Measure and Develop Professional Skills
Professional Skills Development is a formative assessment that helps higher education programs measure, develop, and track the professional skills learners need for academic, clinical, and career success. Support learner growth, strengthen advising, and gather meaningful evidence for continuous improvement and accreditation.
Advance Learner and Program Success
Support Learner Growth
Help learners understand, develop, and communicate the professional skills they need for career success. Personalized feedback, reflection, and skill-building resources encourage continuous growth while helping learners build confidence throughout their educational journey.
Empower Programs With Actionable Insights
Gain meaningful insight into learner development to support learner advising, curriculum discussions, and continuous quality improvement. Longitudinal reporting helps faculty and program leaders identify trends, monitor growth over time, and make more informed decisions that support learner success.
Demonstrate Institutional Impact
Gather meaningful evidence of professional skills development to support accreditation, assurance of learning, teaching effectiveness, and continuous improvement. With consistent, longitudinal evidence of learner growth, institutions can better demonstrate educational outcomes and support quality improvement initiatives.
Why Programs Choose Professional Skills Development
Explore the capabilities that help higher education programs measure, develop, and demonstrate professional skills with greater consistency and confidence.
Built on Competencies, Not Personality
Measure observable, learnable professional competencies, not personality traits or fixed characteristics. Grounded in trusted higher education competency frameworks, Professional Skills Development creates a shared language for teaching, assessing, developing, and communicating the professional skills learners need to succeed.
Designed For Formative Development
Support ongoing growth, not simply assign a grade. Personalized feedback, guided reflection, and skill-building resources help learners understand their strengths, take action, and monitor development throughout their educational journey.
More Structured Than Subjective Assessment
Move beyond observations, reflections, and informal evaluations with a structured, scenario-based assessment that provides more consistent insight into professional skills. Programs gain meaningful evidence that supports informed conversations between learners and educators.
Actionable Insights For Programs
Understand how professional skills develop over time through individual, cohort, and longitudinal insights. Faculty and program leaders can identify trends, strengthen advising, support curriculum discussions, and gather evidence for accreditation and continuous improvement.
Built On Trusted Assessment Expertise
Built on Acuity Insights’ decades of experience designing and delivering research-backed assessments for higher education, Professional Skills Development draws on established situational judgment methodology and assessment science to provide a trusted foundation for measuring professional skills.
Makes Durable Skills Visible
Professional skills are developed across courses, co-curricular experiences, and workplace learning but are often difficult to define and communicate consistently. Professional Skills Development creates a shared language and meaningful evidence that help learners, educators, and program leaders recognize and communicate learner growth.
Professional Skills Development Manual
The Professional Skills Development Manual outlines the research and methodology behind Acuity Insights’ assessment tool for developing essential professional skills like communication, collaboration, ethical reasoning, and critical thinking. It demonstrates how Professional Skills Development provides actionable feedback and insights to support learner growth and program improvement.
Frequently Asked Questions
- 1. What is Professional Skills Development?
Professional Skills Development is a formative assessment that helps higher education programs measure, develop, and track professional skills over time. Through scenario-based assessment, personalized feedback, and longitudinal insights, it supports learner development, advising, accreditation, and continuous improvement.
- 2. What are professional skills?
Professional skills are transferable competencies, such as communication, collaboration, leadership resilience, and self-awareness, that support success across academic, clinical, and workplace settings. Unlike technical knowledge or job-specific skills, which evolve as industries and technologies change, professional skills remain relevant throughout a learner’s education and career, helping prepare them for long-term success in a changing world.
- 3. How does Professional Skills Development measure professional skills?
Professional Skills Development is a structured, scenario-based formative situational judgement assessment used to evaluate observable, learnable competencies. Rather than measuring personality or relying solely on subjective evaluations, it provides evidence of how learners demonstrate professional skills in realistic situations.
- 4. How is Professional Skills Development different from personality assessments?
Professional Skills Development measures competencies that can be learned and strengthened over time, not personality traits or fixed characteristics. This competency-based approach provides actionable feedback that supports learner growth while creating a shared language for educators and learners to discuss professional skill development.
- 5. Why use a formative assessment to develop professional skills?
Formative assessments are designed to support learning and continuous improvement rather than simply evaluate performance. Professional Skills Development provides personalized feedback, guided reflection, and development resources that help learners build professional skills throughout their program.
- 6. How does Professional Skills Development support accreditation and continuous improvement?
Professional Skills Development provides individual, cohort, and longitudinal insights that help programs demonstrate learner growth over time. These data can support accreditation, assurance of learning, curriculum evaluation, and evidence-based program improvement initiatives.
- 7. How do educators use Professional Skills Development results?
Faculty and program leaders use the results to guide advising, coaching, curriculum discussions, and learner support. Cohort and longitudinal reporting also helps identify trends, evaluate educational initiatives, and make informed decisions about program improvement.
- 8. Can Professional Skills Development be used across different academic programs?
Yes. Professional Skills Development is designed for higher education programs that want to measure and develop professional skills. Its competency-based framework can be applied across disciplines, including health sciences, business, engineering, law, and other professional education programs.