Durable, soft, transferable: naming career-ready skills

Career-ready skills are the capabilities that transfer across jobs and industries: reasoning through an unfamiliar problem, communicating a decision, working inside a team, managing yourself and your time, and navigating an organisation.

The list is stable. The name for it is not. In roughly three decades the same cluster has been called basic skills, soft skills, employability skills, 21st-century skills, transferable skills, human skills, power skills and now durable skills. That churn muddles assessment and makes it hard to compare two institutions’ claims, so it is worth understanding what each label was arguing.

Each name encodes a claim

Soft skills framed them as the complement to hard, technical skills. The word “soft” did the damage: it implied optional, unteachable and unmeasurable, which is the opposite of what every framework since has asserted. Most professionals now avoid the term for exactly this reason, while continuing to use it in job postings because candidates search for it.

Employability skills framed them as the property that gets you hired: a workforce-development framing that connects education to labour-market outcomes. The US Department of Education’s Employability Skills Framework sits in this tradition, organising them into applied knowledge, effective relationships and workplace skills. Note what that structure argues: critical thinking is grouped with academic skills under applied knowledge rather than filed away as a personality trait.

21st-century skills framed them as new: a response to a changing economy. The label aged badly for the obvious reason, and it also overclaimed: collaboration and reasoning were not invented in 2001.

Transferable skills framed them by their defining property, portability across contexts. This is the most accurate of the older labels and the least memorable, which is roughly why it never dominated.

Durable skills frames them by shelf life: they hold value while technical skills depreciate. This is the framing that fits an AI-shaped labour market, and it is the reason the term took over. It also carries an implicit investment argument: spend on the things that do not expire.

Competencies is the assessment-era term, and it is the one that matters institutionally. A competency is defined as observable, demonstrable and therefore scorable. NACE publishes eight career readiness competencies with definitions and a companion assessment tool; the CAS Learning and Development Outcomes organise learning into six domains including cognitive complexity, interpersonal competence and practical competence. Moving from “skills” to “competencies” is the move from describing a quality to assessing it.

Why the naming problem is your problem

The renaming has three practical consequences.

Comparisons break. Two institutions reporting on “career-ready skills” may be scoring different lists against different rubrics. Ask which framework and which edition before treating any two figures as comparable.

Search and stakeholders diverge. Administrators and vendors say “durable skills.” Employers and job postings still say “soft skills.” Students search for both. Using one term internally and the other externally is a reasonable choice as long as it is deliberate.

Assessment plans inherit the old assumption. The word “soft” trained a generation to treat these as unmeasurable, and that assumption survives in assessment plans that measure participation because measuring proficiency was assumed impossible. It is not impossible; it requires a rubric and an artifact.

What the skills list actually contains

Rather than a list of our own, use your framework’s: that is the entire point of adopting one. But the evidence on which of these skills matters most to hiring is worth stating, because it contradicts what students believe.

Our State of Higher Ed 2026 research asked both sides. Students believe employers most want time management (88%), work ethic (88%) and communication (86%). Recruiters name critical thinking (78%), work ethic (74%) and communication (70%).

They agree on work ethic and communication. The divergence is critical thinking, which recruiters lead with and students under-rate. That is not primarily a skills problem. Students in a functioning degree program do critical thinking constantly. It is a naming and articulation problem, which is treatable inside structures you already run.

Choosing your terminology

A workable convention, in three lines:

• Use “competencies” for anything you assess or report. It is the term that carries an assessment obligation, and it is what program reviewers expect.
• Use “durable skills” in strategy and budget conversations. It carries the investment argument, and it is the current vocabulary of the people you are asking.
• Use whatever employers and students use when you are talking to them. Including “soft skills,” if that is the phrase in your local job postings.

Then write the mapping down once, so nobody has to guess whether your “durable skills framework” and your “career readiness competencies” are the same thing. They usually are.

Where these skills actually develop

Durable skills develop through consequential work with other people, followed by reflection. That is not a philosophical position; it is why every framework’s assessment guidance points at artifacts and behaviour rather than at coursework alone.

Which means the delivery vehicle matters more than the vocabulary. Structured programs that put students on a real team, with a real deliverable, and then require them to reflect on it produce both the development and the evidence. The NSLS curriculum is built on that loop: a defined three-level ladder, peer accountability through Success Networking Teams, and a community team project with a DISC assessment at the Advanced level. It produces artifacts a rubric can score.

Settle your terminology, then check whether your programming actually produces the work these skills require. The career readiness reference covers the frameworks, the assessment methods and the program structure; designing a career-readiness program from scratch covers the build.