Through the Lab’s human-centered design process, North Carolina community colleges worked with advanced manufacturing employers to turn critical thinking and initiative from vague hiring demands into more visible durable skills that can be taught, assessed, and recognized in technical programs.
“I can teach an operator to replace a fuse, but I need an electrical tech that can determine why the fuse is blowing and address that — not just replace a fuse.” — Randy Wilson, Mann+Hummel
Employers routinely ask for “durable skills” such as critical thinking, initiative, problem solving, collaboration, and communication. But those terms can be too vague to guide teaching, assessment, or hiring.
What does critical thinking look like when a student is troubleshooting an electrical system? In welding? In advanced manufacturing?
In North Carolina, community colleges and employers are working together to answer those questions. Through Education Design Lab’s human-centered design process, they are turning broad employer demands into shared, job-relevant definitions of skill — and embedding those definitions into the technical learning experiences students already complete.
The key insight is simple: Students are already building durable skills in technical programs. The challenge is making those skills visible.
Employers identified the skills that matter
As part of the regional workforce initiative AdvanceNC, more than 80 advanced manufacturing employers partnered with North Carolina community colleges to identify the skills needed for five high-demand occupations.
Forty-five participants representing 36 organizations used the Lab’s T-Profile tool to identify and rank the technical and durable skills most critical for success in each role. These employer-validated profiles became a foundation for designing micro-pathways — high-quality, stackable credentials that can be completed in under a year, lead to employment in high-demand fields, and create progress toward a degree.
Across all five occupations, employers consistently prioritized critical thinking and initiative. Together, those two skills accounted for half of all durable-skill priorities identified — and every occupation ranked one of these skills as its highest priority.
That finding mattered because it moved the conversation from general requests for durable — or “soft skills” — to a more actionable question: What do these skills look like in the context of real technical work?
Students already build durable skills
North Carolina community colleges already have programs and resources that support durable-skill development, including SkillsUSA Career Essentials, Education Design Lab’s Durable Skills Framework, and North Carolina Community College System courses such as Human Resources Development and Pathway to Employment.
But the AdvanceNC work surfaced a different option. Faculty did not need to add a separate course on critical thinking or initiative. Students were already practicing those skills through labs, technical assignments, troubleshooting exercises, apprenticeships, and assessments.
The problem was not a lack of durable skills. It was that the skills were often unnamed, inconsistently assessed, and difficult for learners and employers to see.
By developing shared definitions and practical rubrics, faculty are beginning to build the capacity to teach, assess, and track durable skills alongside technical skills within existing programs.
How to make durable skills visible
Consider a Motors and Controls course focused on Electrical Component Installation, Repair + Circuit Troubleshooting — a priority technical skill identified by regional employers.
A student may be able to replace a blown fuse. But critical thinking becomes visible when the student can review available information, recognize fault patterns, revise an initial diagnosis, identify the underlying problem, and recommend an appropriate repair.
Faculty can use a rubric (pictured below) to observe those behaviors during technical labs and document a learner’s progress toward Job Ready performance. Instead of treating critical thinking as an abstract quality, the rubric makes it concrete, teachable, and assessable in the context where it matters.
This is the shift: from assuming durable skills are present to giving learners, faculty, and employers a shared way to recognize them.
Building capacity to see skills
Through the Lab’s collaborative design process, employers, faculty, and college leaders are building the capacity to make durable skills visible without adding another stand-alone requirement to already full programs.
North Carolina partners are building:
- A shared language of skills. Employers and colleges are developing clearer, role-specific definitions of the technical and durable skills that matter for success on the job.
- Skills-based approaches to learning. Faculty are beginning to embed durable skills into existing technical instruction rather than treating them as separate content to add.
- Tools to identify and assess skills. Tools such as the T-Profile and skills rubrics help partners identify priority skills, define what they look like in practice, and assess learner progress.
- Stronger signals of what learners can do. By making skills explicit in coursework, credentials, and communications, colleges can help learners better understand and articulate the capabilities they are developing — and help employers recognize them.
Together, these practices strengthen colleges’ ability to make both technical and durable skills visible, trusted, and connected to opportunity.
From regional work to statewide change
What began as employer engagement in one region is now informing a more consistent statewide approach to workforce education.
Building on the 19 micro-pathways developed through AdvanceNC, the North Carolina Community College System is adopting the model as new 9000-level Workforce Continuing Education courses. These pathways are creating clearer, Workforce Pell-eligible options; strengthening articulation between continuing education and curriculum credit; and expanding access to workforce-aligned credentials across all 58 North Carolina community colleges.
This is why shared definitions matter. When employers and colleges agree on what durable skills look like in practice, that language can travel — beyond a single course, program, or region and into statewide workforce systems.
Four steps to make durable skills visible
Other colleges and workforce partners can begin with four practical steps:
- Ask employers to identify the durable skills that matter most.
Use a tool such as the T-Profile to identify a small number of priority durable skills within a specific occupation, rather than assuming employers mean the same thing when they use broad terms like “critical thinking.” - Map where students already practice those skills.
Ask faculty to identify where durable skills already appear in existing courses, labs, assignments, clinicals, apprenticeships, or other work-based learning experiences. - Define what skills look like in real work.
Make skills concrete and observable. What does critical thinking look like in welding, HVAC, or electrical systems? It might mean diagnosing a weld defect, interpreting a system failure, revising an approach, or explaining a repair recommendation. - Assess and communicate what learners can do.
Incorporate durable skills into coursework, performance assessments, credentialing, and learner-facing communications so learners can name their strengths and employers can better understand the capabilities behind a credential.
About the Community College Growth Engine
Education Design Lab’s work with AdvanceNC is part of the Lab’s Community College Growth Engine, which brings community colleges, employers, and learners together to design micro-pathways — high-quality, stackable credentials that can be completed in under a year, lead to employment in high-demand fields, and create progress toward a degree. Since 2020, the Lab has worked with more than 130 community colleges in 20 states to design more than 300 micro-pathways across growing sectors including health care, IT, and advanced manufacturing.
This Impact Snapshot was written by Dr. Elizabeth Ham, with data support from Dharma Wong. Visual design by Karina Bull and Cassie Lynott.
