English and math still matter, said Patrick O’Donnell, CEO of the foundation that supports the charter school north of Oakland, California. But having the ability to reason, research and adapt will be crucial as technologies like artificial intelligence change all aspects of life and the workplace.

“If students can really progress in these skills, they’re almost like launch pad skills,” he said.

But there was a big challenge: How do you go about teaching them? How do you even define these so-called “soft” or “durable” skills? While most people have an intuitive sense of what skills like creativity and collaboration are, few have ever broken them down into clear components schools can use to teach students and test whether students have learned them.

Until now.

Several companies and non-profits are taking these skills that have been fuzzy concepts and working on giving them shape and definition. They’re gathering teachers, developers of tests, business leaders and other experts to break down these skills into smaller skills and then into even smaller subskills and nuances that can serve as steps toward mastery. Communications, for instance, could include negotiating and public speaking as subskills.

The resulting outlines of skills and subskills are like a tree branching out from its trunk into smaller and smaller limbs, all with an eye to making them as teachable and testable as math or English.

“There’s no system of capturing (these skills) and measuring them, because, frankly, we haven’t valued them as at the same level that we have academic skills,” said Laura Slover, managing director of Skills for the Future, a leader in trying to define and test soft skills.

“As the world is changing, so must we,” Slover said. “We’re trying to make what is invisible visible
How do we flip the discussion about college applications and getting jobs, from how someone looks on paper to showing evidence of what they’re capable of?”  

Efforts to flesh out these long-undefined skills come as researchers, including, theand, most recently, the XQ Institute, a nonprofit that promotes soft skills, have increasingly highlighted their importance in the changing economy.

XQ earlier this year listed developing measurements of soft skills one of its 10 keys to adapting high school education for the future. 

The effort is still in its early stages. Skills For The Future released its — earlier this year, so lesson plans and tests of soft skills are still being developed. But Making Waves was able last school year to use to plan lessons on communication and of how students can take criticism constructively.

With communication, for example, O’Donnell said teachers focus on public speaking — one of 10 different aspects of communication Pathsmith identified — then on having students prepare an “elevator speech” — a quick pitch of themselves or a project they can give in just a few seconds.

“We gave students a template of components in an elevator pitch,” O’Donnell said. “Then we also had a lesson on how a strong elevator pitch is both what you say and how you say it. (That) includes things like eye contact and pacing and verbal intonation.” 

Tim Taylor, president of America Succeeds, a nonprofit that’s one of the major partners in Pathsmith, said he hopes the breakdowns of 10 skills the organization released in 2024 will help other companies develop ways to teach these skills as well as test them so employers can have some certainty a student has mastered them. Those skills include leadership, fortitude, character and mindfulness, as well as the three that Skills For The Future has tackled.

“With the advent of AI, when everybody has the same AI, then the things that really differentiate you are these durable skills,” Taylor said. “It’s your critical thinking, collaboration, growth mindset.” 

“I’m old enough that I developed a lot of these skills by being feral and running around my neighborhood and having my peers tell me I was being a jerk,” Taylor added. “I think that the current generation is spending more time on their phones and less time really interacting face to face, and they’re not developing these skills in the same way. But employers still demand them in order to get and keep a job.”

The OECD has tried to start on a test given in many countries, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) the last several years. The OECD hopes to branch out into others. 

An online assessment known as the has tried to gauge student skills of analysis, inference, evaluation, induction, and deduction for several years, even being used by some universities to verify whether students were learning well.

Skills For the Future, a partnership between six states, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Educational Testing Service, the company best known for running the SAT and GRE exams, already has prototypes of tests for high school students on collaboration, communication and critical thinking undergoing trials in a few schools in partnering states. 

The backbone of those tests are the detailed “skills progressions” released earlier this year outlining the three skills by breaking them down into three or four major subskills, then multiple “indicators” within each subskill. 

It also shows how a student can progress in stages, not with A-F grades, but instead using â€œexploring” a skill at the start, to â€œanalyzing; â€œintegrating” it into their work and then “extending” use of it. 

Communication, for example, is broken down into four subskills:

• Different communication modes, such as written vs verbal
• Adapting communication styles to different audiences
• Listening to others for deeper meaning
• Understanding and adapting to different emotional or ethical dynamics of an interaction

Critical thinking also has four major components: How students seek information, analyze it, form arguments and then reason with logic.

