Employability skills enable a lifelong learning mindset that is critical to navigate life and support career success. Employability skills are generic skills, a range of qualities and capabilities that assists young people to make the link between what they are learning at secondary school and their goals for the future. Employability skills can be acquired through a broad range of activities as part of teaching and learning or as part of a designed career development program. These skills are increasingly viewed as important for success in tertiary education.
For students with disability or learning barriers, who continue to sit at the margin, and are less likely to access tertiary education, providing the opportunity to develop employability skills will develop self-determination and improved aspirations. The more empowered a person is to self-mange the more motivated they are to learn and to make informed choices about their post school options.
The Employ Ability partnership, a subgroup of the Wellington Disability Transition Network collaborated to create a series of video clips and a supporting curriculum teaching resource to be implemented into school curriculums. These resources demonstrated that linking individualised career development to authentic community based work programs enabled young people transitioning from school to display the eight employability skills.
This resource can be found at Employability Curriculum.
Andrea Evans-McCall
