Personal development reports
The idea
An online system that supports people (particularly young people) to identify their personal skills and qualities and to be able to track/measure their personal development throughout their involvement in a project or activity over a period of time.
The system will help participants to monitor their personal achievement/progress and evidence learning and development and will need to include a function that allows people to print off a formatted report that they could use in a portfolio or attach to a CV.
This could be used towards accreditation schemes and as evidence of personal growth – useful for individuals and for practitioners supporting young people.
The system could work something like:
Stage 1: Sign Up
- Participant takes part in some interactive activities designed to explore their personality and skills
- Participant answers some specific questions about their interests and skills (provides a rating on a sliding scale)
- Participant is given a summary of their skills, talents and interests (at this stage the system could optionally provide recommendations for potential activities or career interests or educational pathways etc, depending on the implementation of the system by an organisation)
Stage 2: (ongoing)
- Participant is able to update their initial profile using similar steps as at stage 1 (but they cannot see the answers they provided at stage 1!)
- The system analyses the difference in responses and provides a ‘progress report’ indicating areas of progress (or not)
- Based on responses the system could provide links to resources to help develop particular skills
Stage 3: Final
- Participant enters information again (without being able to see previous responses)
- Participant is able to download a pdf summary that indicates their personal ‘journey’ and a summary of their skills, talents, interests
- Based on final report further recommendations
What social need does it address?
This could be a huge asset for those involved with informal education and those looking to support people to develop ‘soft skills’ – the useful skills you really need but can’t get any qualifications in!
It would be an asset for practitioners supporting children and young people in all sorts of settings (and arguably some adults) and would also be an effective tool for helping children and young people gain the maximum personal benefit when involved in projects and activities.
It would provide a facility for young people that do achieve very good personal development during their involvement in informal activities to gain recognition and evidence of the progress they really did make, and to provide this in a format that is credible to others.
The system could be developed as a framework that organisations could adopt towards their own priorities – eg. educational institutions using it to support young people to make choices about courses and training, or a youth agency using it to support young people to identify effective ways of using their skills towards community activities and campaigns.
What’s new about it?
Nothing like this exists! There are lots of things that touch on it such as self analysis surveys or personality tests, but this should be developed as something that records a persons actual personal development over a period of time (not something they can guess the ‘right’ response in order to make their result look cool!)
What inspired you?
Complete frustration!! I’ve been involved with so many young people that have had really impressive ‘learning/development journeys’ but its impossible to credibly measure this. We’ve tried diaries, videos, award schemes – they’re all too fiddly, too academic or just don’t capture that development has happened. Its often very difficult for a person to look back and accurately reflect on where they were to where they are now.
I also think there is a need for something more meaningful than the endless ‘accreditations’ that young people gain. Potential employers are much more impressed by what potential candidates are able to discuss about themselves – their skills, interests, experiences than they are by ‘wads’ of certificates. It would be nice to provide something that allows people to back up those good conversations about themselves!
Idea submitted by Mike Amos-Simpson
Mike set up and runs YoMo – a social enterprise that provides training and resources to support young people to contribute to their local communities. Their training is led by young people that have come through the training themselves and YoMo works all over the UK and Ireland, as well as supporting projects in Malawi.
Mike,
Brilliant Idea! I’m so excited to see this… I have been thinking about something quite similar for a different audience, but largely applicable to your goals and very similar in the desired metric – personal development. I’m adding the idea I would propose below – I suspect it’s unlikely I’ll make it across the pond for the camp and I would love to see this move forward, so look forward to progress notes… I hope this is helpful! – Kate
Idea
The “Be” Factor, a unique formula combined with an innovative 360 Skill Portfolio to create the Be Well, Work Well application
- that revolutionizes the way students are evaluated by promoting development and assessment of skills needed for success in the 21st Century.
- that teaches and evaluates adaptability, capacity for change, leadership/ethics, and communication skills in a meaningful way
- that provides students, schools, training programs, and employers with a “skill portfolio”
Be Factor: One’s ability to set personal goals, modify and modulate behavior to achieve those goals, demonstrate reflective capacity on meeting personal goals previously established, exercise the capacity to refine goals, and sustain a “learning” mindset for personal development.
Be Well, Work Well: One’s ability to work well with others, know oneself – one’s moral/ethical outlook, understand one’s strengths and weaknesses, demonstrate the capacity for responsiveness to others, capacity to tolerate uncertainty and difference, provide and receive feedback from others, identify one’s leadership strengths, demonstrate commitment to develop one’s weaker areas, harness one’s energy to accomplish a desired outcome (including process outcomes)
What Social Need does it address?
