As companies welcome new graduates, apprentices and many other early career employees, a lens on the skills they’ll need to demonstrate their work readiness is crucial. How can businesses support this early talent to bridge the gap between education and employment and develop essential skills to empower employees to thrive in their roles?

Understanding essential skills

The Skills Builder Universal Framework identifies eight essential skills that are highly transferable and necessary for almost any job:

1. Listening: The receiving, retaining and processing of information or ideas
2. Speaking: Oral transmission of information or ideas
3. Problem solving: The ability to find a solution to a situation or challenge
4. Creativity: The use of imagination and the generation of new ideas
5. Staying positive: This is the ability to use tactics and strategies to overcome setbacks and achieve goals
6. Aiming high: This covers the ability to set clear, tangible goals and devise a robust route to achieving them
7. Leadership: Supporting, encouraging and developing others to achieve a shared goal
8. Teamwork: Working cooperatively with others towards achieving a shared aim.

These skills are crucial for workplace readiness and support the application of technical skills and knowledge, making them vital for career progression and success.

The importance of essential skills

Skills Builder Partnership research highlights the significant impact of soft skills in the workplace. Individuals with stronger essential skills tend to enjoy greater job satisfaction and can earn up to 12% more than their peers. In a competitive job market, essential skills for early career talent are increasingly recognised as key differentiators for employability and career advancement.

Unlike technical skills which can become quickly outdated, these skills are enduring and relevant to all industries. This is especially important for early talent – where these individuals may not have the advantage of working experience, essential skills provide a strong starting point for development at work.

Using the Skills Builder Universal Framework

The Skills Builder Universal Framework is a powerful tool for managers and L&D and HR leaders to understand and develop the essential skills of new starters as well as long-standing employees. There are many ways to use the Framework, but here’s a couple of starting point ideas for how managers can effectively use it for talent development:

1. Assessing skills using the Skills Builder Benchmark tool to audit the current skill levels of early career employees. This self-assessment tool allows individuals to reflect on their essential skills and provides insights for development, as well as strengths.
2. Tailored development based on the essential skill steps that employees need or aspire to develop. This can be based on assessment results, or based on job descriptions. You could then use Benchmark to track progress over time
3. Learning on demand through the Skills Builder Launchpad, which offers bitesize content for each skill step. 

Implementing essential skills training

To effectively bridge the skills gap, managers can adopt the following strategies:

1. Structured Onboarding: Integrate essential skills training into the onboarding process using the Skills Builder approach. This ensures that new hires understand the importance of essential skills for their roles.
2. Mentorship Programs: Establish mentorship initiatives that connect early career employees with experienced professionals who can guide skill application in real-world scenarios.
3. Cross-Departmental Projects: Encourage participation in projects across different departments to apply skills in diverse contexts and enhance workplace readiness.
4. Continuous Feedback: Implement a feedback system focusing on skill application and improvement, using the Universal Framework as a reference point.

Best practice for managers

At the core of our approach we recommend 6 key principles to guide skills development. 

1. Keep it Simple: Maintain a consistent focus on the eight essential skills to ensure a shared understanding across the organisation.
2. Start Early, Keep Going: Encourage continuous skill development from the outset of employment.
3. Measure Progress: Regularly assess skills to highlight progress and demonstrate next steps.
4. Focus Tightly: Build upon employees' previous learning, concentrating on achieving progress on specific skill steps.
5. Encourage Practice: Provide opportunities for employees to apply and reinforce their skills in various work contexts.
6. Bring it to Life: Make skill development relevant by incorporating real-life problems and challenges into training and work projects.

In practice: Amey 

‍Amey, an infrastructure services and engineering company, with more than 10,000 employees across the UK, partnered with Skills Builder to boost employee development and increase the impact of their outreach. Amey’s participation in the Government’s post-pandemic Kickstarter work experience scheme for unemployed young people was a catalyst for getting involved. Amey needed to demonstrate that the programme was more than just something people did, but that it had measurable benefits and outcomes.

Amey purchased the Essential Skills Academy training course – a series of ten workshops that help individuals to better understand essential skills, their strengths and areas of development against the Framework, how they fit into the context of their role and set goals to improve them. 

Amey adapted the workshops to best fit their employees and have been delivering them internally since September 2022. Through their delivery, staff have been providing feedback, coaching apprentices and graduates in essential skills, modelling best practice by using the tools and resources, and completing activities themselves.

There's been overwhelmingly positive feedback from staff who are seeing individuals across the business make meaningful progress. They have also trained line managers in the essential skills and Framework so they can nurture and support their direct reports to build these skills. 

Finally, they've added a section into their appraisal/review form for apprentices and graduates that requires them to reflect on their essential skills in formal review meetings

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Want to know more about embedding the Skills Builder approach?

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Get in touch with our team at skillsbuilder.org/employers

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