Its a constant challenge for people working with young people in projects and activities to be able to prove the value of what they’re doing - especially if many of those benefits are in so called ’soft skills’ - things like confidence, working relationships, being organised etc.

They’re called soft skills but they’re towards the top of the list of things that employers look for, so they’re very important. We had the same issue for our Apprentice Trainer Programme - if you speak to the young people involved with that many of them will talk about all sorts of benefits the experience had for them - but we never had any way of measuring this - even the research that was done on the programme doesn’t really give a true picture.

A main feature of our Prospective resource is the process of linking up young peoples skills and interests with other peoples needs. Prospective ends with young people identifying various’ actions’ they would like to take, and these Actions can be group or individual actions. The Outline resource includes ‘Personal Record Cards’ - these are things we developed because we recognised that many youth workers weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities available during a project to help young people develop personally - there was a tendency to just see it as a ‘group thing’. So we developed Personal Record Cards to allow young people to give themselves an assessment in their personal qualities.

The theory is that adults can use this assessment to have a discussion with individual young people about the different qualities and to look at what opportunities there are within a project for them to develop these further. Young people can then assess themselves again at a later stage, and over time it’s possible to see how young people feel they are developing and if used correctly how this can be attributed to the project they’re involved with.

I noticed recently that some groups are using the Personal Record Cards outside of the Outline Activity as a separate resource. Given how difficult it is to measure these skills, and how important it is for practitioners to be able to demonstrate learning & development, this seems like a very good use of the Cards - so we’re now offering them as an additional resource and you can order the ‘Personal Development Set’ from the Resources section on the main YoMo site.