Assessment of Employability Skills in Uganda’s Schools: Challenges and the Way Forward
Keywords:
Employability skills, Assessment of employability skills, Labour market, Labor market needsAbstract
In today’s volatile labour market, employers look beyond academic achievement when considering job applicants. However, since Uganda’s school curriculum is configured to cater for the academic achievements of learners, many graduates fall short of employers’ expectations. The issue that graduates lack Employability Skills (ES) pertinent in the contemporary labour market is hardly new, and stakeholders are incessantly advocating for mainstreaming ES in the national curriculum. While this advocacy is timely, the matter of how ES can be assessed and measured is muted. Yet the effectiveness of teaching and learning of ES is best inferred from the effectiveness of their assessment. This paper draws stakeholders’ attention to such obtrusive but muffled matter that is key to the successful mainstreaming of ES in the national curriculum. We conclude that to meet today’s labour market demands, Uganda’s schools need to shift the assessment strategies towards measuring ES, now prized in a complex global environment. Since the outcomes of assessing cognitive skills have had an important influence on policy, the assessment of and for learning ES will attract attention and support of policymakers in developing ES in the school system.
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