Technical skills aren’t enough anymore. Here’s how Lone Star College-Tomball and Education Design Lab are making durable skills visible to employers.
In 2021, the software company I co-founded took on its first round of venture funding. Flush with cash, we did what other fast-growth software companies did at that time. We hired technical talent. Software developers.
Lots of them.
At the time, the very best advice you could give someone embarking upon professional life was “learn to code.” The demand for technical talent was so intense that we had trouble holding onto the people we hired. Within six months of making our first round of hires, we had lost 50 percent of our new workforce to other software companies. We simply could not keep up with the lucrative salary packages and other benefits offered to even the most junior software engineers. Coding, it seemed, would be the surest path to economic security for the foreseeable future.
That didn’t last long
That observation has not aged well. As Jeff Rumage writes, “AI has rattled the foundations of the tech job market, and virtually no occupation has been affected more than software engineering.” Moreover, if we believe the current predictions, software engineering is only the beginning. Soon, we are promised, virtually every job will be radically changed, if not eliminated, by this new and exciting technology.
This phenomenon is not new. A core feature of the creative destruction that defines our dynamic and prosperous economy is the creative destruction that accompanies the emergence and adoption of new tools. The steam engine, the assembly line, the computer chip, the internet. All fundamentally changed the nature of work, destroying some career fields and marking the inauguration of others.
What survives every disruption
Admittedly, these sorts of transitions can be tough. Some people fail to adapt and see otherwise lucrative careers disappear. Others, though, not only survive but thrive in the new equilibrium that follows tectonic technology breakthroughs.
Why?
Having been a part of a couple of these shifts, I’ve noticed a few common characteristics of those who flourish as work evolves. They excel at communication and collaboration. They are often creative problem solvers. They are continuous learners who synthesize information across multiple domains. Most of all, they are adaptable, willing to adjust their approach as business models change.
I once centered my hiring on technical skills alone, and it backfired. Technical skills are not, and never will be, enough to ensure long-term workforce success. To build a workforce that not only sticks with us but also enables our company to succeed, we need workers who supplement technical skills with something else. They need durable, human skills. These are skills that go beyond context-dependent technical know-how to include context-independent qualities crucial for adaptability and success.
The measurement gap
Most employers sense this reality intuitively, but we lack a way to assess whether candidates are proficient in anything but technical skills. We glance at the transcript and quickly internalize that the certificate in cybersecurity means the candidate has a passing familiarity with cybersecurity. We see the grade achieved in engineering or accounting or chemistry and assume that the grade is a fair assessment of the candidate’s technical abilities in those areas. The transcript and the GPA form a time-tested and familiar common language for assessing technical skill achievement.
But no such language exists for durable, human skills. That’s why the bulk of interviews are dedicated to talking about a time a prospective employee had to overcome obstacles to complete a project in a timely manner. Or about experiences communicating across disparate functional groups. Or about collaborating with a difficult co-worker.
Surprisingly, there is very little work happening in this important area. Everyone is looking to emphasize the durable skills, but nobody knows how to measure whether those efforts are meaningful to students or to employers.
A new way to signal what matters
That’s why I was thrilled to learn that Lone Star College-Tomball — which is one of eight campuses in the rapidly growing Lone Star College System — has identified the need for a clear and commonly understood way for employers to identify those students who have developed durable skills alongside technical skills. Instead of merely acknowledging this need, Lone Star College-Tomball has chosen to act with urgency.
The GPA+ initiative, which would supplement the information provided by the academic GPA to aid employers in finding candidates with human skills, is both bold and timely. Technology, labor markets, and employer expectations move at speeds that higher education often struggles to match. As a result, many of the solutions that colleges offer are answers to yesterday’s problems.
Designing with, not for
By partnering with Education Design Lab to co-design a solution, Lone Star College-Tomball has chosen to proactively engage with the business community on one of its most pressing issues in real time. Together, we are reimagining what a college might do to communicate to employers the full range of skills students develop during their education: Technical, academic, and durable.
Education Design Lab’s human-centered design process mirrors how business works. Its principles are the same ones we use to bring products and services to market: develop an intimate understanding of stakeholder experiences, discover and articulate the problem, generate ideas to solve the problem, prototype solutions built on these ideas, and seek market feedback about what works best.
Overcoming institutional inertia demands strong leadership that creates alignment, urgency, and accountability. Because of Lone Star College-Tomball’s commitment to this process, the GPA+ initiative promises to move forward at a pace that is uncommon in higher education while maintaining the collaboration and rigorous design that are hallmarks of excellent educational design.
We are in the initial stages of this journey. You don’t reimagine a college’s contributions to the business community in a single session! But we’re off to a great start. Our “Reimagining Day” saw dozens of community stakeholders gather to share their perspectives on education, workforce development, recruitment, hiring, and retention. We created a massive mosaic that both describes the local context and provides fertile ground for planting the seeds of innovative thinking. Now, our Education Design Lab facilitators are helping us to identify the most fruitful avenues for future discovery as we think about ways that we might satisfy the diverse but overlapping demands of students, educators, community servants, and business leaders in a manner that is scalable beyond our local campus to the broader Lone Star College System.
What comes next
Technical expertise alone is no guarantee of workforce success. The people and the organizations that thrive in this iteration of the labor market are those who can identify, cultivate, and reward durable, human skills in addition to technical capability. Colleges can play an important part in shaping that future, but only if they are willing to evolve as quickly as the world around them. The Lone Star College System is demonstrating what that evolution can look like by leading the charge to discover and design an innovative solution to a pressing employer need in collaboration with the business community. Their proactive approach to workforce realities is an example that I think more institutions should mimic.
Kenneth Odom, PhD, is co-founder and CEO at WASTELINQ, which builds technology that makes waste management simple, connected, and transparent.
Lone Star College-Tomball is one of five community colleges participating in Education Design Lab’s Reimagining Community Colleges Design Challenge, a transformative initiative supporting institutions in crafting their strategic plans using the Lab’s human-centered design approach.
[1] “Computer Science Degrees Are Losing Popularity in the AI Era.” Built In. Accessed March 29, 2026. https://builtin.com/articles/computer-science-degree-decline-ai.
