Education Design Lab is building on the momentum of Georgia’s Career Ready by Design initiative by supporting cross-state learning, locally grounded pathway design, and a growing community of leaders advancing career-connected learning.

Career Ready by Design is a statewide initiative bringing together Georgia technical colleges, high schools, employers, and state leaders to co-design dual-enrollment pathways that help students earn college credit, build in-demand skills, and move toward high-wage, high-demand careers.

Now, Education Design Lab is extending the initiative’s learning and design approach through the Career Ready by Design Readiness Network — a cross-state community of practice for leaders who are strengthening career readiness in their own local and statewide contexts.

The Readiness Network brings together 31 community college educators, administrators, and state leaders from Alabama, Arizona, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. While these states were not selected for the initial Career Ready by Design initiative in Georgia, their leaders demonstrated a strong commitment to expanding equitable, career-connected opportunities for learners.

Through the network, participants are working alongside the Lab and one another to apply human-centered design methods, tools, and decision-making strategies to the career-readiness challenges in their states. The focus is not on replicating Georgia’s model. Instead, it is on helping each state identify what its learners, institutions, employers, and communities need — and then translate those insights into practical next steps.

From shared learning to locally grounded action

Each participating state will receive $10,000 in funding to support this work. The investment is intended to help teams move from conversation to action: identifying strengths and gaps in their current systems; examining opportunities for alignment across K–12, postsecondary education, and workforce partners; and developing strategies that fit their local context.

The Readiness Network is helping state teams explore questions such as:

• Where do students encounter barriers to early college, dual enrollment, or career-connected learning?
• Which high-demand industries and occupations should inform pathway design?
• How can high schools, colleges, employers, and state agencies share responsibility for learner success?
• What policy, funding, data, or partnership conditions are needed to make pathways more equitable and sustainable?
• How can states ensure that college credit earned in high school leads to credentials, further education, and meaningful career opportunity?

By creating space for leaders across states to learn together, the network is also generating insights that can strengthen Career Ready by Design’s long-term impact. Teams are bringing different policy environments, institutional structures, labor-market needs, and learner populations into the conversation, helping surface what is transferable across contexts and what must remain locally designed.

Building a vision for early pathways

As part of the experience, each state team will develop a Preliminary Early Pathways Vision: a concise, locally grounded articulation of what stronger career readiness and career-connected learning could look like in its state.

Each state will also translate its vision into a short op-ed or commentary designed to advance the public conversation about career-connected learning and early pathways. These pieces will help leaders make the case that students need more than access to college courses in high school; they need equitable, connected pathways that lead to transferable credit, in-demand skills, continued education, and a meaningful next step.

Strengthening the field together

Career Ready by Design is rooted in the belief that learners should not have to navigate disconnected systems to find their way from high school to college and career. The original Georgia initiative brings together the Technical College System of Georgia, five technical colleges, and 10 to 15 high schools to co-design dual-enrollment pathways that enable students — especially those historically underrepresented in early college — to earn at least 12 transferable college credits that stack toward credentials connected to high-wage, high-demand jobs.

The Readiness Network broadens the learning community around that work. It creates a structured opportunity for leaders in other states to apply similar design principles, learn from peers, test ideas in their own contexts, and contribute insight that can inform the larger field.

Explore the interactive graphic to meet the leaders and state teams participating in the Career Ready by Design Readiness Network.

Learn more about the Career Ready by Design project.

New design insights from Education Design Lab’s Student Parent Success community show why belonging, visible support, childcare, and co-design must be central to student-parent success.

Nearly one in five college students is raising children or serving as a primary caregiver while pursuing a credential or degree. Yet higher education systems, policies, and supports are too often designed without student parents at the table — leaving many to navigate college, work, caregiving, and basic needs largely on their own.

Co-Designing With Student Parents: Actionable Insights for Systemic Change shares what emerged when Education Design Lab’s Student Parent Success community brought parenting learners together with college educators and ecosystem partners to redesign the student-parent experience.

The report centers a simple premise: student parents should not be treated only as recipients of support. They should be active partners in identifying barriers, shaping ideas, and informing the solutions intended to serve them.

