The Universal Framework for Essential Skills

The Essential Skills

There is no shortage of people who care about essential skills. The challenge is establishing a common language and terminology around skills that is easy to understand, to grow confidence in building them effectively, with shared outcomes to align cross-sector efforts. 

We define essential skills as those highly transferable skills that almost everyone needs to do almost every job and which in turn support the application of knowledge and technical skills. 

Having carried out a comprehensive set of reviews over the years, we have found that although there is great variation in the language of skills, there are four broad areas that fulfill that definition: communication skills, self-management skills, interpersonal skills, and creative problem-solving skills. We balance nuance and pragmatism to focus on eight essential skills, with a pair of skills focused on each of those four broad themes. This gives us: 

The Skills Builder Universal Framework

Over the last decade we have focused on working with people in a range of settings to see how they build essential skills. In doing so, we developed the Skills Builder Universal Framework. 

This Framework stops these essential skills being hazy, and instead breaks them down into manageable chunks. Each essential skill has 4 Stages: Getting Started, Intermediate, Advanced and Mastery, which contain 16 teachable, assessable skill steps. The Universal Framework helps us not only identify what people can already do, but supports them to improve their skill set further.

For example, Teamwork includes working well with others, taking responsibility for tasks, decision-making approaches, conflict resolution, evaluating team members’ strengths and weaknesses, and making suggestions to improve team performance. Broken down in this way, it becomes possible to build essential skills effectively.

You can read about the development of the Universal Framework here.