Improving Career Readiness Through Skills-Based Measurement: A Collaboration with Year Up United
Workforce development organizations face a persistent challenge: scaling programs while maintaining quality. As demand grows, many struggle to consistently measure participant progress, verify skill development, and uphold the credibility of their outcomes. Without reliable systems to track development, organizations cannot be certain that graduates have the baseline competencies (e.g., perseverance and adaptability) needed to succeed in professional settings. This gap undermines both employer trust and participant success.
Year Up United (YUU), a national leader in workforce training, encountered this challenge firsthand and decided to address it proactively. As the organization expanded, it identified gaps in assessing incoming participants and monitoring their progress over time. Because quality underpins YUU’s relationships with employers and drives student success, ensuring that every learner arrives prepared to contribute from day one is essential.
Our Work
To preserve quality while scaling the program, YUU has partnered with AIR to design a skills-based framework and implement a valid, reliable suite of assessments that track student progress. These assessments verify that students have acquired critical competencies and highlight areas where additional support is needed, ensuring readiness for internships and long-term career success.
Over the course of this collaboration, we have produced a comprehensive framework and suite of assessments. Drawing on YUU expertise, existing research, and resources such as the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Network database, AIR developed a model of workforce and career readiness skills across four categories:
- Technology;
- Communication;
- Personal effectiveness; and
- Career and workplace effectiveness.
We also helped YUU build and assemble a suite of 15 skills-based assessments through rigorous pilot testing. Building on this foundation, we are now supporting YUU in validating the assessment suite to understand the extent to which it predicts critical outcomes such as training success.
AIR’s collaboration with YUU has created a foundation for a robust system to evaluate and strengthen learner readiness throughout the entire YUU program lifecycle.
