of soft skills tomorrow that we could begin to work up some storyboards for animations to help explain what they actually are, so I’m immersing myself back into the world of soft skills and I’ve found myself off on a slight tangent looking into how organisations currently asess soft skills of candidates and employees.

OnTheUp isn’t aiming to actually assess soft skills, well at least not in the traditional sense - we’re not aiming to develop something that allows you to get a ‘Grade A’ in Communication or Creativity! What we are aiming to do is to help people assess whether or not they feel they’ve developed personal skills and qualities while working towards particular projects/goals.

Our aim for for the user is to help them become more self aware of the skills and qualities they have and how they developed them - the underlying principal being that people who have a good understanding of their personal skills & qualities will be able to handle interview situations much more confidently (there are of course lots of other benefits but we’ll stick with this one for this post!).

Ultimately people that use the system will still find themselves in interview situations and will still find Read the rest of this entry »