1. Employability skills Workshop
Presenter: Marie Baird

2. Welcome AND INTRODUCTIONS
What’s your best employability skill? Explain.

3. Overview 9:30 am Start 12:00 pm Lunch 12:30 Afternoon session
2:00 pm End

4. What are employability skills? What are they also known as?
QUESTIONS
What are employability skills?
What are they also known as?
Why are they important?
List the eight skills.
What are the Adult Learning Principles?

5. What are Employability Skills?
Also called ‘generic skills’ or soft skills’, employability skills are non-technical skills that employers say they are looking for in their employees.
(Pre-accredited Quality Framework, Teaching Guide p 16)
MB – go to group for responses

6. hard skills of industry.” (Jeremy Blain – Cegos Asia Pacific)
“Soft skills are the
hard skills of industry.”
(Jeremy Blain – Cegos Asia Pacific)
MB – what do you think this means?

7. Initiative and enterprise Planning and organising
Employability Skills
Communication
Teamwork
Problem solving
Initiative and enterprise
Planning and organising
Self management
Learning
Technology
MB -

8. WHAT’S YOUR EMPLOYABILITY SUPERPOWER?
MB -

9. What’s your Employability superpower?
Discuss these questions.
What’s your strongest Employability Skill
How do you apply this skill at work and at home?
Name two specific tasks this skill can assist with and explain how it helps.
How do you improve this skill?
MB -

10. See Teachers Book p 17

11. Employability Skills FOUNDATION SKILLS Technology Literacy & Numeracy
INTERPERSONAL SKILLS
Communication
Teamwork
THINKING SKILLS
Problem solving
Initiative & Enterprise
SELF-MASTERY SKILLS
Learning skills
Planning & Organising
Self-management
MB – not discrete skills, can be roughly sorted into different categories, often overlapping
Clusters of employability skills based on DeSeCo model

12. employability skills are:
mostly used in combination rather than individually;
applied and performed at various levels depending on the task;
context dependent, but transferable between contexts;
developed over a lifetime through work, education, family and social life.
The Impact of E-learning on Employability Skills content/uploads/E-learning_Employability_Report1.pdf
Shouldn’t be treated as separate skills – could also be described as adult life skills – the skills we need to negotiate the world successfully as adults.

13. PQF QUALITY INDICATORS
All three indicators relevant to Employability Skills

14. PQF Moderation
Questions to help with the practitioner preparation section:
Tell me about the employability skills you include in this course?
Which ones do you focus on?
What strategies do you use to focus on that skill?
What approaches do you take to include this skill?
Questions for the reviewer comment part of the employability skills:
Tell me how effective that strategy is at building employability skill?
How exactly is that strategy effective?
What evidence do you have of the effectiveness of the strategy?
How well documented is that strategy in your course plans?
How explicit is the employability skills made to the learners?
What improvements could you make to this strategy?
What other strategies could you use to embed employability skills?
Questions from front page of PQF wiki

15. THE PRE-ACCREDITED QUALITY FRAMEWORK
Which Employability Skills will you focus on?
1. PLANNING
What approaches will you use to embed these skills?
2. STRATEGIES
How will you help your learners develop these skills?
3. DEVELOPMENT
How will you make Employability Skills explicit to your learners?
4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

16. PLANNING
When you are planning a course how do you decide which Employability Skills to focus on?
What tools/resources do you use to help you decide?

17. PLANNING What need is this course addressing?
Which Employability Skills will help learners meet these Outcomes?

18. PLANNING Do your learners know what Employability Skills are?
Which do they already have?
Which do they want to learn or develop?

19. PLANNING How do you introduce the Learner Plan?
How do you discuss Employability Skills with your learners?
Kat feedback

20. PLANNING
‘We start with “What are you good at?” A learner might say, “I’m good at gardening” and then we go through the employability skills in terms of that activity: “So if you‘re good at gardening you’re good at planning what to plant and when. You might also have to negotiate what to plant where, or who does which jobs.”
(Teaching Guide, Pre-accredited Quality Framework)

21. STRATEGIES
What sort of strategies and approaches are appropriate for adult learners?
Adults are internally motivated and self-directed: they know what they want and prefer to work at their own pace
Adults bring life experiences and knowledge to learning experiences: they already know and can do a lot.
Adults are goal and problem oriented: they want to get something out of the learning experience.
Adults are relevancy oriented: they need to see the point of what they are doing.
Adults are practical: they like a hands on approach or to see how their learning can be applied.
Adult learners like to be respected: they have multiple roles requiring skills and knowledge outside the learning environment, so being lectured can cause frustration

