Skills tracker

Share this skills tracker with your students to keep track of their progress as they develop their employability skills.

Employability skills are different from technical skills and academic qualifications, they are the core transferable skills, sometimes known as core or essential skills such as communication, problem solving, creativity and adaptability.  Employers see these transferable skills as equally or more important than academic qualifications, but report that many young people are leaving education without these skills and so are currently experiencing a skills gap when hiring.

These skills are vital in preparing the UK workforce for a world of work that is evolving rapidly, particularly with digital and AI developments, making it harder to predict what the jobs of the future will look like and what technical skills will be needed.  

It’s important that students recognise when they are using these skills in their day-to-day schoolwork, projects and within LifeSkills sessions. This will help students to value and link these skills to work whilst developing their own skills as they move through school.

There are two trackers available to download: one for primary-age pupils and one for secondary-age students.

Primary school: Skills tracker

Pupils can use this tracker to record the activities that they have completed and the skills that they developed during each one, using the core transferable skills icons as prompts. There is also a column on the tracker for pupils to write down ways that they could continue to practise these skills in everyday life, at school and at home.

Secondary school: Skills tracker

Students can use the tracker to make a note of the activities they have completed, and reflect on which skills they developed, how these will be useful in future work-related scenarios, and areas where they could continue to build upon those skills.

The tracker can be used alongside all our LifeSkills resources, as well as our dedicated core transferable skills lessons.   

If students need to understand the specific steps to develop skills such as communication and problem solving, they can also use the Skills Builder Universal Framework which breaks the skill down to show progression.