The Skills Employers Look For

Setting the Stage

When employers hire people to fill vacant positions, they look for particular skills. Some of these skills are job-specific (e.g., for an engineering position, you need engineering skills and knowledge; for a welding position, you need a person who has welding skills and knowledge). However, employers also look for employability/transferrable skills such as ability to work as part of a team, ability to communicate effectively, ability to solve problems, etc. Employability skills are often developed outside of academic training programs through the activities in which we engage.

Material & Preparation

• Students should have a good understanding of what employability skills are and why they are important. 
• Arrange for computer and internet access for students working in pairs or groups.
• Download the Employability Skills 3, 2, 1 Exit Slip Reproducible (1 per student) [Google Doc] [PDF]

What to Do

Organize students into pairs based on their career interests/plans. Provide each student with a copy of the ready-to-use “Employability Skills 3, 2, 1 Exit Slip” Reproducible and a selection of career profiles from the Let’s Talk Science careers resource. Alternatively, students could select career profiles from a sector or area in which they are interested. Both partners must use the same profiles for this activity.

If the profiles are selected by the teacher, these can be organized by career sector (e.g., health care, information technology, skilled trades), educational pathway (e.g., college, apprenticeship, university), or they may be mixed. Teachers could compile collections based on career sectors encountered at different times throughout the year. Sample profile selections are provided below.

Individually, each students will read their assigned profiles and answer the three questions on the 3, 2, 1 Exit Slip. After completion, each student will meet with their assigned partner to share and discuss their responses.  

To conclude this lesson, teachers could engage students in small group or whole class discussions to address the following topics:

• What information did they use to identify the employability skills in a profile?
• Did they encounter any challenges in identifying employability skills? 
• Did any particular skills seem to be most common among the profiles?
• If they had to choose one or two employability skills as being most important, what would these be? Explain.
• What things did the people in the profiles have in common? 
• Could they see themselves working in a career sector like the ones in the selected profiles they reviewed? Why/why not?
• Did they feel they had skills similar to those identified for the people in the profiles? What are they? If not, do they think they could develop those skills? What would they need to do to develop those skills?

Please refer to the Exit Slip learning strategy learning strategy for more information and ideas on how to use it in your classroom.