Q: What is in the AchieveWorks Skills report?

A: The report includes 9 sections: introduction, conscientiousness, creativity, critical thinking, social-emotional, leadership, skills development, and careers and pathways. Each skill section contains a score, definition and related skill facet scores. Developing your Skills section has all each skill facet score and definition with a selection of basic and advanced recommendations to try.

Q: What are the skills measured?

A: The five skills within AchieveWorks Skills are conscientiousness, creativity, critical thinking, leadership and social-emotional.

Q: How many skill facets form a skill?

A: Each skill is comprised of 5 skill facets. You can find definitions of the skills and their facets here.

Q: Why are they called a “skill”?

A: Skills are complex and comprised of a combination of skills, sometimes known as a “skillset” or individually as a “skill facet”.

Q: How can skills be improved?

A: Building skill facets leads to improvement in related skills. For example, if an individual works on bettering their optimism, they will find that they increase their score for the conscientiousness and creativity skills as well.

Q: How do careers and pathways relate to skills?

A: Over 1,800 connections were made between various aspects of a career (e,g,, work values) and an individual’s skills assessment results to form a list of best possible careers and pathways. Some of the areas looked at include work context, values, abilities, activities, styles, and interests.

Q: How were the skill facets decided upon?

A: Countless hours of research were conducted to determine the general skills needed for success in academics and the workplace. These skills are a result of natural talent and experience in developing the skill.

Q: How were the skills defined?

A: In order to simplify the report and make it easier for people to understand and track their skill development, we combined skill facets into groups, called “skills”. Our skill definitions are more comprehensive than is traditional – this is intentional. A more robust definition of critical thinking, for example, serves to make its development more beneficial to students and workers. Traditionally, critical thinking has been described as the ability to analyze and solve problems. Our definition includes problem solving as well as the ability to gather information, judge that information, and be keenly aware of one’s own biases.

Q: How long does it take to complete AchieveWorks Skills?

A: It takes 20 minutes or less to complete the assessment.

Q: Should the skills assessment be repeated? Why?

A: Every day there is the potential to learn something new, especially if a conscious decision is made to improve. As time goes on, individuals should retake the skills assessment to measure their current scores and look at progress over time.

Q: How often should the skills assessment be repeated?

A: We recommend retaking the skills assessment annually to see which skills have been improved and which skills could most use improvement.