The breakdowns then go deeper into each skill. About half the evaluation of communication, for example, focuses on how well a student conveys a message. Beginners should recognize that communication should differ for different goals, such as whether to explain, inform, persuade, or entertain. At higher levels, a student should know how to tailor communication to the goal, as well as consider the needs of different audiences and respond to cues from an audience about how well the message is received.

The other half of the communication subskills, though, focus on how well a student is hearing and understanding communication from others. That might include pausing before responding to be sure others have expressed themselves fully, adapting to cultural differences of others, asking questions to clarify what someone said or picking up on messages that may be implied but not clearly stated.

“Can you express the same idea in different ways?” asked ETS researcher Teresa Ober. “I think it’s maybe the easiest (subskill) to grasp, but it can also be kind of the most challenging to convey, right? Maybe you explain something one way and a person doesn’t quite understand it, Can you explain it in a slightly different way.”

“It’s also really important to be able to use visuals very effectively, right?” Ober added. “We’re often used to giving presentations with PowerPoint slides and so forth. So, how can you take an idea and just present it as succinctly as possible?”

Similarly, critical thinking covers component skills such as fact-checking, using multiple sources of information, using evidence over opinion in reaching conclusions, using deductive reasoning and recognizing and avoiding logical fallacies,

Ober said that because the skills progressions are designed for tests and to guide teachers in rating students, many of the indicators are behaviors a teacher can observe a student doing, or not doing. She compared them to the “I can” statements teachers use as goals for lessons — can a student say “I can” perform a skill.

“The indicators are still pretty general, but they allow us to get that much closer to observable behaviors,” Ober said. “Because we are a measurement organization, we are really focused on things that we can observe, right, that provide evidence of a particular construct, a particular competency.”

Skills for the Future hopes to have new assessments of collaboration, communication and critical thinking that include exams but also ways of allowing students to demonstrate mastery with projects or presentations available for schools to try out by fall.

It’s also looking at adaptations for colleges.

While Skills For The Future has built its frameworks with schools as its starting point, Pathsmith focuses on business needs first. Formed from America Succeeds, a Denver-based non-profit, and the Lightcast research and consulting company, formerly known as Emsi Burning Glass, it developed outlines of 10 skills by searching 80 million job advertisements for traits companies seek the most. The CompTIA digital training and certification company also joined the partnership.

“We define durable skills as how you use what you know, then how you show up in the world,” Taylor added. “The goal is to be able to signal to employees what you know, what you can do related to these skills, at what level.”

Similar to Skills for the Future, Pathsmith breaks each skill into subskills — between four and eight for each of the 10 — and also spells out how skills develop over time through four performance levels — emerging, developing, applying, succeeding. 

With communication, for example, Pathsmith divides it into eight subskills or contexts that each require different approaches. These include written vs. verbal, negotiations, customer service, on social media and public speaking.

Insuring someone has skills in all these areas matters to different businesses, said Jason Tyszko, senior vice president at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, which uses some of the breakdown in its youth training programs.

Financial services companies, he noted, will care if someone can send clear, concise and polite notes to customers and write internal reports properly.

“Now, if I’m on a manufacturing floor, what I need to know is, when there’s a safety condition that is about to go wrong, how are you communicating effectively, loudly and as clearly as possible to prevent an injury on the job?” Tyszko said. “And how are you making sure that you are reinforcing in a clear and consistent manner safety protocols to avoid injury or to avoid the line going down.”

Pathsmith doesn’t have tests of the skills in the pipeline yet, though it hopes vendors will step forward to develop some, so that students can prove to employers they have a skill in a way employers will trust.

“We don’t want to say who can build it and who can’t,” Taylor said. “We just want to make sure that the market has an opportunity to start with a really quality back end, and they don’t have to start from scratch.”

Whether universities and companies buy into the tests and treat the ratings as real credentials for college admissions and hiring will be key to whether either Pathsmith or Skills To The Future frameworks succeed..

“I would say, let them compete and see which one ends up getting more adoption than the other,” said the Chamber of Commerce’s Tyszko. “But there’s room for both, as far as I’m concerned.”

For the past half-century, the jobs that have commanded the greatest earnings have increasingly concentrated on , .

“This isn’t school,” Robinson, a business owner, told the teenagers at the early June launch of the ProX internship program. “This is a summer internship. You all have employers.”

You can’t just skip a day or come in late, said Robinson. If something happens that gets in the way, you need to call your employer. You can’t be on your phones all day. Each employer will have a cell phone policy to learn, along with dress codes. And work hours must be entered online.

