ACT WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment

Essential skills are referred to by many names, including “soft skills,” “21st-century skills,” “employability skills,” or “durable skills.” These skills are different from core academic skills like reading or math. In short, essential skills are interpersonal, self-regulatory, and task-related behaviors that research shows are important for doing well in education and in job settings.

In education settings, having these skills can help you do well in your studies and finish your degree. At work, these skills can make you perform well at your job, make you more satisfied, and help you work well with others. People with these skills are less likely to quit their jobs, and they can earn more money over their lifetime. Having essential skills can enhance your quality of life. These skills are like superpowers!

Absolutely! Multiple surveys show that essential skills are—well, essential—to succeed at work now and in the coming future. For example, McKinsey & Company conducted a survey of 18,000 workforce professionals in 15 countries focused on the skills needed to succeed at work in the future. Of 56 skills identified, 35 (or 63%) were related to essential skills (e.g., persistence, collaboration, self-control). When focused on the U.S. alone, a study by America Succeeds and Burning Glass analyzed over 82 million job postings and found that seven of the ten most-requested skills are essential skills.

The WorkKeys Essential Skills assessment measures six skills that have been demonstrated by a robust body of research to relate to important outcomes in education settings, workforce settings, and life in general. These skills (and their definitions) include:

There are a variety of audiences—including individuals, institutions, and organizations—that can benefit from the insights generated by the WorkKeys Essential Skills assessment. Audiences and use cases are listed below.

As articulated by ACT’s Holistic Framework, education and work success involves a combination of knowledge and skills from a variety of areas. We do not emphasize essential skills over other skills; instead, we emphasize essential skills alongside core academic or foundational skills. Below are some reasons why the development of essential skills is considered both important and complementary to foundational skills:

• A well-rounded education (whether K-12 or postsecondary) includes the development of essential skills as success in life depends on more than just academic knowledge. These skills are vital for building supportive relationships, making plans and following through on them, and staying resilient in the face of challenges, all of which are critical for success in personal and professional contexts.
• Employers value essential skills in addition to academic qualifications. Essential skills enhance teamwork, leadership, communication, and flexibility, thus making individuals more valuable in the workplace. Further, as automation and technology continue to change the job landscape, essential skills like empathy, adaptability, and collaboration can help individuals to stand out from the competition (whether that competition is human- or machine-based).

The WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment include a variety of features designed to optimize the information examinees and administrators receive in a short amount of time. These features include:

• Multi-method, research based. The assessment combines Likert and Situational Judgement Test items to create a more engaging experience. The skills measured are based on decades of research on the Big Five and HEXACO models, two models in personality psychology that have a rich empirical backing.
• Anytime, anywhere online testing. Online administration allows examinees a streamlined experience using ACT’s learning management system or your existing system. Proctoring is not required.
• Short test time, reader friendly. The assessment takes approximately 15 minutes to complete. Items are written at a fifth-grade reading level.
• Digital badging. Examinees who score high on each measured essential skill will receive a micro-credential that can easily be shared with employers via Credly digital badge.
• Robust and actionable data. For administrators, examinee score reports and aggregate-level data are available and can be downloaded from their learning management system as soon as 15 minutes after testing is complete. Data resources and free coaching tools are available to ensure that institutions and organizations can use WorkKeys Essential Skills data to understand and support examinee skill development and success.
• Dedicated support. ACT provides comprehensive training materials and resources to ensure successful administration. Dedicated WorkKeys Customer Support ensures that administrators have easy access to solutions and

There are two reports available: an Examinee Report and a Roster Report.

The Examinee Report provides detailed information on an examinee. For each individual who completes the WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment, this report includes scores on each of the six skills. Score reports include a graphical representation of the respondent’s scores on each skill, as well as interpretive information about what each score means. Further, the report includes a link to a free coaching tool with exercises and activities designed to help examinees improve their skills.

The Roster Report catalogs all examinees who have been assessed during a specified time period. This report includes the following:

• Examinee name and email
• Date and time of administration and administration site
• Examinee demographics, education, and employment status
• Examinee’s percentile scores for each of the six Essential Skills

The Roster Report is generated as a .csv file, which can be opened by any spreadsheet application, such as Microsoft Excel. As a result, an administrator can filter, sort, and merge the data in any way that meets their needs.

For more details, take a look at the “Interpreting WorkKeys Essential Skills Reports” section in the user guide.

Yes. As an examinee, if you earn a high score on any of the six skills, you are eligible to claim a digital badge through Credly, which is the largest and most connected digital credential network. And, if you have also earned an NCRC, there are digital badges for those as well.

Digital badges are quickly becoming the common language of verified skills. With badges, you can signal to employers that you are highly skilled in one (or more) essential skills—and you can include these in your resume or your social media profile.

