Why Essential Skills Are Hard To Assess, And Why That Matters

Essential skills are key to work and daily life, so why don’t we assess them in the same way as occupational skills or knowledge? So why do we need to change our thinking if we are to tackle some of the employability challenges facing learners?

Essential skills, such as communication, collaboration, judgement, and adaptability, are widely recognised as critical to employability. The recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper highlights how insufficient essential skills prevent millions of adults from thriving at work.

We know that employers and educators value these skills, so why do we struggle to develop them? Assessment is part of the problem. Essential skills are notoriously difficult to define and difficult to assess. It isn’t always clear, or universally understood, what the ‘construct’ is that we should be measuring. This makes fair, valid, and reliable assessment challenging.  

Much of the assessment for vocational and technical qualifications happens at the end of a period of learning. Where essential skills are assessed, this is often implicit or incomplete. For example, a strong written assignment may demonstrate aspects of communication, but it doesn’t demonstrate the full, multifaceted nature of the skill. We need to use more innovative and intentional assessment methods if we are to gain a true assessment of someone’s ability. 

The employability conundrum 

Research into formative assessment tells us that learning is enhanced when learners receive targeted feedback throughout the assessment process, helping them to understand how to improve.

In the workplace, skills such as communication or critical thinking are typically developed by completing tasks, interacting with others, and learning from experience over time.  

The development of these skills is iterative, so a single assessment at the end of an educational programme is unlikely to provide much value to learners. 

Fairness and validity 

This matters for fairness as well as validity. Essential skills are often central to workplace success, yet they are not always assessed explicitly or consistently within programmes. For learners with SEND, or those returning to education, this can be particularly difficult.  

At NCFE and at Ufi VocTech Trust, we see this as a shared system challenge. Through the Assessment Innovation Fund, we’ve taken a deliberate, evidence-led approach to identify ways to support essential skills development, working with providers, researchers and innovators.

We test, learn, and build understanding of how essential skills can be assessed more intentionally and effectively, alongside established external assessment methods that measure occupational knowledge and skills. 

What needs to happen? 

Tools such as the Skills Builder Universal Framework have made a valuable contribution to essential skills by providing standard definitions of competencies including listening, speaking, problem solving, and creativity, and setting out a pathway through to skills excellence in small, teachable steps. 

However, there is more work to do to support learners and teachers in developing and assessing these skills to the point where they can be deployed confidently in the workplace.  

Thanks to the UK Standard Skills Classification (SSC) launched in November, we now have a valuable resource to explore the connections between ‘core skills’, qualifications, and occupations. We must further investigate how strengthening these foundational skills can support the development of occupational skills and knowledge and help learners access and navigate the world of work. 

We need to give educators the tools and space to teach essential skills iteratively and provide formative assessment opportunities to ensure regular, targeted feedback that supports all learners to progress.  

Our experience has shown how learners and teachers value the chance to develop and practise these skills in virtual simulations that reflect authentic workplace scenarios. Technology also offers opportunities to efficiently track and deliver ongoing assessment.

We must be creative and ambitious in the assessment methods and technologies that we use to ensure that they effectively measure and help develop essential skills. The work emerging from the Assessment Innovation Fund shows what’s possible when we do this well: better learner engagement, improved confidence and, we anticipate, learners who are better prepared for the workplace. 

By Rebecca Conway, Director of Research and Innovation at NCFE