SKILL STANDARD CREATION PROCESS - National Convergence Technology Center

The skill standard creation process can be used for any technical discipline. It can be used to create brand new programs. This is more than a normal business advisory council and the results are more than the normal.

STEP 1: Identify Leadership and Personnel

Responsibility/Roles
- Subject matter expert/Lead
  - Time commitment – approximately 12 hours per cluster plus meetings
  - Guides the work of the job cluster
  - Leads the Thought Leader meetings, Job Cluster meetings, and Verification meetings
- Skills Managers
  - Time commitment - 1 person is approximately 100 to 200 hours per cluster a second person would be on an as needed basis for assistance approximately 20 hrs per cluster
  - Schedules meetings
  - Sends out invites and other information
  - Creates voting forms
  - Coordinates synthesis and creation of key pieces of the skill standards
- Employability Lead
  - Time commitment – approximately 40 hours initially plus meeting participation
  - Coordinates the team who creates the employability skills
  - Creates and finalizes employability skills
  - Explains the process in the job cluster meetings
- Key Performance Indicator Lead
  - Time commitment – approximately 20 hour per cluster
  - Creates the key performance inidicators
- Student Learning Outcomes Lead
  - Time commitment – approximately 6 hours per cluster
  - Coordinates the creation of student learning outcomes

*All time commitments are based on a national scale your needs should be less.

STEP 2: Gather Labor Market Demand Data

STEP 3: Thought Leaders and Thought Leader Meetings

Thought Leaders purpose is the help guide and navaigate the skill standards
Determine what type of meeting you need to have
- Identification – Asking them to help identify the areas to be covered
- Assistance – Executing what they reccomend in an identification meeting isn’t going well and you need more direction/verification
Identify the ideal characteristic of the individuals you want
- C-suite Executive
- person in charge of keeping the company ahead of all others
Choose dates for your meetings
- It is essential to hold multiple meetings to obtain broader input
- Keep the attendance for each meeting capped at 20-25 making it easier to handle the discussion no one feels unheard
Create a registration form – use free programs like Google Form or Microsoft Form
Create your pitch - how will you entice people to attend your meetings?
- What is it in for them?
- Clear on time commitment
- How does this impact students and the future workforce?
Recruit
- Use these groups to start your recruitment
  - Personal contacts - always start with employers you know, you can ask them to recommend other employers
  - Industry associations – this is a good resource to help you recruit, associations have large groups of members they can reach out to
  - Posts on social media or website – posting on social media like LinkedIn can connect you to other employers
- Send personalized emails – mail merge is a great way to send a large number of personalized emails simultaneously
  - Do not use BCC mass emails; it reduces the chances of emails being received
- Create a follow-up schedule – an email follow-up should be sent out about two weeks after the original email to those who have not responded
- Send calendar appointments (i.e Outlook) to those who have signed up
Meeting prep
- Identify host- should be someone who can allow discussion and redirect when discussion gets off track
- Create a PowerPoint
  - Indetify the group hosting the meeting
  - Explain the purpose of the meeting
  - Show pro-forma information to guide the discussion - use the date pulled in at step 1
  - Include contact information in case someone thinks of something after the meeting
- Identify at least two people to take notes for each meeting (If online, then record and have someone take notes)
Host the meeting – All thought leader meetings are virtual meetings
- Start the meeting platform 15 minutes earlier than the meeting starts
- Have a welcome slide on the screen and play some soft music in the background. This helps people know their equipment is working because they can hear the music vs. complete silence
- Start the meeting promptly at the time given to the employers (stay aware of the time; you never want to take more time than you asked for)
- The host introduces themselves and then start going thru the slides.
- When you get to the slides with the data, take time at each one to open the discussion with the employers
- Use the exact same data in each meeting; you do not want to sway any of the discussion
After the meeting
- Collect all meeting minutes from the note takers
- Synthesize the meeting minutes from all meetings, looking for consensus
- Take the findings and turn them into an online voting form using Google forms or Microsoft forms
  - The voting is to confirm what was said in the meeting (e.g. if 10 items were presented and 6 items were really strong and focused on then they would be voting on the details of those 6 items)
- Send the voting form out to those that attended the thought leaders' meetings as verification that you captured what they said

