Durable skills

Where the term comes from

“Durable skills” is the current preferred label for what the sector spent two decades calling soft skills. Its usage traces to America Succeeds, which published a national competency framework for durable skills, developed with CompTIA and launched in 2024, and which is the authority on the framework’s current contents. Take the competency set from America Succeeds directly if you intend to assess against it.

The rename was not cosmetic. “Soft” implied optional, innate and secondary to technical content, which made the skills hard to fund and easy to cut. “Durable” makes two claims instead: that these capabilities are teachable, and that they outlast the technical skills a curriculum is otherwise organised around. Both claims are arguable in a budget meeting in a way that “soft” never was.

Why the framing matters more now

The half-life of a technical skill is the whole argument. When a specific toolchain is current for a few years, the capabilities that transfer between toolchains become the part of an education with the longest return. That is also the honest answer to the question administrators now get from families about whether a degree will survive automation: what survives is the transferable half.

The perception gap is the finding, not the framing

Students and employers do not weight these skills the same way. In our State of Higher Ed 2025 research, 51.5% of undergraduates named problem-solving a critical soft skill against 88.3% of employers who want candidates who have it, a gap of nearly 37 points on a single competency. The same research found the figure rising sharply with proximity to the labour market: from 51.5% of undergraduates to 76.6% of graduate students and 83.4% of recent graduates and administrators.

Read that as a sequencing problem rather than a values problem. Students learn the importance of these skills after they need them, which is an argument for making demonstration part of the undergraduate experience rather than an argument about student attitudes.

Durable skills and career readiness are not the same thing

Durable skills name a category of capability. Career readiness is an assessed judgement about a person against a named framework, and includes the ability to demonstrate the capability to someone making a hiring decision. A student can hold durable skills and be unable to evidence them, which is a very common profile and a fixable one.

The frameworks overlap heavily without being interchangeable. NACE publishes eight career readiness competencies for higher education and revises them periodically; America Succeeds’ framework is built for a broader education-to-workforce audience including K-12 and workforce agencies. Use one as your system of record and translate to the other only if a partner requires it.

Assessing them is the hard part

Self-report runs high, because confidence is easier to report than proficiency. The defensible method is to score something a student produced, a team project, a capstone, a documented role, a reflection, against a rubric tied to your chosen framework. That approach also produces evidence the student can carry into an interview, which no survey does.

See also employability and our guide to career readiness.