Employers in Puerto Rico kept saying the same thing: candidates were showing up without the skills or experience they needed to succeed. At the same time, industries like construction were struggling to fill tens of thousands of open roles, even as young people showed little interest in pursuing careers there. When ConPRmetidos brought together roughly 1,300 students and high school counselors for a career conference focused on in-demand fields, the students made something else clear. They didn’t just want more information about careers. They wanted to talk to real professionals, ask honest questions, and understand what the work actually looked like day to day.
Those three signals, a skills gap, an exposure gap, and a connection gap, led ConPRmetidos to launch Futuro ConPR, an after-school program designed to close all three at once.
Puerto Rico’s Distinct Context
Durable skills development is a global challenge, but Puerto Rico’s economic and institutional landscape shapes how ConPRmetidos approaches it. One of the biggest obstacles is a lack of coordination between government, education, and the private sector. Economic development strategies create jobs, but those roles don’t always align with what local academic programs are preparing students to do. Many young people are also making major education and career decisions without full awareness of the opportunities emerging across the economy.
Private-sector involvement in talent development remains limited too. As jobs grow more specialized, employers increasingly need to take an active role in training and work-based learning, rather than leaving that responsibility entirely to schools. ConPRmetidos frequently hears from employers who want workers with practical experience, yet few of those same employers offer internships or mentorships that would build it. Futuro ConPR was built to help close that gap by exposing students to high-growth sectors, connecting them directly with professionals, and encouraging greater private-sector participation in preparing the talent employers actually need.
What a Day in Futuro ConPR Looks Like
Futuro ConPR runs after school, and every session is built around one of two goals: career exposure and durable skills development.
On career exposure days, students are introduced to a sector and the range of careers within it, including roles they may not have known existed. From there, students take part in interactive activities, like an escape room where they had to identify which professionals had the expertise to solve a fictional crisis, followed by direct conversations with professionals from that field. Exposure also extends beyond the classroom. During a creative industries module, students went backstage at Puerto Rico’s largest indoor arena during concert setup, speaking directly with stage managers, lighting technicians, audio technicians, and producers.
On durable skills days, students start by learning why a specific skill matters in the workplace, then have opportunities to practice it directly. That might mean building benches together to develop collaboration, or playing a game that requires distinguishing fact from opinion to build critical thinking. Across both types of sessions, the goal is the same: students don’t just hear about careers or skills, they practice them.
Measuring What’s Actually Measurable
ConPRmetidos originally hoped to measure success by tracking how many students pursued in-demand careers and by demonstrating measurable growth in specific durable skills. They quickly learned that both outcomes are shaped by far more variables than any single program can control, from family circumstances to personal interest to access to further training.
So the team recalibrated. At the student level, success now means building awareness and intentionality: do students understand why these skills matter, can they recognize the skills in themselves, and do they understand that developing them is an ongoing process rather than a single lesson? At the school level, success means equipping counselors with the resources and current labor market information they need to support students at a scale ConPRmetidos can’t reach on its own. And at the ecosystem level, success means greater private-sector participation in talent development, since employers ultimately hold the key to closing the gap between workforce demand and the preparation available to meet it.
Where Pathsmith® Fits In
The Pathsmith® Durable Skills Framework gave ConPRmetidos a common language and structure for the skills they wanted students to recognize and practice. It helped the team be more intentional about introducing vocabulary, connecting skills to real workplace contexts, and building them directly into hands-on curriculum. The framework also validated an approach centered on self-recognition and reflection, helping students identify these skills in themselves and understand how they continue developing over time.
Beyond the framework itself, ConPRmetidos has valued the connections America Succeeds has helped make possible, including the introduction to an AI-enabled durable skills measurement tool that the team is now testing. As that collaboration continues, ConPRmetidos is looking forward to helping make durable skills more visible to local partners and building greater alignment around this work across Puerto Rico.
Futuro ConPR is a clear example of what it looks like to take durable skills work seriously in a specific, local context: not treating exposure, skills, and connection as separate problems, but instead building a program that addresses all three at once.
Learn more about ConPRmetidos and the Pathsmith® Durable Skills Framework.
