The Working Stronger and Smarter Handbook from SRI International provides learning principles and instructional practices ideas for educators and employers to help technical education students build employability skills.

This article describes how one in four employers now use pre-hiring assessments to find prospective employees. The assessments’ popularity is fueled by employers who no longer consider a college degree to be a measure of career preparedness and therefore no longer require a college degree. Employers also use pre-hiring assessments to ensure more equitable hiring, since fewer African Americans hold college degrees. Advances in technology and artificial intelligence make it possible to create assessments that measure whether an applicant can work in teams, communicate well, and make good decisions. Tech employers have been drawn to hackathons to find talented students who demonstrate their drive and ingenuity to solve a problem. Since COVID-19, with an increased number of job candidates, and health risks making it hard to meet in person, the use of pre-hiring assessments is growing faster than in the past.

This article considers what instructors and decision-makers should look for in creating or evaluating effective social-emotional learning (SEL) tools. The authors encourage instructors and school systems to look for research-based best practices in SEL tools that include these three areas: teacher professional development, SAFE (sequenced, active, focused, and explicit) content, and activities that employ a developmental approach. To reach this conclusion, EdSurge reviewed hundreds of articles, reports and whitepapers on promising practices to look for in creating or evaluating SEL tools. This article, published on July 8, 2020, draws from the EdSurge report “Education in the Face of Unprecedented Challenges,” written in partnership with New Schools Venture Fund.

This article describes Emsi research into the top ten in-demand skills U.S. Fortune 500 companies were seeking in employees. To do this, Emsi looked at the top ten companies on Fortune magazine’s 2020 list and pulled data from millions of their online job postings, comparing them by company, to uncover the top ten skills these companies sought from 2017 to 2019 and how those skill demands have changed over time. Findings show that skills such as communications, management, and leadership consistently top the list, followed by customer service, operations, and sales. The article shows data from each of the ten companies displayed in a flow diagram illustrating the change over time from the first quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2019. When Emsi researchers compared the top in-demand skills data from these top ten companies to all companies across the U.S. using online job postings, they found the same skills consistently identified.

First Step Act: Best Practices for Academic and Vocational Education for Offenders, a report from the National Institute of Justice, examines the best practices and outcomes in correctional settings when skill-enhancing initiatives, such as remedial academics and vocational programming, are implemented. A key component of successful re-entry for ex-offenders is the acquisition of new personal, academic, and employability skills through participation in skill-enhancing programs while still incarcerated. Best practices include participation in an ESOL program until reaching a minimum English proficiency level of eighth grade, classes to build foundational literacy skills, high school equivalency programs for inmates lacking a high school diploma, and occupational education courses to prepare inmates for reentry after release. An innovative life skills and behavioral/cognitive change program called Breaking Barriers is specifically highlighted and could serve as a model for future correctional program design. Other findings show that when drug and alcohol intervention programs and therapeutic communities are implemented, there are positive outcomes in the effort to reduce recidivism.

The Job Skills of 2022 is an e-book presenting the results of a two-year study of skill trends and employment shifts, identifying the most up-to-date, in-demand workplace skills.

This article summarizes key research and current thinking on how the future of work might look with increased automation and artificial intelligence.

This piece reframes how we look at skills, asking us to recognize that technical and job specific skills are more perishable than transferable “durable” skills.

While some believe that workers either have or don’t have certain transferable skills, this author argues that transferable workplace skills can and should be taught explicitly.

The Academic Resilience Consortium supports and disseminates research, programming, and materials related to academic resilience in higher education and hosts an online resource library.