I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already starting to think the ‘Personal Development Reports‘ will be more of a ‘Soft Skills Plotter’ albeit the measurement of development over time is critical so hopefully a better name will come up in time.

For the concept to work there are two key factors – usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!

In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:

• Young People – becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
• Practitioners – measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
• Employers & Educators – understanding what soft skills are and who has what

So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).

This isn’t something new to me – our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” – its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” – but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.

Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and attempting to categorise them. This is based partly on previous work I’ve done but also I’ve been trawling websites looking at what Employers are looking for and also advice given to Human Resources Departments about assessing candidates soft skills (which are very vague!). Reassuringly theres a lot of stuff about the importance of soft skills and one thing I particularly liked was a comment that ‘Employers recruit people on the basis of their hard skills and then sack them on the basis of their soft skills!’ (as part of an argument for better recruitment strategies).

So heres the list so far and please do comment if you suggestions/changes/comments – at this stage all input is useful:

The qualities listed within each category are not just ‘indicators’ they’re skills themselves. I’ve categorised them because part of the design is likely to include a ‘menu’ to allow users to focus on particular categories of skills that they would like to measure/assess.

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