Meet Jane Sacco, our UK project champion for the Understanding My Journey project.
In this short video, Jane and one of her students, Nimco Abdi Osman, share their feedback on the UMJ toolkit.
Jane is the World of Work coordinator at BSix College in Hackney, London. She works within the careers department, coordinating work experience and work related learning for students at the College.
Jane has piloted the UMJ toolkit with groups of learners at the College. She reported the main benefit was learners’ realisation of a tangible framework for soft skills; they hadn’t previously linked their personal characteristics to a specific skill that could be applied in a work setting.
Jane described
‘It was fun to observe this realisation amongst the learners; as they started seeing their abilities or character described as a skill. They realised “this is a skill that I have and I could develop further.” As they went through the questions, they considered what they could improve upon.’
‘Visually, the toolkit is great and it has worked particularly well with our ESOL students, who enjoyed the visual experience as well as the process. I think it would work really well in schools, introducing the concept of soft skills to younger learners, as well as in Colleges.’
Jane shared her thoughts on how she plans to integrate the toolkit moving forward.
‘I think the best way to integrate the tools is within our career guidance toolkits, as a tool to support young people to develop their skills online. We have modules for employability skills and this will be a valuable tool to include, particularly for our ESOL students. It helped them to consider some of the key terms and phrases around soft skills development. Any of the words or terminology they didn’t understand, they were able to look up on google translate.’
‘Because it is a self-led framework, users can follow it independently, and so teachers can set it as an independent learning resource.’
Jane also provided useful feedback, and a tip for other staff who would like to share the toolkit with their learners;
‘I would say that with our learners, when using any tool for self assessment, they don’t necessarily think about what skills they possess, so it might be more helpful to phrase this as ‘abilities’ rather than skills.’
Jane plans to integrate the toolkit into her employability support for all ESOL learners at BSix – across nine groups, this means that 100 learners will benefit directly from their engagement with the toolkit.
All project resources are available for free on the UMJ website
