Building Capacity to Measure Essential Employability Skills​

​A college program helps prepare students by teaching them the skills they need to enter and succeed in a specific field. In addition to the skills that are specific to a certain type of job, there are arguably also the skills that are crucial to succeeding in any job. The Government of Ontario has articulated a list of such skills: “The Essential Employability Skills”; and HEQCO is involved with a number of projects that are examining how best to teach, quantify and measure them.

Researchers at George Brown have completed work on a three-year, multiphase LOAC project that explored learning activities and assessment strategies to measure student achievement of one specific Essential Employability Skill: critical thinking. Researchers developed a rubric and a handbook designed to both help other institutions explicitly incorporate critical thinking skills into their curriculum and also make the assessment of critical thinking more consistent.

Beginning with the assessment of critical thinking in one English course at George Brown, researchers attempted to create a rubric that could be easily adapted not only to different courses but also adapted to evaluate other Essential Employability Skills.

Part of the challenge in assessing critical thinking can be finding a consensus on what critical thinking is and what it involves. The faculty members involved in this project acknowledge that critical thinking needs to be addressed more explicitly at George Brown, a finding that was replicated in the LOAC project at Humber College.

Materials and Outcomes

Throughout the course of this project, updates and final reports will be posted here.​​​​​