Across learner stories, interviews, focus groups, surveys, and design sessions, three themes stand out:

Belonging matters. A flexible professor, a visible family-friendly space, or a peer community can make the difference between stopping out and persisting.

Support must be visible and connected. Childcare, mental health, transportation, basic needs, and career support often exist across disconnected systems. Student parents need clear, coordinated pathways to the resources that can help them succeed.

Student parent voice must drive change. When institutions design with parenting learners — not simply for them — they gain clearer insight into what families need and build more relevant, responsive solutions for all students.

The report offers stakeholder-specific insights and calls to action for:

Faculty and staff seeking practical ways to create more flexible, affirming learning environments.

College leaders working to make student parents a priority in planning, basic-needs strategy, and campus culture.

Ecosystem partners building coordinated connections across education, workforce, housing, childcare, transportation, and family supports.

Employers looking to recognize the durable skills student parents build through caregiving, work, and persistence.

Policymakers advancing childcare access and family-centered infrastructure that makes postsecondary completion possible.

The report also highlights examples of action already underway — from a faculty-and-staff learning experience co-designed with student parents, to campus communities that foster belonging, to the CUNY Fatherhood Academy, skills-validation work with 150 student parents, and family-centered childcare models such as Study N Play.

When student parents thrive, their children thrive, too. They build generational opportunity for their families, communities, and the future workforce.

Download

Download the full report to explore the learner stories, design insights, examples, and practical starting points for building higher education systems where student parents can belong, persist, and succeed.

This report was written by Breanna Shaw, an assistant education designer at Education Design Lab who was a student parent during her own higher education journey. The research included in this publication was made possible through the generous support of ECMC Foundation.

New report by Education Design Lab explores what it takes to build skills-validation ecosystems that work for people — and at scale.

As employers, educators, and workforce systems move toward skills-based practices, the challenge is no longer simply issuing badges or building assessments. The real work is creating systems that help people demonstrate what they can do, earn credentials they understand and trust, and carry those signals into real opportunities.

Education Design Lab’s new report, Validating Skills at Scale: A Human + Tech Ecosystem View, explores what it takes to make that possible.

Using the Lab’s XCredit ecosystem as a reference model, the report follows a composite opportunity seeker through the full skills-validation journey: discovering an opportunity, selecting a skill, completing a performance-based assessment, receiving feedback, earning and sharing a credential, and navigating next steps.

The report’s central finding is clear: Skills validation works only when human experience and technical infrastructure are designed together.

For learners, that means clear information, trusted guidance, relevant assessments, accessible technology, feedback that supports growth, and a visible connection between validation and opportunity. For systems, it means secure identity management, interoperable data, machine-readable credential metadata, reliable integrations, transparent mastery rules, and pathways that allow skills and credentials to travel across platforms.

Neither layer can succeed alone. Systems built only around standards, automation, and interoperability can lose learners when experiences feel confusing, irrelevant, or disconnected from real value. But systems that focus only on user experience struggle to scale without the data architecture and technical reliability needed to make credentials portable, verifiable, and trusted.

The report identifies several priorities for the field:

• Build trust through clarity, transparency, and visible outcomes.
• Connect skills validation to real opportunity, advancement, and next steps.
• Design recovery pathways that treat an unsuccessful assessment attempt as a learning opportunity — not an exit point.
• Use open standards and interoperable infrastructure to support portability, verification, and scale.
• Treat skills validation as a connected ecosystem, not a standalone assessment, badge, or platform.

Grounded in more than three years of XCredit pilots with over 10 partner organizations across workforce agencies, employers, training providers, and higher education institutions, the report offers a practical system-level view for credentialing platforms, assessment providers, colleges, workforce intermediaries, employers, policymakers, and funders.

Download

Download the full report to explore the human and technical conditions that can make skills validation more meaningful for learners, more useful to employers, and more durable as infrastructure for economic mobility.

The report was written by Nishita Chheda and Mary Gwozdz. The research included in this report is made possible through the generous support of Walmart.

Community colleges are at a pivotal moment.

As learners, employers, and regional economies change, these institutions have an opportunity to lead the next evolution of higher education — if they can move beyond structures built for a different era.

