June 2, 2022 | Jay Stansell

The Future Ready Score | 2022 Q1 Update

In this article, our data team examines Find Your Grind’s proprietary Future Ready assessment data and shares a unique set of insights with regard to the future readiness of the next generation of American adults.

Find Your Grind Data team shares unique insights available like no other career readiness vendor

The Find Your Grind Lifestyle Assessment is the first step toward a more purposeful life and career journey. Students need more than a list of outdated job titles that match a personality type. Instead, they need a framework that changes the way they see themselves in the changing landscape of work.

Accompanying this is the Find Your Grind Future Ready Assessment, part of our Future Ready Framework, which is a tool that measures how future-ready learners are before, during, and after using Find Your Grind.

Measuring Future Ready Learners

Our Future Ready Framework educates and measures across four key future-ready competencies:

Self Awareness: Students will be able to demonstrate their personal strengths, skills, values, and behaviors
Social Awareness: Students will be able to communicate how they relate to others, individuals, social settings, and the world around them
Career Awareness: Students will be able to identify how their skills and talents will empower them to thrive in their future work and the industries and careers they can be successful in
Action Awareness: Students will have the ability to communicate their actionable steps toward achieving their goals

When illustrating to learners how future-ready they are, we use 5 cohorts, stretching from least to most future-ready:

Working things out
Finding your way
On your path: You already have an idea about your future but might not be totally sure about how to get there. That’s a fantastic place to start.
Ready to take action
Ready for the future

Find Your Grind helps students figure out who they are and where they want to go by flipping the script on traditional career planning and focusing on a lifestyle-first approach.
FIND YOUR GRIND

Overarching Insights

Fig. 1 Initial Future Ready indicator scoring from all students across the United States.

When investigating our data, we started by looking at all learner data across the United States regarding initial future-ready outcomes.

What we identified is that in this broad group, on average, students are in the cohort of “Working things out” (Fig. 1).

This data aligns strongly with the Find Your Grind mission, and the Find Your Grind Theory of Change research & evidenced-based learning strategy.

Progressional Change Insight

Self Awareness Impact

Fig. 2 As learners complete Self Awareness units, we see overall future readiness improve. The inside bar gauge line is the original future-ready score, and the outside gauge line illustrates the change.

As students progress through the Find Your Grind curriculum, they begin to improve their future-ready scores across each of the competencies. Within the Find Your Grind data set, we can begin to investigate this change.

The first measurable improvement we see is regarding Self Awareness. After learners complete the self-awareness-focused units, we are able to measure and see a 50% improvement in scores on this competency.

The future-ready outcome for learners is aggregate; they increase their Future Ready Score to the Finding your way cohort. The change can be visualized in Fig. 2.

Social Awareness Impact

Fig. 3. Future Ready scores continue to improve after learners study social awareness. The inside bar gauge line is the original future-ready score, and the outside gauge line illustrates the change.

The next part of the Find Your Grind curriculum focuses on social awareness. The improvement in this competency is slightly lower than self-awareness and sits at 46%. This does improve the overall future-ready score of learners, however, it does not change the cohort, although it is on the cusp as shown in Fig. 3.

Career Awareness Impact

Fig. 4. Future Ready scores continue to improve after learners see the importance of a connection between self, lifestyle, and career. The inside bar gauge line is the original future-ready score, and the outside gauge line illustrates the change.

The third competency study is career awareness. At this point, learners have discovered new and unique personal insights about themselves, and have learned why social awareness is an important component of being future-ready.

Here we see a significant impact on the average future-ready score. Learners, typically for the first time in their lives, are able to see the importance of the connection between self, lifestyle, and career. This is something that only Find Your Grind offers learners. We see a cohort jump (shown in Fig. 4) when reviewing this data as learners progress into the On your path cohort.

Action Awareness Impact

Fig 5. On average across the United States learners progress from ***Working things out*** to **Ready to take action** when the Find Your Grind curriculum is introduced into schools. The inside bar gauge line is the original future-ready score, and the outside gauge line illustrates the change.

The ability to take action, beyond the theory of being future-ready is a critical component of the Find Your Grind curriculum. With the study of this final competency, we can see the complete impact Find Your Grind has on learners. This competency is where we see the largest jump in change across any competency. When we investigate the data for this competency development alone, we see the cohort change from Working things out to Ready to take action. This data underpins the impact that Find Your Grind has in not just educating learners, but empowering them to feel that they can take action and confidently apply their learnings in other study areas and beyond the classroom. The final result, as illustrated in Fig. 5, with regards to the total future-ready score change for all learners in the United States is on average on the cusp of Ready to action.

Summary

Find Your Grind data from Q1, January to March 2022, illustrates the measurable positive impact Find Your Grind has on learners when implemented in schools and districts.

To learn more about how having a lifestyle-first conversation will improve the future readiness of your learners, please contact us.