Connecting Students' Skills to Careers with Skills Lab

With the addition of Xello’s new skills assessment, students now have a new lens through which to evaluate career goals – by understanding which careers are most suitable based on how frequently they’d like to use certain skills.

As educators, you know how important it is for students to make the connection between the academic work that’s required of them today, and the goals they wish to achieve in the future. Making this connection is what motivates students to engage in the classroom, pursue rigorous coursework, and persevere through challenging school and life transitions.
But forging this connection can be difficult. Some students struggle to build a vision for their future, while others may set lofty goals without giving much thought to how their goals align with who they are, what they’re interested in, and the steps required to get there.
Xello’s assessments help tackle these problems by giving students tools to build self-knowledge and think critically about how their interests, characteristics, and motivations align with different career paths. And with the addition of Xello’s new skills assessment, students now have a new lens through which to evaluate career goals – by understanding which careers are most suitable based on how frequently they’d like to use certain skills. 

Empower your students with a unique approach to skills assessment

Skills Lab is a brand new assessment for students in grades 9 to 12. Developed in collaboration with a team of academics, this interactive survey helps students identify the skills they’d be interested in using most often in their future career. 
Unlike other skills and aptitude assessments, Skills Lab eliminates the anxiety that many students feel when having to assess how good they already are at a skill. Instead, it focuses on identifying the skills students want to spend their time doing and enables students to work at their own pace – with the option to stop and start as necessary.
Students’ results are then combined with results from their Matchmaker interest assessment. Rather than filtering out potential career matches, students get deeper insight into their career fit for existing matches and can be exposed to a wider set of options they may not have considered.
This approach ensures that students are motivated by their results. Knowing that skills can be learned and mastered over time, it creates an opportunity for educators to inspire their students by helping them see how their academic work supports the development of skills that students want to use in their future careers. 

A simple and intuitive experience for you and your students

Your students can access the new skills assessment from their Student dashboard or within their About Me section.

After clicking on the Get Started button, students are presented with a series of 35 questions that have students consider how frequently they would like to use certain skills in their future career. 

Once students have finished rating skills, their results page will show their top 5 career matches based on their skill preference. They will also see a summary of how they ranked each skill, with the option to review answers or re-do the quiz entirely.

As students delve into specific careers, they can learn more about how they got their match by clicking on Find out Why. They’ll see how their overall match was determined based on their responses to both the interest and skills assessments. They can also delve deeper into how frequently each skill is used in each career and how that compares to their desired use.

To review the top desired skills for your students, simply log into your account and navigate to the Student Work tab under Reports. Here you’ll see a quick summary of top skills across all students, with the option to drill down into individual students’ results. 

Take the new Skills Lab assessment for a test drive

Try it out for yourself before introducing it to your students. Simply log into your account and complete the survey using a grade 9, 10, 11 or 12 demo student account.
If you’d like to learn more about Xello’s assessments, visit the Xello Support Center and see how to help students with their assessments.