In the Lab’s new study, Insights from 15 Community College Presidents on the Future of Learning in a New Economy, leaders share their perspectives on the opportunities and barriers facing the sector, as well as the institutional changes needed to help more learners access economic mobility.

Their insights validate Education Design Lab’s Future of Learning framework, which asks five essential design questions:

1. How might we make skills and competencies visible?
2. How might we create stackable pathways that credential skills along the way?
3. How might we make learning universally flexible through multiple modalities?
4. How might we guarantee applied learning opportunities for every learner?
5. How might we ensure every learner has access to adequate support services?

Presidents described community colleges as uniquely positioned to respond to local workforce needs, provide affordable access, and help learners build toward better jobs and long-term opportunity. At the same time, they identified persistent barriers: outdated funding models, time-based learning measures, institutional silos, limited support for faculty and staff, and growing competition from faster, more flexible credential providers.

The study points to a clear conclusion: Transformation requires more than a new vision. It requires a practical method for turning vision into institutional practice. Participants identified human-centered design — grounded in empathy, learner insight, data, and cross-sector collaboration — as a critical approach for rethinking systems and engaging the people closest to the challenge. They also emphasized strategic planning as the vehicle for aligning stakeholders, resources, and decisions around a shared direction for change.

Together, these findings reinforce the premise of the Lab’s Reimagining Community Colleges initiative: When colleges combine human-centered design with strategic planning, they can build the capacity to continuously evolve around learners, workforce needs, and economic opportunity.

Download the study to explore the presidential insights shaping a more flexible, skills-based, learner-centered future for community colleges.

For a deeper look at the ideas behind the study, listen to its author, Education Design Lab Chief Program Officer Dr. Kevin Stump, on the Smarter Campus Podcast. In the episode, Kevin explores why higher education must move beyond degrees alone — toward visible skills, stackable credentials, stronger employer partnerships, and human-centered approaches to navigating AI and workforce change.

Dr. Kevin Stump, Education Design Lab’s Chief Program Officer, conducted this study as part of his doctoral research in New York University’s Leadership and Innovation program.

How Education Design Lab is co-designing a micro-credential that signals demonstrated skills, not just completed coursework.

Across systems, new career roles and credentials are being built to respond to real gaps in access, capacity, and trust. Yet one of the hardest questions remains surprisingly basic: How do we show not only what someone knows, but what they can actually do?

That question has been illuminated in a highly regulated legal context through Education Design Lab’s work with Frontline Justice, a national organization dedicated to democratizing access to the legal system by empowering a new category of frontline “community justice workers.”

Designing a new Community Justice micro-credential

“The justice worker model has the potential to scale in ways that nothing else had that I saw in 25 years in legal aid.” — Nikole Nelson, CEO, Frontline Justice

Frontline Justice and the Lab have been designing a Community Justice micro-credential for learners who need low-barrier, affordable, and flexible routes into community justice worker roles. Community justice workers are frontline helpers trained to give timely, critical legal help on everyday issues that lawyers aren’t providing. They can be shelter volunteers, community health workers, or other trusted advocates. We’re building a model that combines self-paced training with a credential that needs to communicate hands-on practice and demonstrated competency.

As a strategic design partner, the Lab introduced a human-centered design process to this effort, drawing on our experience designing micro-pathways and credentials in other sectors. The Lab developed an early prototype of how the community justice worker credential might function and used that prototype to frame conversations with Frontline Justice and other stakeholders about what the credential must signal to learners, employers, and courts.

Frontline Justice is working toward a simple, ambitious vision: By 2035, anyone, no matter their background or location, can access the legal help they need for everyday civil issues. To move toward that future, the work is organized around two goals that run in parallel: (1) rapidly growing a new workforce of justice workers now, and (2) laying out long-term vocational paths so this role becomes a lasting and respected part of the justice ecosystem.

In the short term, the focus is on rapidly growing the workforce. That means providing low-barrier training opportunities that formalize work many community members are already doing, expanding participation, and keeping opportunities as accessible and inclusive as possible. Frontline Justice partners with legal aid organizations who can offer supervision and take referrals for more complex cases, so justice workers are supported, while also expanding the capacity of the community-based organizations that employ them.

