Sims Capability Assessment

Read a finished recordA finished one. Made-up student, no sign-in.→Tell us about your programmeSix questions, about two minutes→

The problem it addresses

Students complete hundreds of hours of community-engaged work and cannot describe any of it to an employer. They have the capabilities. They do not have the words.

Across two years of advising conversations with our own scholars, not one connected two service experiences to a named competency. That is a practitioner observation from one programme, not a study.

How it works

The student answers once. About 92 questions: 20 about them and 72 scored, ten of which ask for a story in their own words.
Two readers score every story. A model scores it against a rubric anchored in students’ own stories. A practitioner scores the same story.
The practitioner decides. That is the current decision rule while reliability work continues. It is a choice about authority, not a proven accuracy claim.
The student gets a record. Five parts: her experience, her evidence, putting it to work, her roadmap, her progress.

The twelve capabilities

Aligned with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies. The same twelve everywhere, with room for a programme to add its own on top.

CommunicationAnalytical Problem-SolvingAdaptabilityEmotional IntelligenceCollaborationSystems ThinkingAdaptive LeadershipCross-Cultural CompetencyInitiative & DriveRelationship BuildingResource ManagementCommunity Leadership

NACE publishes eight competencies and this framework has twelve, so the alignment is a crosswalk. A crosswalk establishes alignment. It does not establish equivalent measurement, and we say so rather than implying otherwise.

What earns a rating

Every capability sits in one of five bands. The top two are earned by a story, not by a score.

Band	What it takes
Signature Strength	A full story from two different parts of her life. Two stories from the same job count as one part.
Natural Strength	One strong story, or a high score seen in one context.
Developing	Evidence is there and not yet consistent.
Emerging	A trace of it, not enough to call.
Not enough evidence	The instrument never asked the question that would have shown it. A statement about the instrument, not about the student.

Two contexts is an evidence requirement rather than proof of mastery. It also means caregiving, family translation and church work count as contexts. That matters for students whose work was never counted as work.

What we can show, and what we cannot

What existsSixty-one students are in the system. Scoring, practitioner review, record writing and delivery all run end to end. Early findings were presented at IARSLCE in October 2026.

No claim that students become more employable, and none that a rating predicts workplace performance. There is no evidence for either yet.
No reliability statistic yet. Criteria and independent rating procedures are still being established, and a second trained scorer has not yet scored live submissions.
In early review the model rated stories lower than the practitioner more often than higher. The counts were 67 to 54. A preliminary pattern, not a finding.
Some capabilities are measured much better than others, and a capability the instrument cannot evidence does not get a level.

A programme that wants certainty should wait. A programme that wants to help build the evidence is the one to talk to now.

Who it is for

Community engagement centres, experiential learning offices and career services. Also whoever owns a quality enhancement plan or a grant that must report outcomes. It works best where participation is already expected, so a cohort is a cohort.

What happens next

Read a record first. Then answer six questions about your programme. We will reply with what a cohort involves and what it costs.

Tell us about your programmeSix questions, about two minutes→Read a finished recordMade-up student, no sign-in→

Or write to kaylasimsconsulting@gmail.com.