Actionable Curriculum Insights Powered by Skills

Published on Feb 16, 2021

Updated on Nov 3, 2022

Written by Remie Verougstraete

Actionable Curriculum Insights Powered by Skills

Emsi is pleased to introduce Skillabi: A powerful new way to evaluate and improve curriculum alignment with the job market, using the common language of skills.

 

For years, higher education and the labor market have spoken fundamentally different languages: colleges and universities have talked in terms of degrees, GPAs, and CIP codes while employers are primarily interested in the skills an individual has and the work they can do. 

This disconnect has made it nearly impossible to achieve a clear, apples-to-apples comparison of what an institution teaches and what the market is asking for. As a result, academic leaders and staff struggle to quickly assess how curriculum aligns with the needs of learners, and confidently determine next steps to better meet those needs.

Overcoming the language barrier

To solve this problem, Emsi created Skillabi.

Skillabi works by surfacing the work-relevant skills in the courses you offer, and showing how those skills relate to labor market demand. By using skills as a shared language, it delivers insight that is far more precise, up-to-date, and actionable than traditional approaches that rely on government taxonomies to approximate connections between programs and careers.

With Skillabi, it’s skill-to-skill instead of CIP-to-SOC.

Quickly review skills you teach, related skills to consider adding, and how they relate to employer demand.

Putting skills to work

Over the past year, we’ve piloted Skillabi with a handful of colleges and universities who are using these curricular skill insights to:

  • Review skill alignment of academic offerings with the job market in their region

  • Repackage curriculum to better serve the needs of their industry partners

  • Surface the in-demand, marketable skills taught to students in each course

  • Empower faculty with market data related to the skills they teach in their classroom

  • Improve course descriptions and boost SEO on program web pages

Skillabi starts by surfacing the work-relevant skills in your course descriptions and syllabus documents.

See it in action

Head over to the Skillabi page to see what these skill insights look like and learn more about using them to answer mission-critical questions for your institution.

Want to see Skillabi in action? Complete the form below and we’ll be in touch to walk you through an example of Skillabi using one of your institution’s programs.