Yes, you can. There is a common misconception that one’s characteristic ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving are “set” at an early age and do not change, or that there are “types” of people with particular skills. However, there is much evidence to counter these misconceptions. Research overwhelmingly supports the notion that our essential skills change over time. Studies have found that people’s skills naturally change throughout their lifespans. That is, people tend to mature as they grow older and are more likely to do the following: persist when challenges arise, cooperate with others, manage their emotions in stressful situations, and stay flexible and open to new experiences.

Research has also found that people can change their skills on purpose, either through simple activities like undergoing a series of behavioral challenges, through systematic curriculum delivered at school or workforce development settings, and through more structured and longer-term interventions, like one-on-one coaching.

To facilitate skill development and growth, WorkKeys Essential Skills has a paid curriculum as well as free coaching tools. Both are aligned to the assessment and can help individuals to improve their essential skills.

For more info, take a look at the “Note for Career Coaches” section in the user guide.

The reliability of a test reflects the stability or consistency of test results over time and across diverse settings. Research has reported that assessments of essential skills display moderate to high internal consistency reliability, meaning how well each item relates independently to the rest of the items on a scale and how they relate overall. Despite the brevity of the assessment, the internal consistency reliability of the WorkKeys Essential Skills assessment falls in the high range. Further information on the reliability of the assessment can be found in the Technical Manual.

Validity refers to the degree to which empirical evidence and theory support the adequacy and appropriateness of conclusions drawn from assessment scores. In the case of assessments of essential skills, studies have shown that properly designed assessments are valid predictors of many aspects of work performance, including quality and quantity of work, teamwork, leadership behaviors, turnover, absenteeism, counterproductive work behaviors, and organizational citizenship/helping behaviors, as well as job satisfaction, job tenure, and earnings. These assessments are also predictive of a variety of consequential outcomes in educational and broader life contexts (see table below).

Specific to the WorkKeys Essential Skills assessment, research indicates that the test measures the same broad themes as those captured by other well-validated assessments of the Big Five and the HEXACO—the models that served as the theoretical models for this assessment. Further, validity research done with the assessment suggest that it is predictive of job performance in similar ways as those reported in the research literature. Detailed construct and criterion validity evidence is presented in the Technical Manual.

In training and development contexts, people seeking formative feedback find taking an assessment of essential skills helpful. In selection contexts, research based on opinion surveys of job applicants shows that the majority of respondents perceive these types of assessments as an appropriate selection procedure. When asked to rank order their overall impression of various selection procedures from positive to negative, assessments of essential skills consistently rank in the middle (i.e., neutral), below interviews and above honesty testing.

In general, research has shown that “fakeability” or cheating has a small impact on the validity of assessments of essential skills in most settings, particularly in training and development contexts. Although most examinees tend to respond honestly when completing these assessments, sometimes examinees do exaggerate their positive attributes, which can potentially bias the results. For this reason, the WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment contains multiple item types, which research shows can help to mitigate against response biases and attempts to “enhance” the results.

Also, on occasion, examinees don’t pay much attention to the assessment questions or rush through their responses which results in scores that are not an accurate reflection of the person’s skills. To help address this issue, the WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment contains an algorithm that can help to detect careless responding. When this is triggered, a score report is not generated and a message in the reporting platform will state “No Report Available” with an information icon preceding it. When hovering over the text, a more detail explanation appears in a text box that reads as follows: A report was not generated for this student. This occurred because the student’s pattern of responses was highly indicative of a lack of attention to, and engagement with, the assessment (e.g., finishing the assessment unreasonably quickly, answering “strongly agree” to all answers, etc.). As such, creating valid scores for the student was not possible. We encourage you to encourage the student to retake the assessment, putting forth more time and effort in providing thoughtful answers.”

Industrial-Organizational psychologists, who are experts at designing employee selection and assessment systems, recommend using a “multiple hurdle approach” for employment selection to enhance the accuracy and fairness of hiring decisions. This approach involves the use of several assessment stages, where candidates must pass each stage before moving on to the next. Examples of stages that an examinee may complete include initial screening, assessments of foundational skills, assessments of essential skills, structured interviews, and/or work samples and simulations. The multiple hurdles approach provides a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates and reduces the risk of biases while improving the overall quality of hires. Since the WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment would only constitute a single stage in this process, it should not be used as the only source of data for making a high stakes decision. However, as described above, it can be a useful component of a multiple hurdles approach.

Adverse impact refers to the likelihood that a selection tool systematically selects members of one demographic group over another. In terms of adverse impact, research on assessments of essential skills has shown small to moderate differences between demographic groups. Further, these types of assessments are rarely implicated in adverse impact claims. Consistent with the research literature, analyses from the WorkKeys Essential Skills Assessment show that this assessment does not result in substantial adverse impact. Additional information is provided in the Technical Manual.