It’s a lot for some of the 660 new interns from across the Kansas City area, some as young as 15 and whose internships are their first job ever. Many have never had a boss or a work schedule before, so working alongside adults can be intimidating, said Robinson and program head Solissa Franco-McKay.

ProX, short for “professional experience,” has created one of the strongest and most structured support systems for interns in the country, hoping to solve a challenge that regularly scares away employers and trips up high school interns anywhere — student and business expectations not matching up. 

Each student has a coach hired by the program they meet weekly, as well as a mentor who is an employee at the business. ProX also sets aside every Monday of the internship as “professional development” to work on so-called “soft skills,” such as punctuality, teamwork and communication, which many teens lack and employers want.

“This is a starting point of a journey for you,” Franco-McKay told the students. “This is about growing your network, growing your skills, and just doing a little exploration
You have your coaches who help, guide and support you along the way.”

“If you mess up, that’s alright. That’s what it’s about, right?” she stressed. ”And we’re going to be doing it together.”

Providing all the training and support for students and companies has one big drawback, however: It limits how many students the program can serve. 

ProX had 3,000 students apply for spots this summer, so the majority had to be turned away. The program’s budget has already grown from $1 million at its start to $4 million today. More coaches and other staff would need to be hired to accommodate every student.

The ProX program, launched in 2021 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, is a rare opportunity for high school students with paid summer internships for five weeks each summer that let them test drive a career they may want to pursue.

Though internships are common for college students, there are few for high schoolers. Only about five percent of high school students have a chance at an internship or a more advanced apprenticeship, either in summers or during the school year. 

That’s partly because U.S, companies, unlike those in Europe where internships and apprenticeships are common, don’t always trust high school students with business tasks.

A 2024 survey by American Student Assistance, a nonprofit that promotes career opportunities for students, found companies listed the work needed to select good interns and manage them were among the biggest barriers to hiring high schoolers.

It’s left to outside agencies like ProX to manage internships for many companies, finding interns, teaching them soft skills and verifying they can handle the workplace. The more those agencies take on for the companies, the easier it is for a business to hire students for the summer.

“When we were first created, it was really about making this as plug-and-play for the employer as possible,” said Franco-McKay. “We want the employer to kind of see us as a common front door.”

“If you’re wanting to engage with students here in Kansas City, you can come to the ProX program and we’ll handle all the paperwork,” she added. “We hire the interns. We pay them the stipend. We track their hours. The employer really just has to focus on providing a quality experience and mentoring them.”

ProX isn’t the only agency, often known as “intermediaries,” taking on training and hiring interns to help companies. The nonprofit Boston Public Industry Council manages that city’s extensive summer jobs program for the city and school district. Though many students are taught basic soft skills at school there, Executive Director Neil Sullivan said employers rely on PIC staff to meet with students and vouch for them being ready to handle work.

The Genesys Works high school internship program in eight cities including Houston, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., is another. It also makes teaching soft skills as much a priority as ProX. Students spend the summer before their internships learning several skills — communication, time and project management, work ethic, problem solving, collaboration, and initiative — and are rated on each one. They are placed in internships only if they score well.

“It’s meant to be broad, so that students go into their internship on day one with the baseline skills that they need,” said Mandy Hildrenbrand, chief services officer for Genesys Works. “The internship then can train them in more specific skills to their internship “

The ProX internship program has made training an integral part of the internships since it was started by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, named for the pharmaceutical magnate best known as the former owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team.

The internship isn’t a full-time job. It pays a stipend of $1,250 for 25 hours a week for five weeks, less than some fast food and retail jobs pay per hour. But the internships aim to give students a taste of potential careers and practice navigating the job application and hiring process, rather than just be a way to earn money during summer break.

ProX also prioritizes bringing in students from low-income neighborhoods, so it offers students money to buy work uniforms if needed or rides to work through zTrip, a local rideshare company.

“Our program is really focused on breaking down any barriers that may exist to student participation,” said Franco-McKay.

That’s a big reason why ProX invests heavily in coaches and training. Each Monday, interns spend a half day at the Ewing Marion Kauffman School in the city to learn about a different skill each week — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, leadership and understanding one’s own thinking process.

In addition, while each of the 95 companies in the program assigns an employee mentor to each intern, ProX hires educators like Kristi Larison, a teacher at Liberty North High School in a neighboring suburb, to be a coach and liaison between interns and companies. Larison has 19 students to follow this summer, visiting them at their companies once a week and discussing their goals for each week and the summer.

