The PAES lab
The PAES Lab turns a room in your school into a working workplace. Students clock in, pick up a job, and get to work with real tools and real materials across five areas of work. Not a simulator. Not a worksheet. Real work.
Five components
Forty-four units, each a skill set we assess, mapped to more than 260 real jobs. Every unit is sequenced from level 1 to 6, so each student starts where they are and moves up as they succeed. Over the assessment cycle students rotate through all five areas, so you see how they perform across many kinds of work, not just one.
Business &
marketing
Office tasks, data entry, customer interaction, inventory.
Construction &
industrial
Hand tools, assembly, measurement, material handling.
Consumer &
service
Food handling, hospitality tasks, domestic services.
Processing &
production
Packaging, sorting, quality control, production flow.
Computer &
technology
Keyboarding, basic IT, software use, digital tasks.
logistics FAQ
PAES has operated as a performance-based assessment business since 1989. Dr. Judith Swisher first documented the methodology in 1987 and validated it through her doctoral work at the University of Kansas in 1998. The peer-reviewed publication is Swisher and Green (1998), Educational Assessment, with a companion paper at the 1999 AERA annual meeting.
PAES is peer-reviewed at the instrument level: Swisher and Green, Educational Assessment (1998), with a conference paper at the AERA annual meeting in 1999 (ERIC ED431021). This is rare in vocational assessment. Most tools in the space validate program outcomes; PAES validates the measurement itself.