Employers, Colleges Alike Care About Durable Skills (column)

For much of the last decade, it seemed as if employers and higher education were on opposite sides of a chasm.

The people doing the hiring increasingly doubted the value of degrees and the underlying transcripts, dropping degree requirements and embracing “skills-based” hiring that appeared to prioritize technical capabilities or industry-specific knowledge that changed too fast for colleges to keep up with.

Many people in higher education, feeling on the defensive, bristled at the idea that it was their responsibility to prepare learners for specific jobs, peppering their critiques with complaints about “vocationalism” and disdain for general education and what we used to call the “soft skills” that prepare learners for a lifetime of learning.

This disconnect reverberated despite the fact that years of surveys of employers by organizations like the American Association of Colleges and Universities and others consistently showed that employers—at least philosophically, with their words, if not always with their hiring practices on the ground—valued a “broad-based education grounded in experiential, applied learning and anchored in the skills foundational to liberal learning.”

In the last few weeks, as I’ve returned to the fall conference circuit in full force after spending the last two autumns recovering from open-heart surgeries (I don’t recommend doing it once, let alone twice), I’ve been struck by a surprising degree of alignment in the tenor of conversations at very different kinds of events.

These range from higher education–specific events like Inside Higher Ed’s U.S. Universities and Colleges Summit and meetings that bridge education and career, like New York EdTech Week and the Convergence conference on credential innovation put on by UPCEA and AACRAO.

(I’ll be at AAC&U’s Conference on AI and Higher Education and the P3·edu event on public-private partnerships in Atlanta starting later this week, for those of you who will be there.)

One of the most significant areas of alignment is around how this remarkable moment, when generative and agentic artificial intelligence promises (or threatens, depending on your point of view) to upend so many things about how we work and live, is reinforcing rather than undermining the value of skills and capacities that AI is unlikely—or least likely—to replace.

At the Convergence event in Washington, a group of chief credential innovation officers (whose titles spanned academic affairs, professional and continuing education, and online education) heard from someone who comes as close to speaking for the diverse millions of employers as anyone can: Clayton Lord, a senior leader at SHRM, the national human resources association.

Lord offered an initial caution for those college officials seeking absolute clarity from the “employer side” of what has often seemed like a divide between colleges as producers of workers and employers as consumers: 99.5 percent of businesses are small to medium-size, and they hire an average of five to 10 people a year.

Some patterns are becoming clear, though. Even before the lightning pace of AI, technology was developing so quickly that the “hard skills” that individual employers long prioritized in hiring “are changing too fast to ask for someone else to deal with it all the time,” Lord said. (Employers with specific technical skills requirements are either developing homegrown training or “trying to find a trusted institution that can give them exactly what they need”—often a community college, he added.)

Instead, employers are “rediscovering” durable skills—a phrase that has caught on with employers but not so much so far in higher education, which still largely uses “human skills” or “soft skills.”

Lord recounted a conversation he’d had with a hiring manager for a regional transportation agency that was typical: “She was not looking for institutions to teach people to drive a bus. She wanted them to be good to other people and to be able to learn how to drive a bus.”

Colleges and universities have long boasted about their success in developing exactly the types of skills and traits that Lord says employers are increasingly focused on. And there’s more good news: He described as “higher education’s greatest opportunity” the preference of employers to have the option of “going to a trusted party for teaching and validating the skills they’re looking for. That’s really, really appealing” to most of them.

But as the proxies on which employers long depended—degrees, transcripts, résumés, cover letters—lose currency, hirers will be asking potential employees for evidence of learning that is “understandable, credible, discoverable and actionable.” That job will fall in large part to the colleges, universities and other organizations that educate and train them.

For an industry that hasn’t historically been too focused on having to prove that students are learning, that could require doing things very differently, Lord suggested.

“The greatest opportunity for improvement may be making explicit things that were previously implicit,” he said.