Schools evaluate knowledge, and on occasion, analytic/reasoning skills, but life skills – communication, capacity, leadership- are not cultivated, nor incented through evaluation. Yet these skills are the cornerstone of success in the “real world.”
Developing mechanisms that both cultivate and demonstrate a person’s capacity, adaptability, communication skills, and personal development are vital to transform the status quo and to lead our education paradigm and those it trains into the future.
This effort specifically arises out of an interest to develop a tool to evaluate interdisciplinary professionals who require a common skill set – such as communication, leadership, ethics, conflict resolution. In the absence of adequate tools to measure these skills, unequal access to opportunities arises, allowing less “skilled” people to be selected based on degrees and academic achievement, while the most important skill sets for success are “soft” skills.
What’s New About it?
- While 360 reviews and skill portfolios are not, separately, new, this application would integrate these two approaches to innovate the educational paradigm with the aim of transforming the educational metrics and promoting cultivation of the most essential life skills that go untaught and unevaluated.
The System Would Work Something Like….
- One does a baseline skill self assessment and sets personal goals appropriate to the training course/situation, then at a mid-point interval or after each session (if short program), the person re-assesses their skills (blind to initial score), assesses their progress, resets goals, and upon completion of the course/training, the participant re-assesses skills, progress, and goal achievement. Participant also provides peer and coach feedback and evaluation.
- In addition to setting personal goals with one’s own (blinded) subsequent “self assessment” of those goals, the person would receive assessments from peers and coaches… in order to reduce “rigging” the system (where we all give each other high scores), specific feedback comments/ examples would be encouraged/necessary for outlying reports….
- each person’s personal assessment would be internally calibrated to how they assess themselves relative to others. e.g. if they are overly high for others, but low for themselves (vice versa) or if they rate everyone on a higher evaluation that weight might be calibrated as “less” weighted in the other’s final score. That calibration would be incorporated into their portfolio and Be Factor.
- with coaches also providing assessment the student’s peer feedback can be assessed for its calibration with each other and the coaches
- the self/peer/coach feedback and calibrations, hopefully, enable surfacing and reducing the adverse impact of personal biases that might lead some people in a peer or supervisory role to unfairly “grade” a person whom they don’t like and/or is different.
- collectively, these three sources of input, akin to the 360 review in corporate realm, provide the basis for a “skill portfolio” for each student. More than simply self assessment the external validation from peers/coaches makes the Be Well, Work Well a robust skill portfolio that a person can share for professional development and job situations.
- the Be Well portfolio could be uploaded to a “Work Well” public portfolio that one could post on LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, other sites for job seekers
- ideally, it would be a core platform with open source developer tools so that other institutions/programs/NPOs could build their own portals from it and for a nominal fee, they could use the central components/metrics whose validity and value arise from its measurement across institutions and training programs.
- the application could/would provide a foundation for accreditation in disciplines that have not yet established credentialing mechanisms (mediation, interpersonal, leadership, ethics training, professionalism, conflict resolution, etc)
What Inspired You?
The opportunity to build leaders from the bottom up – create an application that can change the classroom paradigm and metrics to reflect something meaningful and enable people with non-traditionally measured, valuable skills the opportunity to advance! Most of all, to leverage technology to disrupt the status quo – create recognition/ valuing of invaluable life skills.
I realized that these vital life skills – self knowledge, communication, leadership, interpersonal, capacity for uncertainty/difference, and personal development – are not taught and the tools to evaluate them are wanting – most importantly, we need to cultivate this thirst for growth when people are young and to provide recognition and opportunities for people who have them in spades … it’s a habit that one can grow, so why not start early?!
What are you Looking For?
- Developers who might be interested in building the project.
- Funders who would support the initial costs until endeavor is self funding.
I am seeking to develop this technology as a component for an leadership program. I know there are a variety of other disciplines/areas that could benefit from it, though I don’t envision a blockbuster tech endeavor, a definite break even. I am considering pulling this component out of the grant application and developing a separate, private technology project as I am uncertain whether foundation funders would understand the value of funding this tech aspect of an academic endeavor. Reflections on that forward plan are welcome.
There is something along these lines available through a group that I think is affiliated with the author of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman. I believe that access to this group’s programs are expensive and thus impractical for youth, others in a variety of sectors that might benefit and may have “dominant” culture overtones, as some EI/SI metrics favor “western” and “psychotherapeutic” models of understanding. http://www.eiconsortium.org/measures/eci_360.html
Also, I don’t think it has the “over time” component and it requires someone “qualified” to assess abilities so it leads to a kind of elitism in access that a democratized model such as those proposed here do not.