Over the long term, the aim is to lay out clear vocational paths for community justice workers. A formal credential is being designed to advance long-term career goals by providing recognized credit that supports deeper qualifications and transitions into transferable roles that address community and legal needs. Justice workers will increasingly specialize in areas such as SNAP benefits and Medicare, based on community needs, creating a workforce that is both responsive to local legal problems and able to grow into sustainable, high-impact career paths.

That two-stage structure matters. The credential is meant to verify that the justice worker can actually do the work in context. We do not want to build another generic credential, but one that serves as a trustworthy signal of readiness to a set of varied stakeholders.

Where the friction lives

Our design sessions have made clear that the hardest part of the system sits in the transition between training completion and real-world application. A learner can finish the modules and still stall at the threshold where practice must be observed, interpreted, and signed off. What learners need is not more abstraction, but exposure to work-based learning: demonstrations, simulations, shadowing, and applied practice, along with signals that reflect what they are actually prepared to do rather than implying blanket readiness.

To understand that threshold more clearly, the Lab conducted interviews with legal aid practitioners who hope to employ community justice workers. We synthesized what we heard about hiring needs, supervision realities, and liability concerns. Those design conversations sharpened the challenge: The credential had to make real practice visible and trustworthy in the eyes of employers and courts, not simply certify that training was completed.

This is where the design challenge sharpens and positions us at the most consequential point in the system, between doing the work and being recognized for it. But when relationships, capacity, and interpretation vary, the credential can end up measuring uneven support as much as competency. And when the value of the credential, the path to opportunity, or the language for translating it is unclear, what looks like a learner completion problem may actually be a system visibility problem.

What began to emerge in this work was that it was not only a credential design challenge, but a skills visibility and skills translation challenge. The Lab’s Skills Visibility Cycle framework became useful because it framed visibility not as a single act of credentialing, but as five connected practices: skill definition, development, validation, documentation, and communication across the wider ecosystem. That shift matters because it moves the work beyond naming skills toward building signals that are legible, trusted, and portable.

How we design toward visibility

In this work, we are guided by a set of design criteria:

• meet learners where they are,
• build modular and flexible experiences,
• prioritize legal clarity and confidence,
• design for low-tech and high-touch conditions,
• embed durable human skills,
• and account for local context.

These design criteria closely resemble the Lab’s micro-pathway work and help ensure the credential is not only well designed, but usable and meaningful in practice. They also build on the Lab’s broader focus on skills validation, which expands the ways skills gained through work and life experience are recognized. In this work, the community justice worker credential carries that commitment into the justice ecosystem, turning everyday practice in community settings into visible, trusted skills currency and drawing on the Lab’s Skills Visibility Cycle to focus on how those skills are defined, developed, validated, documented, and communicated across the ecosystem.

The Lab’s Skills Visibility Cycle helped shift the work from a focus on issuing credentials to a broader focus on how readiness becomes visible and communicated across an ecosystem.

What this opens up

What is emerging from this work is not simply the need for more credentials, but for a more action-centered signal. The strongest signals may be the ones that make validated practice visible: what someone can do, under what conditions, how that capability is observed, and where its boundaries lie.

The Skills Visibility Cycle offers one way of building that layer. It points toward more applied practice earlier in the process, clearer definitions of both durable and technical skills, stronger approaches to validation and documentation, and better translation of the credential into language that different audiences can actually use. Put simply, the credential should be the signal, not the substance; the substance is validated practice.

Why this matters

Frontline Justice offers one example of how this kind of credentialing work can begin to take shape inside a highly regulated context. But the broader opportunity extends far beyond community justice work. For organizations building new pathways in systems that shape people’s futures, the challenge is not only to create opportunity, but to make real work visible and to credential action in ways that can travel, matter, and open possibility.

Frontline Justice, in partnership with Ascendium and Education Design Lab, is currently co-designing this credentialing framework, education pathway, and training standards through its National Community Justice Worker Task Force. To learn more, visit frontlinejustice.org.

This post was written by Brian Rubin, a senior education designer at Education Design Lab.

