Effectively reorienting K–12 education around students’ skills and competencies will require the education field to agree on which skills are most important and what constitutes mastery. To do so, measure developers and researchers, who are in the early stages of their work, can and should work from what parents, educators, and employers see as the most important skills for students’ later success—especially for students starting at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder.
Employers, educators, and parents largely agree on the skills students need to succeed
A scan of surveys and reports from top employer organizations—including the National Association of Colleges and Employers (PDF), McKinsey and Company, the World Economic Forum, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation—reveal that companies across many industries prioritize analytical thinking, critical thinking and problem solving, resilience, and adaptability, especially as they look toward the future of their industries. Leadership and social influence, communication, self-awareness, and teamwork also rank highly.
The priorities state and local education agencies and parents have for their graduates largely mirror what employers look for in workers. Created through community processes at the school district or state level, the increasingly popular Portraits of a Graduate outline the skills communities think students should have upon graduation. These documents serve as frameworks for defining the success of PK–12 systems and aim to guide strategic action.
Though there is nearly complete agreement between education communities and employers, one of the most striking findings in employer surveys is the relative absence of traditional academic and technical skills. Basic skills in math, science, and reading are a necessary foundation for work, but employers define success based on a broader set of abilities that extend beyond traditional academic knowledge. Rather than considering these skills irrelevant, employers might take these skills as a given outcome of K–12 education or might prefer more specific academic skills that aren’t currently signaled as valuable.
Some field leaders worry that shifting focus to “soft skills” could lower expectations and academic standards for students at a time when so many students are leaving high school with limited reading and math proficiency. Others question why schools aren’t teaching these “noncognitive” skills, given that employers look for them.
We don’t think K–12 education must prioritize one over the other.
In fact, we know students can develop academic, “noncognitive,” career preparedness, and social capital skills at the same time. That’s how great K–12 educational experiences are structured, such as when educators weave critical thinking into reading lessons or students learn to navigate the dynamics of a group project in history class.
The research field can build off employer and PK–12 priorities when determining where to focus resources. We can develop new measures beyond what we have now and ensure the skills communities care about are evidence-based mobility drivers for students living in poverty. Additionally, we can align these measures with K–12 education’s other important goals, such as informing an active citizenry, a goal seen in many Portraits of a Graduate.
We need a new and better way to measure priority skills and competencies
Without clear measures of whether students are acquiring these skills, schools and employers have limited ability to understand students’ proficiency, signal students’ readiness for jobs, and understand schools’ roles in preparing students. Few in-school measures exist for these agreed-upon skills, and no established norms define proficiency beyond core academic subjects. For example, there is no standard measure for teamwork or national definition for what would make a student be deficient, be competent, or exceed expectations in teamwork.
But we think some of these measures could be embedded within existing academic tests. For instance, could certain questions or patterns in students’ answers on state summative tests demonstrate critical thinking abilities or persistence? Could existing records about students’ work-based learning experiences showcase communication and problem-solving skills?
Some of SUMI’s grantees are exploring these questions, aiming to identify opportunities in existing tests instead starting from scratch. Other SUMI investments are spurring developing new measures, such as one that could capture how students’ career exploration and planning skills benefit them later in their careers.
Beyond the SUMI projects, Skills for the Future, a partnership between the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the ETS, is working to build scalable measures for a range of durable skills. The initiative is partnering with several states to prioritize measures for three skills: collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. In 2025, researchers plan to test these measures with 5,000 students across five states. The initiative aims to add other skills in the future through “‘testless’ assessments that capture authentic student work generated across academic disciplines—and through unique, tech-powered scenarios—that can be taken anywhere, anytime.”
We are excited to see so many measures in development and see opportunities to further operationalize the skills that parents, educators, and employers value. We encourage the field to embrace the idea of ensuring students graduate with key skills and competencies, and we need to strengthen the evidence base that links these prioritized skills with students’ economic mobility.
As we do so, we need to remember the burden researchers and policymakers place on students and educators when we ask them to measure and track more. We invite policymakers and field leaders to learn alongside us as we work to identify where teachers and assessments might already be embedding and measuring many of these durable skills. Before systems shift entire education models, let’s see where we are successfully tying these durable skills into the educational experience.
We believe every student can have these deeper learning experiences and hope a combination of squeezing all the juice out of our current tests and a few new measures can help us understand how well we are preparing students for success.