What Are Skill Standards?

Voluntary skill standards establish the agreed-upon, industry-identified knowledge, skills, and abilities required to succeed in the workplace. Skill standards provide benchmarks of skill and performance attainment that are behavioral and measurable. Skill standards answer two critical questions:

• What do workers need to know and be able to do to succeed in today's workplace?
  
  
• How do we know when workers are performing well?

Without this fundamental information, employers do not know who to hire or how to evaluate employees, employees and new entrants to the workforce do not know what is expected of them, and educators do not know how to prepare students for the challenges of the workplace.

Why Use Skill Standards?

Skill standards address the global shift to an economy based on knowledge and information and the need for higher levels of skill within the workforce. Like never before, education is challenged to restructure itself to prepare that new workforce. A well established skill standards system is a proven way of addressing educational gaps. Skill standards have several important benefits:

• Industry-identified skill standards will serve as a vehicle for companies to communicate their performance expectations for workers. Skill standards will provide a common framework for communication of workplace expectations between business, education, workers, students, and government.

• Voluntary skill standards will facilitate the reform of education to match the curriculum to workplace requirements. Competency-based standards will assure the employability of students who have completed programs based on those standards. National recognition of skill standards in career fields will provide a common basis for certifying achievement against those standards, thereby allowing for the portability of skills across companies and careers.

• Skill standards will close the qualification gap by linking industry expectations for knowledge, skills, and abilities to the education provided to students. Skill standards will provide workplace expectations, so students know what they need to be able to do to meet those expectations, workers understand what is expected to perform and advance in their field, and educators can discern the competencies on which the curriculum is developed.