22. adult learning PRINCIPLES
STRATEGIES
adult learning PRINCIPLES
Adults are internally motivated and self-directed
Adults bring life experiences and knowledge to learning experiences
Adults are goal and problem oriented
Adults are relevancy oriented
Adults are practical
Adult learners like to be respected
Adults are internally motivated and self-directed: they know what they want and prefer to work at their own pace
Adults bring life experiences and knowledge to learning experiences: they already know and can do a lot.
Adults are goal and problem oriented: they want to get something out of the learning experience.
Adults are relevancy oriented: they need to see the point of what they are doing.
Adults are practical: they like a hands on approach or to see how their learning can be applied.
Adult learners like to be respected: they have multiple roles requiring skills and knowledge outside the learning environment, so being lectured can cause frustration

23. Build on existing skills Clear goals and results
STRATEGIES
Build on existing skills
Clear goals and results
Relevant to the course and vocational context
Real world
Hands on and practical
Transferable
Opportunities for reflection

24. STRATEGIES
When students learn by performing tasks that are situated in authentic practice, their learning is made meaningful by its context. Specific lessons are immediately applied and integrated; success is rewarded by progress toward a larger goal. Learning is not abstract or decontextualized.
The Employability Challenge full report 2009, UK Commission for Employment and Skills, London UK ployabilityChallengeFullReport.pdf

25. STRATEGIES Discuss the strategies and activities on your table.
Are they useful? Effective?
How do they incorporate Adult Learning Principles?
How could you apply them to your program/s?

26. How do you help your learners develop their Employability Skills?
DEVELOPMENT
How do you help your learners develop their Employability Skills?
Make the point that learning something generally doesn't mean being shown once and then off you go. Need to consider past experience of the group and build on them, learning styles that will work for the learner group, context specific approaches that make it real, increasing independence - show model but indicate that only part of the process might be needed -

27. DEVELOPMENT Think of a time when you learnt a new skill.
Explain your learning process to a partner.
What Employability Skills helped you to learn the new skill?

28. DEVELOPMENT Recognition: the skill is introduced to the learner
Practice: repetition and sequential development
Mastery: greater learner control and independence
Peer-Instruction: the learner can teach others
Make the point that learning something generally doesn't mean being shown once and then off you go. Need to consider past experience of the group and build on them, learning styles that will work for the learner group, context specific approaches that make it real, increasing independence - show model but indicate that only part of the process might be needed -

29. DEVELOPMENT Cook, Grow, Go - Teamwork
Recognition: introduce the importance of teamwork in hospitality – video of restaurant, interviews
Practice: cooking task – learners repeat specific tasks and roles in the group – close supervision
Mastery: learners move between roles and tasks independently and with minimal supervision
Peer-Instruction: learners plan task and teach and monitor peers independently

30. DEVELOPMENT May not be sequential Build on existing skills
Incidental opportunities to practice skills
Use different approaches and contexts
Include ‘real life’ practice
Encourage ‘noticing’
Integrated with ‘hard’ skill development

31. DEVELOPMENT You are developing a new Computers for Beginners class.
How will you develop the Employability Skill you’ve been given?

32. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
How do you make Employability Skills explicit to your learners?

33. THE MARSHMALLOW CHALLENGE
Time: 20 minutes
Tools:
20 sticks of spaghetti
1 metre of tape
1 marshmallow
Instructions: Build the tallest free-standing structure you can. The marshmallow needs to be on top.

34. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT What Employability Skills did you use?
How could you use this activity to make Employability Skills explicit to your learners?

35. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Opportunities to reflect are vital. Learners need to reflect on what they can already do, as a basis for development; and they need to reflect on what they have learnt, to cement and activate their newly acquired skills.
The key transferable skill is the ability to transfer your skills.
The Employability Challenge full report 2009, UK Commission for Employment and Skills, London UK
What does that mean?

36. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Introduce a new skill each week
Refer throughout the course to the Learner Plan
Review employability skills at the end of each lesson
Create an Employability Skills portfolio
Include an Employability Skills section in CV (esp for young learners)
Use the language of Employability Skills consistently
Learner Review

37. summary *course outcomes * learner needs *scaffold *real-life
PLANNING
*course outcomes
* learner needs
*scaffold
STRATEGIES
*real-life
*contextual
*relevant
* Adult Learning
DEVELOPMENT
* build & extend
* apply in different settings
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
*make explicit
* feedback
*self-reflection
* transferable

38. What will you take and use from today?

39. Resources
Pre-Accredited Quality Framework: Teaching Guide, 2013, ACFE Board, Melbourne (see also Springall J, Keys to Work: a teaching kit for developing the employability skills of CALD learners, 2008, AMES Developing Generic Skills, 2003, Aspire Training and Consulting, Fostering Generic Skills 2003, Aspire Training and Consulting, 180 Degrees of Reflection Learner Guide to the Employability Skills The WOW Factor - Employability Skills or/year_8/unit1.pdf

40. SCAFFOLDING RESOURCES
Learner guide to the Employability Skills
(Victoria University Adult Literacy National Project - DEST)
What Employers Want
(series of videos by Central West NSW Youth Transition Services)
The 180 Degrees of Reflection: Networking Moderation in Gippsland Project
(PQF support for Learn Locals in the Gippsland region
Review resources – 10 mins