Are Portfolios on the rise?

Donna and others,

Here's another thought about the use of portfolios for work-related basic skills once one is on the job. The OECD PIAAC international report on 23 (24 once the U.S. report is released) countries' adults basic skills, released today (October 8), has many tantalizing findings. The full report and interactive tools are available at http://skills.oecd.org/skillsoutlook.html. Among thefindings are these:

• Unused skills can become obsolete or atrophy
• Using information-processing skills at work is closely linked to labour productivity

The report also offers, among others, these "Key points for policy":

                  Develop links between the world of learning and the world of work. Skills development can be more relevant and effective if the world of learning and the world of work are linked. Learning in the workplace allows young people to develop “hard” skills on modern equipment, and “soft” skills, such as teamwork, communication and negotiation, through real-world experience. Hands-on workplace training can also help to motivate disengaged youth to stay in or re-engage with the education system and makes the transition from education into the labour market smoother.

                  Provide training for workers. Employers have an important role in training their own staff; but some, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, might need public assistance to provide such training.

                  Ensure that the training is relevant. Employers and trade unions can also play an important role in shaping education and training, to make it relevant to the current needs of the labour market but also to ensure that workers’ broader employability is enhanced.

                  Allow workers to adapt their learning to their lives. Programmes to enhance adult information-processing skills need to be relevant to users and flexible enough, both in content and in how they are delivered (part-time, flexible hours, convenient location) to adapt to adults’ needs. Distance learning and the open educational resources approach have also allowed users to adapt their learning to their lives.

                  Identify those most at risk of poor skills proficiency. The most disadvantaged adults need to be not only offered, but also encouraged, to improve their proficiency. This means identifying low-skilled adults who require support, particularly foreign-language immigrants, older adults and those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and providing them with learning opportunities tailored to their needs. This is likely to require innovative approaches and significant community engagement.

                  Show how adults can benefit from better skills. More adults will be tempted to invest in education and training if the benefits of improving their skills are made apparent to them. For example, governments can provide better information about the economic benefits, including wages net of taxes, employment and productivity, and non-economic benefits, including self-esteem and increased social interaction, of adult learning.

                  Provide easy-to-find information about adult education activities. Less-educated individuals tend to be less aware of education and training opportunities, and may find the available information confusing. A combination of easily searchable, up-to-date online information and personal guidance and counselling services to help individuals define their own training needs and identify the appropriate programmes has often made a real difference

                  Recognise and certify skills proficiency. Providing recognition and certification of competencies can facilitate and encourage adult learners to undertake continued education and training. Transparent standards, embedded in a framework of national qualifications, and reliable assessment procedures are important instruments to this end. Recognising prior learning can also reduce the time needed to obtain a certain qualification and, thus, the cost in foregone earnings.

To return to the topic, if employers take these recommendations seriously, portfolios can be a great way to document work-related basic skills learning. Work tasks and projects that require critical reading, analytical writing or summarizing, or work-related numeracy/math skills could be included in online worker portfolios so that both a work task or challenge at hand could be met _and_ workers could demonstrate the writing and math skills they used to meet it. Possibly these portfolios could be used as evidence for job promotion or eligibility for employer-assested higher education.

I hope that CoP members have read the PIAAC report, we can discuss it here. It has lots of interesting workforce preparation and workplace literacy ideas and policy recommendations.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com

Hello Michelle, and others,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Michelle. There is lots there to think about, but for now I'll try to respond to just one of your concerns: "...How does the employer know that the employee candidate actually wrote the online portfolio, or did he have a friend do that for him?"

That's a reasonable concern with all kinds of evidence of learning, whether presented online or in person. In person, sometimes applicants present forged certificates, or photographic evidence of work that they say was theirs, when it was not. This is possibly a reason some employers may be skeptical of portfolios of all kinds.

The way I recommend that job seekers use portfolios, whether online, on an electronic storage device such as a jump drive, or in hard copy is to bring the portfolio to the job interview, not send it (and tobe prepared, if it is a hard copy or on a storage drive, to leave it to be returned to them later.) In the initial interview, if the employer asks if they have any other questions -- and if they think the interview has gone well -- they can mention that they have a portfolio with evidence of what they can do, briefly explain what's in it, and ask the interviewer if s/he wants to see it. The portfolio, like a good cover letter, or good answers to questions in an interview, can make an impression, can set one apart from the other qualified candidates, that is, if the portfolio is done well, and is designed for presentation to a prospective employer.

In adult literacy education many people have used writing porfolios as a formative assessment strategy. It's excellent for that purpose but an assessment writing portfolio is a terrible strategy for getting a job. That kind of portfolio is not the same as an employment interview presentation portfolio. In the presentation portfolio, the work -- writing, building rehabilitation skills, computer skills, math problem solving skills, or other skills demonstrated should be examples of one's best work, and should be polished and presented attractively. Ideally, the applicant presents the portfolio in person to the prospective employer, where the employer can ask questions about what they are looking at -- sometimes questions designed to see if the applicant was the person who actually did the work, to see if this is representative of the applicant's  skills.

Whether or not a presentation portfolio will help and what the portfolio should contain depend on what kind of job one is applying for. I have worked with programs that train young adults, some for entry level jobs in the building trades. What employers in the building trades are interested in -- in addition to good work habits, and good communication and teamwork skills -- is good basic math skills, and often evidence of good "skills with one's hands" which often means not only that the applicant can use tools well but that s/he has good work-related problem solving skills. Photographs of a project you worked on -- yourself or in a team -- that you can talk about can often be a great way to demonstrate your problem solving (and communication) skills. You can talk about the steps that led to the result, the problems encountered and how you addressed them. Through this dialogue about work photos in a portfolio employers can see that you, as the writer Mike Rose as put it in the title of a great book he wrote a few years ago, have a "mind at work."

I wonder anyone has examples of using electronic (or other) employment presentation portfolios and, if so, if you could share a description of them with us here. If students are willing to share their actual employment presentation portfolio URLs, perhaps many of us here would be interested in seeing them. 

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com