“We know kids and we know job sites, so we’re going to kind of pull them through,” she said. “I had a lot of students last year that relied heavily on me with questions, because maybe they didn’t quite have skills to communicate with the employer yet, or they were too timid. I really was a bridge to kind of help them learn how to do that on their own. I think that’s critical.”

Don Simon, another coach who teaches at suburban Smithville High School, said he believes the coaching helps students who may have never had a job before. Having coaches also reassures employers that they are not alone in supporting students.

“A lot of our employers have experience with college internship programs, but not really high school,” Simon said. “For the kids to have a coach with them, that really sort of seals the deal for a lot of employers. They’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do this’.”

Some students, like Bradley Epps, an incoming senior at Park Hill High School, are so directed in their goals they’d rather just work on Mondays instead of having workplace training. An aspiring architect, he’s still excited, though, to intern at the architecture and urban planning-focused Kansas City Design Center.

“I think it will give me some experience,” he said. “And, if I had any doubts, it will give me a chance to see for myself.”

Others appreciate both the instruction and a chance to test out a career. 

Trisha Rastogi just graduated from Blue Valley High School south of the city and hopes to be a cancer researcher. She said a chance at real work experience at Children’s Mercy Hospital, even in the public health department, is a great opportunity for her.

“I want to become a physician, which is healthcare at a more individual level,” she said. “But I also like that I’m doing this internship because it gives me exposure to healthcare at a community level too.”

Brewer, who leads Yorktown High School an hour northeast of Indianapolis, is grappling with the trouble many young people have with basic job rules: The need to be on time, taking initiative and speaking with customers. And without a standard class for schools to teach these skills there’s no way to prove to employers that students have learned them.

“If you’re going to be workforce ready in a plethora of possible industries, what are the things that you need in order to be a successful employee?” said Brewer, whose school of 800 students will join a growing number of schools and community organizations in the Indianapolis area using a new set of career skills “badges” that standardize what young people need to know. “Here’s a way that we can solidify some additional training that is going to be marketable.” 

Brewer has made the badges the core of a pilot graduation track for students who want to work right out of high school, one of . Students will complete all six badges as part of that track.

Like a digital version of Boy Scout merit badges, the — Mindsets, Self-Management, Learning Strategies, Social Skills, Workplace Skills and Launch a Career — verify what students have learned and serve as soft skills credentials in the local job market.

Within those categories, students are taught about professionalism, time management and attention to detail. Since launching in 2018, more than 3,400 young people, mostly high school juniors and seniors in the Indianapolis area, have earned at least one badge.

“When a young person completes the badges
when they apply to a job…it’s a way for them (businesses)  to have confidence,” said Austin Jenness, a spokesman for EmployIndy, which helped develop the badges. “What are their communication skills? What are their interpersonal communication skills? Are they ready for this, even entry level position?”

Indianapolis isn’t alone in trying to create so-called “soft skills credentials” that can take hold like technical and industry credentials have over the years. Community colleges in California have used a soft skills curriculum and badges for a decade. There is also a national movement away from using high school or college diplomas as the main credential in hiring toward .

But soft skills credentials are rare for high school students. And as MDRC, a national nonprofit organization that researches economic policy, noted last fall, .

“If these credentials become widespread enough, possessing them could provide job candidates with a distinct advantage,” an MDRC commentary said.

Among the biggest challenges is making sure they come from reliable organizations that have status, something Indianapolis has in hand.

Victory College Prep, a K-12 school of about 900 students in Indianapolis, requires them for all students before starting mandatory internships in 11th grade.

“Folks are familiar enough that when we talk about the students completing the badges…it does give prospective partners a degree of confidence about 17 and 18 year olds that could be quite a gamble in terms of readiness and temperament,” said Andrew Hayenga, the school’s chief development officer. 

EmployIndy created the badges and a curriculum to teach them in 2018 by combining the state’s 36 “,” skills and talents that apply across all jobs and industries. It then developed lessons to teach them over 30 hours of in-person classes that schools and community organizations could pull off the shelf and teach.

Along with schools, EmployIndy reported some summer programs run by community groups use the training as part of their sessions, with classes expanding now that they are online and the pandemic has eased.

But beyond the increase in the number of people earning badges, EmployIndy has no real data to show success. Asked to name companies that use the badges in its hiring process, EmployIndy couldn’t. And it’s not yet collecting employment data for completers, but is about to start a series of focus groups to update the lessons.

“Our world has rapidly changed in the last couple of years, so how we do work has changed,” Downey said. “We anticipate almost yearly kind of refreshes of the content, not complete deep dive changes, but just to ensure that we’re staying up to date.”