People build valuable skills through work, caregiving, parenting, military-connected experiences, community leadership, education, and everyday problem-solving. Yet those skills are often invisible to the employers and institutions that make decisions about hiring and advancement.

Education Design Lab’s new report, Making Skills Visible: Learner Stories and Insights on the Power of Skills Validation, explores what changes when people can identify, validate, and communicate the durable skills they have already developed through life and work.

The report draws on conversations with participants in XCredit, the Lab’s initiative using short, performance-based assessments to help opportunity seekers demonstrate durable skills and earn portable, interoperable credentials. Its central insight:

Skills validation does not create new abilities. It creates visibility around skills people are already building through life and work.

For New Majority Learners balancing work, caregiving, and non-linear education journeys, that visibility can be a bridge to confidence, recognition, and mobility.

Three learner stories

Felix, an immigrant professional and father of four pursuing a transition into cybersecurity, entered XCredit with technical expertise but wanted to strengthen his communication skills and confidence. The validation process became more than a credential: it gave him a framework to practice, reflect, and approach interviews as opportunities for growth.

“The more you put yourself in those uncomfortable situations where you have to speak, the more you are going to learn.”

Rose, a veteran spouse, caregiver, educator, and advocate, had years of experience navigating complex systems and supporting others under pressure. But translating those strengths into workforce language was difficult. Skills validation gave her a way to benchmark her growth and communicate the value of experience that traditional resumes often miss.

“Now I have somewhere where I can go and actually gauge it … maybe once a year … to see if I can measure progress against it. It’s my benchmarking.”

Tamara, a student parent and educator, found that validation helped her name the communication, adaptability, prioritization, and conflict-navigation skills she had built through parenting, teaching, and daily life.

“Having these kinds of questions really helped me understand myself more.”

Together, their stories show that validation can support reflection, professional identity, and a clearer connection between lived experience and future opportunity.

What the report finds

• The barrier is often visibility, not ability. Many people have significant workforce-relevant skills but lack the language and trusted evidence to communicate them.
• Reflection is part of the value. Validation can help learners identify strengths, see opportunities for growth, and build confidence before a job change or promotion occurs.
• Durable skills develop everywhere. Caregiving, military-connected experiences, community engagement, and career transitions all build valuable capabilities.
• Design determines access. Validation tools must be flexible, accessible, and human-centered if they are to work for people balancing work, family, disability, and other responsibilities.
• Visibility can support mobility. When learners can explain and demonstrate their skills, they are better positioned to navigate education, career transitions, and employment opportunities.

What stakeholders can do

• Employers: Look beyond degrees, job titles, and linear work histories. Clarify the durable skills you value, recognize evidence of them in practice, and help workers communicate what they can do.
• Higher education and workforce organizations: Integrate durable-skills reflection and validation into advising, career services, workforce programs, and learner-support experiences. Make the skills developed through courses and experiences explicit.
• Policymakers and ecosystem leaders: Support systems that recognize learning across work, caregiving, military-connected experiences, and nontraditional educational journeys—while ensuring that skills are validated in ways employers and institutions can trust.

Download the report

The opportunity is not simply to create more credentials. It is to build systems that recognize the full range of human capability already present in learners, workers, caregivers, and communities.

Download Making Skills Visible to explore the learner stories, emerging insights, and recommendations for creating validation systems that strengthen confidence, recognition, and economic mobility.

Download the report

This report was written by Nishita Chheda, an education designer at Education Design Lab. The research included in this publication was made possible through the generous support of Walmart.

A skill has little value if no one can see it, understand it, or trust it. Credential Engine and Education Design Lab explore what it takes to turn skills into signals that can open doors to opportunity.

People gain skills everywhere: in classrooms, on the job, through military service, community roles, training programs, and lived experience.

But having a skill does not automatically make it useful in the labor market.

For a skill to help someone move toward an opportunity, other people and systems need to be able to see it, understand it, and believe it. That creates two closely related challenges for education and workforce organizations:
How do we make skills visible? And how do we make them trusted?

At Credential Engine and Education Design Lab, we approach those questions from complementary directions.

Credential Engine focuses on the technical infrastructure that allows credentials and skills to be made visible: described, connected, and used across systems.