I am of two minds about the tension around making this kind of product accessible to all and creating some method to ensure that people are getting fairly measured (to the extent there are measurements by others), but I would opt over developing the tool for cultivating personal development in a democratized/accessible manner and then let whomever adapts the platform determine how to monitor external/social references.
Again, hope this helps the development thinking…
wow thanks for that input – good to see how the use could diversify beyond my own thoughts about its possible uses. I think a lot of practitioners would like the option to contribute to the assessments of individual development and to be able to marry that up into an overall ‘score’.
Its the overtime element that I think is really important – if this works it can be much more effective in attributing the individuals development to what it was they were involved with at the time (taking it away from a simple self assessment/personality test).
I guess the tricky part will be designing a framework that allows for the variables to be easily altered so that it can be used in different environments/by different organisations – fingers crossed someone will have a solution for that…
Just had a further thought on this too – the different inputs could be ‘weighted’ – so for example in one scenario you might allow for a self assessment, a peer assessment and a tutor assessment with weightings at 30%, 30%, 40% (with an option to vary these weightings according to the project) and with a bit of maths these could affect the final ratings accordingly. This would also users the option to have just a self assessment at 100% (or a 100% tutor assessment) etc.
Brilliant! Congratulations on the selection!!
Agreed that the overtime element is a critical component for assessing personal development; I too had spec’d out to have the goal setting over time with the user blinded to their historical input to assess their ability to goal set, meet goals and build their progress. Since self-development is an ongoing process and requires a constant re-calibrating, the over time element enables the user to set clear objectives for concrete skill development and to see their “success.” Visibly seeing positive growth begets more enthusiasm, we tend to focus, culturally, on deficits and being forced to see the merits along with the opportunities for growth is a powerful paradigm shifter!
I think building the kind of flexibility that would enable different organizations/environments to build off of a core platform wouldn’t be that difficult (she says, admittedly not a programmer) and certainly the ethos of open source that would enable different orgs/institutions to use this with their own “branded” interface would be essential.
From the US Youth market perspective, there are a lot of programs around me who are working with young people incorporating the kind of personal development skills into the youth programming (youthspeaks (my favorite local group), writerscorp, citykids (theater by youth for youth- great group I volunteered with from nyc), etc) … and those organizations could use an easy to modify/build interface that would enable them to upload their “web design/brand” and modify the personal development metrics with some core program driven goals and then the individual user could draft goals. I have some web snapshots of what those metrics might look like somewhere around here.
From the US market perspective, I might suggest having user ID compatibility with Facebook (social/school/work networking) and LinkedIn (professional networking), I don’t know whether there are comparable UK entities or whether these are as dominant in the UK social network market.
Indeed, agreed, I might envision the ability to create an “overall score” that would have a particular weighting (my though would be to give the highest weight to the individual then equal parts to peer and tutor – so 60% (self), 20% (peer), 20% (tutor) – with the peer & tutor scores internally calibrated and cross referenced for improved validity. I suppose offering control over the % to the “user” organization with a strong encouragement that under 50% weight on the individual defeats the purpose of creating an empowered “self development” mindset (?) … it would be a shame for traditional paradigms of ‘power’ to co-opt the tool to ‘grade’ others on soft skills, but I may reveal my biases.
Happy to continue the dialogue and share other thoughts. I am so excited about this project selection and moving forward for youth and its potential for application in other disciplines. I do believe that the time has come to provide youth and those not ‘in sync’ with the traditional system with tools to demonstrate their skills in other highly valuable areas…
Feel free to get in touch offline, I would like to work with you on this and/or from what you come up with… I can be found at k.michi.ettinger (at) jhu.edu …. I’ve submit something for a west coast mashup at netsquared for elder care (project name: Live Well) It doesn’t align quite as nicely as this project did with the social innovation camp, but it also tells a bit more about my background, we’ll see where it all goes! Congratulations again!
Thanks Kate – please do keep inputting its very useful. Obviously my brains now in full flow since finding out the ideas been selected.
I’ll look into all the programmes you’ve mentioned (lol just noticed the US/UK spellings!) and I’m going to attempt to start making sense of all the different thoughts and put them into a simple format- once done I’ll drop you an email in the next few days.
There is a web-site, which tackles a similar issue, which people may be interested in viewing. The concept is about assessing barriers to work and then giving advice as to how to tackle them. I developed the concept myself while at Jericho.
http://www.barrierbreaks.org.uk
Anyway, some fantastic stuff developed. I hope there is more to come!