making employability – A webinar convening CTE and curriculum leaders urged districts to treat employability skills as an intentional thread running from early childhood through graduation—made measurable through cycles of experience, reflection, and application, and adapted to a cl
The question sounded simple: what does it actually mean to prepare students for the future?
In a webinar titled “Beyond the Buzzword: Making Employability Skills Central to K–12 Learning. ” leaders from career and technical education and curriculum teams wrestled with a harder truth—employability skills often get treated like an add-on. taught late. or measured inconsistently. The push from the session was immediate: start early. make the skills visible. and rethink how students demonstrate them in an AI-shaped world.
At the center of the discussion was new research from Marzano Research, conducted in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. The study reviewed more than 22. 000 resources—labor market data. policy documents. research studies. and expert panels—before narrowing the pool to just over a thousand relevant sources to modernize the national Employability Skills Framework.
The findings pointed to eight core areas employers consistently prioritize: Adaptability & continuous learning; Communication & collaboration; Creativity & innovation; Global & social awareness; Leadership & responsibility; Problem-solving & critical thinking; Professionalism & self-management; and Technology & information fluency.
But the leaders on the webinar said the more urgent gap isn’t what employers want—it’s how schools currently deliver it. Employers, they said, report wanting greater adaptability, more applied real-world experience, and stronger problem-solving, not just technical knowledge.
The session’s loudest message was about timing. Skill development, the research and speakers argued, can’t wait. Foundational habits such as collaboration. self-regulation. and digital literacy should begin from elementary school onward. rather than being saved for CTE electives in high school. In early childhood. the webinar suggested this can be as simple as building foundational habits through play and structured interaction. including early emotional development and basic cognitive skills. By elementary school. employability skills should be integrated into everyday academics—learning to collaborate. work in teams. and develop early digital literacy. By secondary school. the focus shifts to applying those skills through CTE pathways. work-based learning. and real-world contexts that mirror what employers actually expect.
Trudy Cherasaro of Marzano Research put it bluntly: “We can’t treat employability skills as an add‑on. They must really be intentionally developed throughout the education experience and connected to real‑world context.”
The webinar also insisted that districts can’t rely on labels alone. Employability skills may be called navigational skills or workplace readiness standards, but the point is to build the systems, expectations, and structures that teach students these skills.
As the conversation moved from what skills matter to how they show up, another pressure entered the room: AI.
Panelists said the core employability skills haven’t changed dramatically, but how students apply them is shifting quickly. Kian Zare. the college. career. and military readiness coordinator for Houston ISD in Texas. emphasized that effectively communicating with AI tools is becoming its own core skill—something that draws on the same competency as communicating with people. “I think we’re going to be applying [communication skills] to large language models a lot more than we think at the moment. ” he said. adding that working effectively with an AI model requires understanding its strengths and tendencies. much like learning to work with a colleague.
In Idaho, Aurora Hymel, a CTE coordinator at West Ada School District, tied the rise of AI to the urgency of continuous learning. “The number of times our students are going to have to re-skill throughout their careers is going to be accelerated with all the new technology,” she said.
Carolina Cano. assistant director of CTE for Portland Public Schools in Oregon. urged district leaders to lean into AI rather than try to prohibit it. “We need to teach students to work with technology and accelerate the pace of change in the industry,” she said. “And we need to give students the skills to identify when something is made by AI.”.
For district leaders, the webinar said that means providing teachers with access to AI and the professional development needed to help them teach students responsible use of the technology.
The most practical instructional move discussed didn’t require new jargon. Instead, it centered on a cycle administrators can implement and support across schools: experience, reflect, and apply.
Teachers, the panelists said, are already creating experiences through group projects, problem-solving tasks, and real-world scenarios. The step that often disappears is structured reflection. Hymel suggested students need explicit opportunities to ask themselves: “What skill did I use?. How did I grow?. What would I do differently?” David Yanoski of Marzano Research described what that reflection adds. saying. “It’s really asking students to think about what they just experienced.”.
The goal of that deeper reflection, the webinar’s speakers argued, is transfer—helping students carry what they learned into new situations.
Administrators were urged to look for the cycle in walkthroughs, curriculum design, and professional development. When it’s paired with rubrics. observation. peer assessment. and portfolios. districts can extend employability skills beyond CTE classrooms and make them visible and measurable across schools.
Measuring soft skills, panelists acknowledged, can feel messy. But they offered approaches built for consistency rather than perfection.
Hymel described a statewide workplace readiness assessment for capstone CTE students in her district. as well as a badge-based credentialing platform that allows teachers to recognize demonstrated skills. Cano advocated for portfolios and student self-assessment. Zare argued for peer assessment as a way to build genuine accountability. mirroring the feedback students will receive in the workplace.
Zare added a detail about behavior that hit home: when students know their peers will assess how they showed up for a group project, they moderate their behavior and are more present—something schools can build into existing structures to prepare students for a professional environment.
The takeaway was clear: the goal isn’t perfection. It’s consistency—assessment embedded across contexts and connected to growth over time. Zare described using rubrics to track student growth across the school year. then using those scores as the basis for structured performance conversations that mirror a real workplace evaluation. Hymel also pointed to regularly connecting teachers with industry partners so educators stay grounded in what accountability actually looks like in the workforce and bring that context into classrooms.
For districts, the webinar said, when these practices live at the school-wide level rather than depending on individual teachers, employability skills begin to function as a shared language across the district.
That shared language, the panelists stressed, can’t be confined to one program or department. Employability skills. they said. must emerge through effective classroom practices centered on student engagement. collaboration. and reflection—play-. project-. or work-based opportunities included—across all content areas and all grade levels.
Cano made the same point with urgency: “It shouldn’t just be a CTE thing. It shouldn’t be siloed. It should be across all content, and as early as pre–K.”
Yanoski described the current problem in plain terms. “Right now, we’re a system set up to feed content to kids, and we need to get away from this,” he said. “We need to get to a point where these skills become the vehicle by which students gain the content.”
That shift, the webinar suggested, depends on collaborative commitment—starting with administrators and instructional leaders. Marzano Research’s report offered a set of starting points for school leaders: establish a shared language for employability skills across grade levels; highlight strong examples of skill-building during staff meetings or professional learning; encourage teachers to embed skill reflection into student-led conferences or portfolios; and support collaboration across departments to align academic content with skill development goals.
The challenge, of course, is that what the shift looks like will differ for every district. Still. the webinar’s central argument stayed consistent from start to finish: making employability skills visible. valued. and consistently developed from pre–K through graduation is the pathway to giving students what tomorrow’s workforce will demand—adaptability. communication. problem-solving. and the ability to navigate technology. including AI. as part of everyday learning.
employability skills K–12 education pre-K CTE Marzano Research U.S. Department of Education workforce readiness AI in education skill assessment portfolios peer assessment rubrics badges reflection experience apply