Skills Builder Universal Framework
A framework describing essential skills such as listening, speaking, problem solving, creativity, staying positive, aiming high, leadership and teamwork.
Skills Builder Partnership
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- making skills progression visible
- designing employability or leadership activities
- using shared language across schools, youth work and employers
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Which essential skill is this activity actually developing?
- What does progression look like in observable behaviour?
- How will young people reflect on and evidence growth?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Skills Builder Universal Framework as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- skills frameworks should not reduce young people to employability outcomes
- progression needs practice, feedback and context
- avoid claiming skills gains without evidence