SkillSurvey and NACE Center for Career Development and Talent Acquisition Launch Program to Help College Students Gauge their 'Career Readiness'

BERWYN, Pa., Oct. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Today, SkillSurvey, the leading provider of cloud-based reference checking, announced enhancements to SkillSurvey Reference® that augment the flexibility of the solution. In its current release, the solution has been expanded to allow college and university students to obtain feedback from their former managers and co-workers on their past work experience, co-op, or internship and the associated work-related competencies. These work-related competencies align with key soft skills employers are expecting in 'career-ready' college graduates.

In an exclusive pilot program being run in conjunction with the NACE Center for Career Development and Talent Acquisition, the career services offices from 15+ academic programs from U.S. institutions of higher education and organizations focused on providing experiential learning opportunities, SkillSurvey has enabled career services centers to measure and assess students' 'career readiness' in work-related behaviors. To support the pilot, SkillSurvey has created 16 unique post-experience, career readiness surveys that align with the competencies defined by NACE, their member institutions and employers as part of its Career Readiness Initiative. With this pilot, SkillSurvey is leveraging its patented Pre-Hire 360 workflow, recent product enhancements and the newly developed surveys. The second phase of the pilot program recently kicked off and more than 40 institutions have committed to this phase of the program.

"A Lumina Foundation study regarding the public perception of higher education tells us that 11% of business leaders believe graduates have the competencies and skills required when they come to work while 99% of higher education chief academic officers think they are career ready," said Matthew Brink Assistant Executive Director of NACE. "This stark contrast in perception underscores the importance of addressing the competency gap."

"The Washington Center's participation in the Career Readiness Project not only provides our interns with a rich report on their development, it allows us to benchmark their career readiness using real employer data, providing a powerful value proposition for our students and institutional partners," said Sherrod Williams, Managing Director, Experiential Learning and Career Readiness at The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars.

"We are excited to join the pilot as we had been researching instruments that would allow students to obtain feedback from supervisors, co-workers, faculty, and teammates regarding their career readiness," said Kathy Horner, Associate Director of Analytics and Initiatives at Clemson University. "Having used SkillSurvey's reference checking solution for employment decisions, we knew it would be easy to use by employers and provide an efficient way to aggregate student data mapped to critical competencies. A bonus for us is that the survey instrument standardizes data collection but still allows us to ask some customized questions key to the Clemson experience."

In its recent Talent Pulse study, the Human Capital Institute found that more than half of the hard-to-find skills can be characterized as "social, cognitive, or emotional abilities." Until now, the collection of work-related behavioral insights by higher education organizations had not been standardized, structured, or competency-based across different academic departments.

"Career readiness is more important than ever, it is our hope that our program will help ensure that students are equipped with the right skills to tackle the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities that lie ahead. This pilot will help career services centers provide students with actionable insights on their work-related competence and help them be better prepared to enter the workforce," said SkillSurvey CEO Ray Bixler.

Each of the post-experience, career readiness surveys will include behavioral questions that reflect the following eight competencies as identified by NACE:

• Critical Thinking/Problem Solving
• Oral/Written Communications
• Teamwork/Collaboration
• Digital Technology
• Leadership
• Professionalism/Work Ethic
• Career Management
• Global/Intercultural Fluency

An individual competency report will be produced for each participating student that will include normative data and valuable insight on each student's 'career readiness' as compared to competency ratings of nearly 100,000 entry level job candidates across various industries. For more information on our pilot program and the career readiness project visit http://www.careerreadinessproject.com/. Phase 3 of the project will get underway in early 2019.

Currently, more than 100 higher education institutions in the U.S. are using SkillSurvey's solutions to improve the efficiency of their institutional hiring process, and the quality of the employees they select. These include state universities, colleges, community colleges, for profit universities and state systems. On average, these organizations are getting feedback from 4.5 references per job candidate and have access to a reference feedback report on the candidate in 1.2 business days.

SkillSurvey is used by more than 10,000 recruiters per month; each month more than 100,000 job candidates are reference checked using the solution. To date, more than 5 million job candidates and 30 million job references have experienced the solution.

About SkillSurvey®

SkillSurvey applies the science of human behavior and harnesses the power of insights and data to create a fuller picture of the people you recruit and hire. SkillSurvey makes the referencing and credentialing process more efficient and effective — by helping employers save time and money, by onboarding employees faster, and by growing revenues. Visit SkillSurvey at http://www.skillsurvey.com, and on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

SkillSurvey® and SkillSurvey Reference® are registered trademarks of SkillSurvey Inc.

© 2018 SkillSurvey Inc. and its affiliates.

Media Contacts

SkillSurvey: Stephanie Sabath, Sloane & Company, (212) 446-1873, ssabath(at)sloanepr.com

SOURCE SkillSurvey, Inc.

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