Education Design Lab focuses on the human and quality infrastructure that helps ensure those skill claims can be trusted. They must be backed by meaningful evidence and reliable validation.

Increasingly, organizations need both.

What makes skills and credentials visible?

A credential can contain rich information about what someone learned and can do, yet still be effectively invisible outside the organization or platform that issued it.

Much of the information about credentials today lives in web pages, PDFs, transcripts, and databases that humans can read, but other systems cannot easily interpret or connect.

That is the problem credential transparency is designed to solve.

Credential Engine’s Credential Transparency Description Language, or CTDL, provides a common, structured way to describe credentials, skills, assessments, organizations, pathways, and other related information. When that information is published as open, structured data through the Credential Registry, systems can find it, understand it, and connect it to other information.

That distinction is important. Visibility is not simply putting more information online. It means describing information in a way that advising tools, job-matching platforms, state systems, AI tools, and other technologies can actually use.

And that helps skills information travel across systems. Instead of information about what a credential or skill represents remaining trapped in a web page, PDF, or proprietary platform, it can be discovered, interpreted, and connected to credentials, pathways, and opportunities elsewhere.

Try it: How visible are your credentials?

Visit Credential Finder and search for your organization.

What shows up? Are your programs and credentials represented? Are the skills inside them clearly described? Can you see connections to other credentials, competencies, assessments, or pathways?

If not, you may have just identified a visibility gap.

But even when credentials and skills are clearly described and easy to find, visibility alone does not tell us what sits behind a skills claim. What evidence shows that someone has actually demonstrated the skill? And how was that evidence evaluated?

That brings us to the second challenge: What makes a skills claim trustworthy?

What makes a skills claim trustworthy?

We regularly use proxies to make judgments about people’s skills: Degrees, previous employers, job titles, years of experience, coursework completed, or even someone’s own assertion that they are “advanced” in a particular skill.

Those signals can tell us something. But they do not necessarily tell us whether someone can actually demonstrate the skill.

That is where skills validation comes in.

At the Lab, we think about validation as an evidence-based process in which someone demonstrates a skill, evidence is gathered, and that evidence is evaluated against a defined standard.

A simple way to remember it:

Evidence + Evaluation = Validation

Evidence might be a work sample, performance, simulation, portfolio artifact, assessment response, or something a person has already produced in the course of doing their job.

Evaluation is how we make sense of that evidence. Who or what reviews it? Against what rubric, competency framework, or other standard? How consistently?

A work sample alone does not validate a skill. The critical step is evaluating that evidence against an agreed-upon standard.

Try it: What would make a skill trustworthy in your context?

Pick one situation where a skill matters in your work: Hiring, promotion, credentialing, program eligibility, prior learning, or another important decision.

Then ask:

• What skill matters?
• What evidence would convince you that someone has it?
• How should that evidence be evaluated? By whom or by what technology, and against what standard?

The exercise often surfaces an important distinction: Organizations may be good at asserting skills without yet establishing what makes those assertions credible.

Visible + trusted: Why organizations need both

A skill can be trustworthy but invisible.

An organization might use a rigorous assessment and a strong evaluation process, but if the resulting information is locked inside one system, the learner or worker may not be able to carry it into the next opportunity.

The opposite can happen, too. A credential may be machine-readable, openly published, and easy for systems to find, but provide little information about whether its underlying skills were ever meaningfully demonstrated.

One creates trustworthy information that cannot travel.

The other creates information that can travel without enough reason to trust it.

Our work through the Advancing Workforce Mobility initiative has made this connection particularly clear. Across the cohort, organizations are publishing open, machine-readable credential information, creating more granular skill statements, developing employer-informed rubrics, embedding performance demonstrations into real work, and creating portable records backed by validated evidence.

In fact, half of the 10 AWM projects are working across both credential transparency or quality and skills validation. Their work reinforces a simple lesson: visibility and trust are different problems, but they are much more impactful when solved together.

Where Credential Engine + Education Design Lab come together

Organizations often encounter these challenges at the same time.

You may need to determine how your credentials and skills should be structured so they can move across systems, while also deciding what evidence makes those skills trustworthy.

