Mapping Wider Skills Progression

From Activities to Progression

Equipping learners and apprentices with wider skills like communication, problem-solving, and collaboration is a core part of modern further education. However, simply scheduling standalone activities or tutorials is not enough. An impactful approach requires a deliberate, mapped progression where skills are introduced, practised, and honed with increasing complexity throughout the learner journey.

A mapped approach moves wider skills from a 'nice to have' extra to an integral component of your curriculum design. It ensures that development is intentional, measurable, and clearly linked to learners' future success in work and life. This transforms your provision for participation and development from a series of events into a coherent, developmental programme.

Identify Your Core Skills with Stakeholders

Before you can map progression, you must define what you are progressing towards. Not all wider skills hold equal weight for every vocational area or local economy. A focused approach is more effective than trying to cover everything superficially. Work with partners to identify a handful of high-impact skills to prioritise.

• Consult employers and skills bodies: Use your employer engagement activities and Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) to identify the professional behaviours and transferable skills most in demand.
• Analyse destination data: Look at the pathways of former learners. What skills and attributes are common among those who achieve positive destinations in high-value roles?
• Talk to learners and apprentices: Ask them directly which skills they feel least confident about when thinking about job interviews, workplace challenges, or further study.
• Review job specifications: Analyse current job descriptions for the roles your learners typically progress into. What non-technical requirements appear most frequently?

Define What 'Good' Looks Like

Once you have your core skills, you need to define what progress looks like in concrete terms. Abstract goals like 'improve communication' are hard to teach and assess. Break each skill down into observable behaviours and create simple progression milestones. This creates a shared language for staff and learners.

For example, for 'Collaboration':

• Novice: Follows directions within a group and completes allocated tasks on time.
• Developing: Actively listens to others, contributes relevant ideas, and offers support to teammates.
• Proficient: Can help to organise group tasks, facilitate discussion, and give constructive peer feedback.
• Advanced: Can take a leading role in a group project, mediate different viewpoints, and ensure the team meets its objectives.

These descriptors provide clear reference points for teaching, formative assessment, and feedback during progress reviews.

Sequence Learning and Practice

With your skills and milestones defined, you can map opportunities for development across the entire programme. The goal is to create a curriculum where learners repeatedly encounter and apply these skills in increasingly demanding contexts. This builds fluency and the ability to transfer skills to new situations.

• Map opportunities across the journey: Identify where skills will be introduced (e.g., induction), practised with support (e.g., in-class tasks), and applied more autonomously (e.g., in a final project or work placement).
• Integrate skills into vocational tasks: Instead of a separate tutorial on problem-solving, design a technical task that has a built-in fault-finding challenge. This makes the skill relevant and authentic.
• Increase complexity over time: Early group work might be highly structured with defined roles. Later projects could be open-ended, requiring learners to negotiate roles, manage deadlines, and resolve issues themselves.

Make Development Visible to Learners

For development to be meaningful, learners must be able to recognise and articulate their own growth. Your role is to make their progress visible to them, helping them build the confidence and language to showcase their abilities to employers or universities.

• Use self-assessment tools: At key points, ask learners to rate their confidence against your progression descriptors. This fosters self-awareness and helps target support.
• Focus on skills in progress reviews: Move beyond just qualification progress. Discuss specific examples of when a learner demonstrated collaboration or initiative and set targets for the next stage.
• Encourage portfolio building: Prompt learners to collect evidence of their wider skills - such as a video of a presentation, planning documents from a team project, or feedback from a work placement supervisor.
• Teach them the language: Explicitly teach learners how to translate their experiences into powerful statements for their CVs and interview answers, using frameworks like STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result).

Where this fits in QualityHero

A strategic approach to wider skills is a key element of an ambitious curriculum. The Toolkit Areas module in QualityHero can be used to define and share your provider's progression milestones for each core skill. You can then link evidence from observations, work scrutiny, and learner voice to these areas, building a rich picture of your curriculum's impact for your SAR and identifying targeted actions for your QIP.