STEP 4: Job Cluster Meetings

Choose your dates for your meetings – it is essential to hold multiple meetings and cap the attendance for each meeting to 20-25
Identify the ideal characteristic of the individuals you want
- The people who do the work
- Can also be the employers from the thought leader meetings
Create a registration form – use free programs like Google Form or Microsoft Form
- Registration should include questions like
  - Name
  - Email
  - Company
  - Can we use your name, company, industry in plublications? Click all that apply
- Create your pitch - how will you entice people to attend your meetings?
  - What is it in for them?
  - Clear on time commitment
  - How does this impact students and the future workforce?
- Recruit
  - Use contacts, associations, and posts on social media or website
  - Send personalized emails – mail merge is a great way to send a large number of personalized emails simultaneously
    - Do not use BCC; it reduces the chances of emails being received
  - Create a follow-up schedule – an email follow-up should be sent out about two weeks after the original email to those who have not responded
  - Send calendar appointments (i.e. Outlook) to those who have signed up
- Meeting Prep
  - Create a Pro-forma list of tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities (Limit the total number of items to 170-200)
    - Use sources like Career One-Stop, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
    - Work with a small group of employers to help narrow and focus a large list of tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities
  - Take that Pro-forma list and turn it into a Google Form for voting in the meeting
    - For more information on setting up the voting form, use this document ( link to voting set up)
  - Create a PowerPoint
    - Explain the purpose of the project
    - Provide directions for the voting - allow employers to ask questions to clarify the meaning of the votes and process
  - Host the meetings
    - Start the online meeting platform about 15 minutes early
      - Have welcome slide showing
    - Welcome and allow everyone to introduce themselves
    - Go over PowerPoint and answer questions
    - Allow about 20 minutes for voting
    - Go through the KSA spreadsheet on the screen
      - Discuss items with an average below 2.60
      - Widespread votes (i.e. votes almost equally spread across the rankings or a split between 4’s and 2’s)
      - Anything the employers want to discuss
    - Amend the document in real time with changes requested and agreed upon by the employers
    - Have a note-taker of the whole meeting in the room
    - Have someone who can monitor the chat window in the online platform
    - At the end of the discussion of the abilities ask employers what is missing from the list
  - Employability Skills
    - Data Analysis committee
      - Create a team of up to three people
    - Selection of verified employability knowledge and skills
      - Conduct a search to locate existing verified employability skills from places like National Skill Standards Board; Association of American College and Universities; NSF ATE IT skill standards projects, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges and Texas Skill Standards Board.
      - Team will select those most relevant to your focus
      - Have a larger group review and verify
    - Proficiency rating (Beginning, Intermediate, and advanced levels)
      - Employers will vote on the level of proficiency that they expect of a person who had held an IT position for six months to one year.
    - Have employers vote and discuss
  - Hybrid Meeting -With people in person
    - Employers meeting in person will arrive about 15 minutes early
    - Have coffee and water available from start of meeting
    - Have the employers sit in a U-shaped table setting
    - Provide a nice lunch if the meeting is over 3 hours
    - Have table tents for employers and name tags for everyone
    - Provide a printed blank copy of the KSAs+task for employers in the room
    - Have a print out posted of employer on the phone for host in the room
    - Have a sign in sheet
    - Show the Zoom on screen in the room
    - Note- this type of meeting has been less popular post COVID
  - Synthesis after all meetings
    - Combine votes and comment from all meetings into one spreadsheet
    - Review the meeting minutes to gather anything that needs to be added
      - It is ideal to have two or three people conduct the synthesis
      - A new item/topic should be mentioned by more than one or two people to merit getting added

STEP 5: Verification Meeting

Create KSA Synthesis Voting Form
- Take the results of the KSA synthesis and create a new voting form
  - These are the only items they will vote on for KSAs
    - Take only items that were drastically changed
    - New items added from the discussion
  - Create Key Performance Indicator Voting Form
    - Take the tasks that will remain after the voting
    - Group the tasks that are simial to the critical work functions defined by the National Skill Standards Board as major responsibilities of work covered by a cluster.
    - The groupings are used as a point of departure. If, in the process of identifying the KPIs, some are left without a grouping, the grouping can be enlarged or perhaps split in two, to accommodate the KPIs.
    - Create a source document: Locate and review prior verified/approved skill standards documents and enter all of their tasks and KPIs into a searchable database, Excel workbook or equivalent.
    - For the cluster being analyzed, list all of the ITSS tasks in a column with a second (blank) column for KPIs.
    - Review the source document and select tasks that correlate with those identified by the ITSS SMEs.
    - Copy and paste the KPIs from the selected tasks in the source document next to the matching tasks in the ITSS list.
    - Using the KSAs and the discussion records from the SME sessions, review, merge and sort the KPIs for the ITSS task grouping. It is important that the KPIs are relevant for both the tasks and the KSAs.
    - Remove redundancies and consolidate similar elements of performance.
    - Identify gaps and write KPIs to fill them, using understanding of the KPI development process and subject matter expert knowledge of the work of the cluster.
    - Review and edit for coherence.
    - Share the results with others on the team to get their input and revise.
    - Create a voting form – this will be the second voting form for this meeting
  - Meeting prep
    - Invite only those who participated in the KSA meetings- do not invite new employers
    - Only one meeting for this, so invitations are easy
  - Host meeting
    - Welcome and explain the plan for the meeting
    - Employers vote on the KSA verification
    - Discuss results with employers – the goal is to ensure they agree you heard what they said and accurately captured it
    - Employers vote on the Key Performance Indicators
    - Discuss anything KPI that doesn't rate high or that the employers want to talk about

STEP 6: Student Learning Outcomes

Final-ish KSA - KSAs are never final
- Take the cleaned-up KSA and work with faculty subject matter experts who can take the knowledge, skills, and abilities and create student learning outcomes.
Group all Knowledge items by major topics
Group all Skills by major topics
Group all Abilities by major topics
Review each group for further breakdown for measurable outcomes
Use Bloom's taxonomy's six levels of thinking to evaluate each grouped KSA
- Use Bloom's taxonomy action verbs to develop measurable student learning outcomes
Have other faculty review the student learning outcomes
Revise SLOs based on the review