Showcase your skills and achievements

This individual, self-reflective activity will encourage your students to reflect on the activities they take part in, both in and out of school, what they have learned and developed as a result, and how this can help them highlight their key skills in the future.

To follow the activity, each student will need a copy of our worksheet.

Use our teacher notes to guide the discussion, find additional resources, ways to adapt this for different year groups, and some follow-on activities for students.

• Showcase your skills worksheet  (159.7 KB)
• Showcase your skills teacher notes (180.49 KB)

• Suggested age group: 11-14
• Activity type: Individual, reflective activity
• Subject setting: Form time, PSHE, PSE, PDMU,  health and well-being

• To enable students to reflect on what they have achieved and how they can use these achievements to talk about the skills they have learned and market themselves.
• To come up with a personal profile where students outline their key skill set and give evidence to back up their assertions.
• To give students who do not currently do many extracurricular activities the opportunity to see the value of getting more involved.

1. Ice-breaker activity: Ask students to come up with activities they could get involved in at school and write them up on the whiteboard.
2. Now ask students to come up with reasons why people might not get involved and try to dispel those barriers (‘It’s not cool’: lots of famous bands originally got together at school; ‘It’s expensive’: many school opportunities are free) and so on.
3. Think. Pair. Share. Students come up with ideas of what skills you might gain from being involved in these activities. These can also be written up on the whiteboard.
4. Students complete the 'Skills' section of the worksheet evaluating what they do themselves. Those who do not already do a great deal can be encouraged to get involved by setting some short and long term goals.
5. Read out the 'Model profiles' to students to show what they should be aiming to write about themselves. Point out the phrases in bold that are particularly good examples of details to incorporate.
6. To finish, students can write a personal profile showcasing the skills they have outlined in the boxes on the worksheet.