Why CCCA uses Evidence-Based Vocational Tools
Career assessments are an important part of our career counselling services. The right evidence-based tools can provide insights into your interests, talents, values, aptitudes, skills and work readiness. The Employment Readiness Scale™ (ERS™) vocational tool is a self-assessment vocational tool that supports our career professionals to check your work readiness strengths in three key areas:
- Employability
- Soft Skills
- Challenges.
We know that employers hire staff based on the strength of their soft skills and it is often difficult to identify how strong you are in these areas. It is also helpful to reflect on the types of barriers and challenges that may be impacting your ability to find and keep work. This is where the ERS™ online self-assessment tool can help identify where you need the most help. It creates a targeted action plan that with the support of a career professional, can help you to move towards your career goals.
CCCA has been using ERS™ since 2017 in projects with Jobs Victoria, Flemington Works, City of Greater Dandenong, Moonee Valley and the City of Hume.
Parliamentary Recommendation
The ERS™ or similar vocational tool was recommended in the report following the inquiry into sustainable employment for disadvantaged jobseekers. Extensive use of the tool has shown that over 50% of vulnerable jobseekers in the programs CCCA has supported have improved their work readiness and successfully secured employment or pursued study/skills pathways to their employment goals.
Read the report here
How the ERS™ works
The ERS™ looks at various factors to determine work readiness and when strong in all the employability factors and soft skills, it increases the chance of becoming employed and maintaining employment by 80% after 12 weeks.
The ERS™ is an internationally validated, self-assessment vocational tool that helps to establish how well prepared jobseekers feel they are for work. Follow up career sessions and ERS retakes help to show where they have improved and where help is still needed to become work ready.
The goal of the ERS™ is to support jobseekers to become self-sufficient and strong enough to manage their career now and into the future. They can retake the ERS™ up to 6 times depending on their individual support needs and the number of career counselling sessions they engage in.
Being Work Ready means that with little or no assistance, jobseekers can find, acquire, and keep an appropriate job, as well as be able to manage transitions to new jobs as needed.
Answer a few questions to get a sample ERS report here
For Employment and Career Services
The online assessment, planning, evaluation, and reporting tool provides a quick comprehensive initial assessment of employment readiness that can be retaken to track changes in client work readiness. It includes:
- increased levels of work readiness across four Employability Factors and five Soft Skills
- identifies challenges impacting the client
- a detailed feedback report of their strengths and challenges
- an action planning tool
- multiple retakes available up to 6 times showing:
- improvements and increasing client motivation
- service delivery effect and evidence of effectiveness of employment/career programs.
Roll-up reports with real-time data help employment and career consultants and their organisations identify the type of support their clients need and when to offer this support within service delivery. The documented client improvement provides evidence of service effectiveness, essential for ongoing or repeat funding from stakeholders.
If you would like a demonstration or to speak to one of our team about the ERS™, call on (03) 9433 8000 or email: david.thompson@acce.org.au
For further information on the Employment Readiness Scale™ visit www.ersscale.com