Developing the employability skills of medical assisting students in a vocational high school

The purpose of this study was to determine which employability skills office managers considered very important or essential for students to possess prior to employment; to determine if the use of formative evaluations is an effective method of teaching employability skills and the gain of knowledge of key terms related to employability skills; and to determine if students perceive benefits in the use of formative evaluations for cooperative education experience preparation.;The researcher surveyed office managers of local medical offices to determine what employability skills they determined to be important or essential for new employees to possess prior to entering the world of work. A quasi-experimental design, using a control group and an experimental group of medical assisting students, was executed. At five incremental periods throughout the school year, the students completed self-evaluations and two medical assisting teachers completed teacher evaluations. The experimental group received formative evaluations with the teacher, to not only build employability skills with feedback from the teacher, but also provide experience with the formative evaluation process. A pre-test/post-test was also administered to measure the gain in knowledge of terms related to employability skills to both the control and experimental groups.;The employer survey respondents rated the skills listed in the interpersonal and on-the-job categories a mean rating of 4.7 on a rating scale of "1" being not important/essential to "5" being very important/essential. The skills listed in the hiring skills category received a rating of 3.8. Dependability, listed in the on-the-job skills section, received a mean rating of 5, and was therefore considered the most important employability skill.;A comparison of the mean scores from the student and teacher evaluations demonstrated converging data for the experimental group. The converging data suggests that students participating in the formative evaluations developed a more realistic view of their employability skill levels. Although t-tests performed on the pre-test and post-test scores for the experimental and control groups did not demonstrate a difference in the gain of knowledge of terms related to employability skills, field notes suggested that students perceived a benefit from discussing their employability skills with the teacher.