You may need to connect one competency framework to another, while strengthening the assessments, rubrics, or validation practices behind the resulting signals.

That is where our work fits together.

Credential Engine can help organizations describe, connect, and publish credential and skills information as structured, open data.

Education Design Lab can help organizations define skills, identify trustworthy evidence, design or strengthen validation approaches, and build human-centered processes around how skills are demonstrated and evaluated.

Together, we can help organizations address the full challenge: not simply creating another skills signal, but creating one that people and systems can find, understand, trust, and ultimately use.

And that is the real goal. Visibility is not the finish line. Trust is not the finish line either. Both are necessary if skills are going to translate into recognition, opportunity, and mobility.

Want to go deeper?

Watch our Visible + Trusted webinar.

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:

1. 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.”
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

There are moments in an organization’s life when you pause, look at the work you’ve been doing, and realize the way you’re telling your story no longer fully captures who you’ve become.

This is one of those moments for the Lab.

Over the last decade, our innovative (and sometimes messy) work has sharpened, and so has our point of view.

Our mission has always centered a “who”: New Majority Learners are why the Lab exists. We coined that term to reflect the diverse group of individuals who now represent the majority of enrolled learners. This growing demographic includes working adults, first-gen students, learners of color, parenting learners, and others for whom postsecondary education was not designed. They need affordable, faster, more flexible paths to good jobs, where their skills are visible and portable.

Since our founding in 2013, we’ve launched dozens of projects to address the barriers learners face, all leading to this critical insight: Change doesn’t happen one program at a time. It happens when we redesign systems.

Systems is the key word for the Lab’s next chapter: We envision a future where learn-and-work systems are intentionally designed with and for New Majority Learners — systems that drive real economic mobility and close opportunity gaps.

In order to realize that vision, we’re focusing our work on four impact strategies that move from individual projects to full, place-based system transformation:

Here are the strategies in more detail:

1. We’re scaling skills-based pathways so learners can access short-term, affordable, and stackable routes into good jobs — with skills that are visible and valued by employers.
2. We’re fueling community college innovation so that career-connected, learner-centered practices aren’t one-off pilots, but embedded in how institutions operate every day.
3. We’re unlocking regional and rural talent ecosystems, bringing employers, colleges, and workforce partners into alignment so learners can access opportunities close to home, with systems that actually connect.
4. And we’re designing state talent systems that work, aligning policy, data, and funding so learners can move seamlessly across education and employment, with skills and credentials that travel with them.

Across all of this, our approach remains the same: We design with learners, not just for them. By bringing learners, educators, and employers into the same room, we surface the insights that matter and translate them into systems that work better for everyone.

But what about our impact and outcomes?

The Lab’s collaborative design process results in a ripple effect of transformation across multiple levels, from individual programs and colleges, to regions and state systems. We’re measuring our progress through four elements of change that signal system transformation:

CONNECT: How are we strengthening cross-sector partnerships to better align education, workforce, and employer needs, creating clearer, more supported pathways for learners?

ENABLE: How are we shifting policies and practices to remove barriers and support more flexible, skills-based, learner-centered pathways?

BUILD: How are we strengthening the capacity of institutions and partners to design with learners, using data and human-centered approaches to continuously improve?

SHIFT: How are we changing mindsets about learners, skills, and success — challenging outdated assumptions and redefining how systems create opportunity?

We’ve launched a new website

You’ll also see our strategic clarity reflected in how we’re sharing our stories, including a new version of our website. It’s designed to make our work more visible and useful — a place where our priorities, our partnerships, and the impact we’re seeing come together more clearly, along with resources and tools for practitioners across the field.

Explore how we’re turning our strategies into concrete actions and impact at our new digital home: www.educationdesignlab.org. (And please pardon our dust as we continue to build out the site in the months ahead.)

At the Lab, we love good ideas, but we’re biased more toward action. The most generative work we know happens when the right people are in conversation with each other, designing and building together. If this work connects with something you’re thinking about, something you’re wrestling with, or something you want to build, we’d love to be in conversation. That’s where the most important things begin.

Lisa Larson, EdD
CEO, Education Design Lab
August 2026