Individuals require many skills to be college and career ready, including academic knowledge, technical expertise, and a set of general, cross-cutting abilities called employability skills.
Employability skills are general skills that are necessary for success in the labor market at all employment levels and in all sectors. These skills have a number of names— soft skills, workforce readiness skills, career readiness skills— but they all speak to the same set of core skills that employers want.
The Employability Skills Framework is a one-stop resource for information and tools to inform the instruction and assessment of employability skills.
While employability skills are recognized as essential to college and career readiness, the education and training field has yet to coalesce around a single set of elements. Numerous employer groups, educational organizations, professional associations, and federal agencies have identified sets of employability skills, with different focuses and target audiences. Rather than define yet another set of skills, this websites advances a unifying framework that cuts across the workforce development and education sectors.
The Employability Skills Framework was developed as part of the Support for States Employability Standards in CTE and Adult Education project, an initiative of the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, U.S. Department of Education. Framework development was guided by a group of the following career and technical education (CTE), adult education, workforce development, and business organizations:
