Have you heard about Jackrabbit’s new feature in the Staff Portal – Skill Tracking? If you’re wondering why you should start using this as soon as possible for your organization – whether a gym, swim school, music school or any school – keep reading.

This feature was built for you to keep up with your students even easier. By updating skills through the Staff Portal, parents can automatically see what skills their child has obtained and when. They can see when the student is even working on the skills. And best of all, there is an option for the staff to email the parents right in the Staff Portal to share that their child has done a great job in class today and finally mastered her skill! Updates like these are very valuable to parents.

“That sounds great!” you say to yourself, but you wonder what people with experience using skill tracking are saying. We thought that might be the case, so we talked to our early users and got input.

Gina Kinnison at Miller Swim School shared quite a bit about her experience: “We really love being able to use the staff portal and the new skills enhancement in Jackrabbit to evaluate our students. It is makes it so easy to see everything right in front of you during this process. I feel like we have much more accurate records of where our students are in their progress and the parents are loving it too. This enhancement is allowing us to free up hours of paper work give us more time to focus on other things that are more important.”

Kathleen McClure at Indiana Elite Allstar Cheer says “Instead of a usual 3+ hour tedium I zipped through input in less than 15 minutes. With 5 days of classes, I am thrilled to be done with these before the end of the day!”

Jeff Gershe, Just Swim Inc. expressed his excitement about the new feature. With the new Skill Tracking, our instructors are now able to login to the staff portal and immediately update their students’ skills. This is a huge time saver! We especially love the feature of being able to add notes to the students’ skills pages. Using the New Skill Tracking feature helps our office staff to have a more accurate and up-to-date view of our students’ skills. This makes us much more organized and efficient!”

Besides great experiences, there are more benefits. We’ve put this list together for you to see the other ways organizations like yours are using the skills feature to run their businesses.

1. Skill tracking – Some organizations are using this for skill tracking, just like stated above. Instructors or coaches can track not only the skill itself, but the accuracy of the skill. Keeping the skills in one place for staff to update helps owners keep their organizations organized. When it’s time to determine classes for the next year, they have an easy way of seeing what level each child should be placed in. Parents will have a conversation starter with their kids when they get in the car after they’ve advanced a level.
2. Level tracking – Some organizations do not have a full list of skills built out in their software. They use this feature for levels and update it on a yearly basis. Skill tracking in Jackrabbit can be used to update students’ levels on a yearly basis. When a student is excelling in a class, they may be moved up to the next level mid-year. Tracking this in Jackrabbit helps instructors, managers and owners know what students have moved up, how they are doing, and if they should be in the next level at the end of the year. Skills are almost always being improved upon, so instructors use Jackrabbit to track the level of the student through the years.
3. You don’t have to move up just by grade level. By making some sort of skill or level tracking system for your organization in Jackrabbit, you can pick and choose which students go up to the next level each year. If you do automatically advance students into a class depending on their age, you can keep this record in your Jackrabbit database to show parents how many “levels” they’ve gone up – even if they are just moving up one level each year.
4. Staff can email parents updates – On the skills page, there is an option for the staff to send an email. (There is a setting for each user id to have this turned on or off.) Your staff can update parents right there on what happened during the class.
5. Share recommendations for parents through the Parent Portal so parents will know what class to register their child for. You can have each skill/level they obtain per year matched to a specific class for parents to know their child will advance to.
6. Goals – You can have goals like “Kindness Award” or “Leadership Award” that students are able to obtain. Or, a “Perfect Attendance” goal. You can add these to each class and staff can mark these “skills” as completed and the parents will know that their student got a Leadership Award or has perfect attendance this year. This is a great way to use the skills in the Staff Portal to keep parents involved and students motivated.

What other ways are you using the Skills feature in the Staff Portal? We’d love to hear them!