Essential skills unlock learning in the classroom, boosting academic outcomes, perseverance and self-belief. They halve the likelihood of being out of work, and increase earnings across a lifetime. They even boost wellbeing and life satisfaction.

These eight universal skills are: Listening, Speaking, Problem Solving, Creativity, Staying Positive, Aiming High, Leadership and Teamwork.   They underpin all that we’ve been doing with young women for over a decade: empowering them, boosting education and employment, focussing on personal development, upskilling, and supporting with wellbeing.

We’re joining growing numbers of employers, schools, universities, and organisations across the world committing to embedding essential skills recognition and development as part of our core delivery, enabling us to measure impact, support young women to recognise, reflect on and develop these skills, and adding value to each of our programs.

We are excited to get started on this journey and have joined the Skills Builder Partnership‘s Impact Academy for organisations, receiving access to tools, training, resources, and deep expertise to support skills development across our program designs, impact measurement, and facilitation.

To begin with, we will be implementing Essential Skills recognition, measurement and progression for our ArtWaves provision, with the intent to scale this across all our delivery including our employment support, training programs, retreats and mentoring support.

Editor’s notes:

The Skills Builder Universal Framework is the world’s leading tool for measuring and building essential skills. It breaks the 8 essential skills down into a sequence of steps, starting with absolute beginner through to mastery.

It’s completely open source and backed by years of research. Developed with leading businesses, academics and educators, it consolidates the array of different frameworks into something comprehensive and practical.

It’s truly universal. That’s why it’s used by over 850 employers, schools and social impact organisations across the globe.

The Skills Builder Partnership includes 600 schools and colleges, 200 impact organisations and 100 top employers – working collectively towards the mission that one day, everyone will build the essential skills to succeed.