This post was guest written by Transcend. Transcend is a national nonprofit that helps communities reimagine and redesign schools so every young person can thrive in a rapidly changing world. Across the country, communities are recognizing that classrooms built for the industrial age aren’t preparing learners for what’s next. Schools must be designed for continuous evolution. We’ve partnered with hundreds of schools and districts to build capacity for bold, lasting change. From this work, we develop and share tools, research, and models that help schools everywhere make the leap to extraordinary learning.
As artificial intelligence rapidly automates aspects of the entry-level positions that have traditionally served as career gateways, young people are watching their expected pathways transform overnight. More than half of today’s teens say AI has negatively impacted how they view their future, which is a reasonable response to the evolving future of work.
Yet this disruption reveals an opportunity. While AI eliminates certain types of work, it makes the abilities machines can’t replicate more essential than ever: critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, problem-solving, and adaptability.
Schools, employers, and policymakers can act now to build the capabilities that will matter regardless of how the economy shifts. Capabilities that help young people adapt, solve problems, and find their way forward no matter what comes next.
Transcend has spent over a decade partnering with communities to answer this question, working alongside 600+ schools and districts to redesign learning for a world that keeps changing.
The Field’s Convergence on Durable Skills
Across K-12, postsecondary, and workforce sectors, organizations have been arriving at a shared answer to what young people need. Researchers and practitioners now use the term “durable skills” to name capabilities that are transferable across roles, resistant to automation, and increasingly valuable as routine work disappears.
Different organizations frame these capabilities in different ways. Transcend organizes durable skills across three connected areas that draw on learning sciences, research, and thousands of conversations with students and families across 600+ communities:
- Intellectual Prowess: critical thinking and creativity, the ability to analyze complex problems and generate innovative solutions
- Well-Being: fortitude, mindfulness, growth mindset, and the interpersonal skills of leadership, collaboration, and communication
- Wayfinding: metacognition and character, the self-awareness to understand one’s own learning and the agency to chart a meaningful path forward
America Succeeds, working with CompTIA and drawing on analysis of nearly 76 million job postings, has developed the Pathsmith™ Durable Skills Framework. The framework is composed of two connected pieces: (1) the Early Career Performance Rubric, which articulates what durable skills look like in early-career workplace settings, defining 74 subskills across four performance levels, organized into 10 competency domains, and (2) the PK-16 Developmental Progression, which maps how learners build toward those capabilities from childhood through young adulthood, and provides resources to support their development. Together, they were built to translate between what schools teach and what employers value.
These frameworks differ in vocabulary and emphasis, but they converge on a shared insight. Machines can process data, but they can’t determine which problems are worth solving or navigate the ethical dimensions of complex decisions. They can optimize for efficiency, but they can’t build the trust and shared purpose that makes collaboration powerful. They can’t demonstrate the persistence to work through ambiguity when the path forward isn’t clear.
These skills support all students regardless of what path they choose. Whether a student pursues a four-year degree, technical certification, apprenticeship, or direct entry to the workforce, these skills travel with them. They are the foundation for adapting to whatever comes next.
Schools Making It Real
We’ve partnered with innovative schools across the country that are making durable skills central to how students learn.
Brooklyn STEAM Center: Building Skills Through Authentic Work
At Brooklyn STEAM Center, a career and technical education hub in New York, students build professional skills through real work. The school has designed its entire model around four interconnected outcomes: industry skills, professional skills, social capital, and self-direction.
Take Natalya, who graduated in 2019 with OSHA certification, programming credentials in HTML, CSS, and Python, and enough product management experience to command a web designer salary averaging $85,000 in NYC. She chose Stony Brook University over the workforce, graduated college debt-free, and landed a full-time product manager role at Dell.
Natalya’s experience is by design. Brooklyn STEAM explicitly develops social awareness, planning, collaboration, communication, and problem-solving. Students practice these skills daily through project-based learning anchored in authentic community problems.
Students work alongside industry professionals on challenges that matter. They might partner with local organizations to address environmental issues in their neighborhood, or collaborate with businesses to solve actual operational problems. Through these experiences, they learn to navigate professional relationships, manage complex projects, and communicate across different contexts.
This model recognizes that durable skills aren’t built through worksheets or isolated lessons. They develop when students have repeated opportunities to apply them in meaningful situations, receive feedback, and refine their approach. Brooklyn STEAM deliberately creates those conditions.
The result is powerful. Students graduate with both technical expertise and the professional capabilities to leverage it, along with networks and confidence that extend far beyond the classroom.
Launch High School: Competencies Across Every Experience
Picture this: a high schooler studying oyster reefs in New York Harbor, then turning that fieldwork into a persuasive writing project with real ecological stakes. That’s a typical day at Launch High School, a Brooklyn charter school focused on green careers. The school organizes learning around reDesign’s Future9 Competencies, capabilities like Design Solutions, Sustain Wellness, and Navigate Conflict.
What makes Launch distinctive is how these competencies thread across every aspect of the student experience where students get to put these skills to use in real-time via academic classes, pathway immersion experiences, and community partnerships, like the Billion Oyster Project. Other students might design a green transportation ride-share service for Floyd Bennett Field, converting a bus to run on vegetable oil by applying Design Solutions and collaborative problem-solving in a context that is anything but theoretical.
This repetition across contexts helps students see these skills as transferable tools rather than subject-specific techniques.
At Launch academic excellence and durable skills development reinforce each other because competencies are integrated into how students learn.
Rugby, North Dakota: Designing for Durable Skills in a Rural Community
Rugby, North Dakota is a small, rural, agriculture-centered community; the kind of community that is often underestimated for being at the forefront of innovation. But in Rugby, educators are transforming school. They are intentionally designing learning experiences that build durable skills while staying grounded in their local context.
What does that look like? Here are some examples:
Rugby’s Cooperative Work Experience program. Seniors are placed with local employers in agriculture, business, and community organizations. Supervisors provide feedback not only on technical performance, but on initiative, communication, leadership, and problem-solving. Students learn that how they collaborate, persist, and contribute matters as much as what they know. Those skills will support them in whatever life and career paths they choose, especially in an AI-driven world.
Courses that respond to the evolution of industries. A dual-credit drone technology course, offered in partnership with Dakota College at Bottineau, has prepared students for FAA unmanned aircraft pilot exams and introduced them to the growing role of technology in modern farming. In doing so, students developed not only technical expertise, but the adaptability and problem-solving skills required in a field that continues to evolve.
Career-connected pilots that make durable skills visible in core classrooms. In one middle school project, teachers created a pilot for students to work with a local graphic designer to apply mathematical concepts through collaborative design work. In a high school community initiative project, students partnered with civic leaders to explore how Rugby might better retain young residents by researching, debating, and presenting proposals grounded in real community challenges.
Through its Career Connected Learning design, district leaders have clarified their priorities: help students understand the world of work, explore career pathways, build durable skills for postsecondary success, and develop credentials and networks that open doors. In a district where educators wear multiple hats and resources are limited, that focus shapes daily decisions.
Rugby is also measuring what it values. Using self-assessments aligned to the North Dakota Career Development Content Standards, students reflect on skills such as problem-solving and communication at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. Educators review this data to track growth over time. The district has seen consistent gains in students’ self-reported confidence and skill development, evidence that intentional design paired with reflection makes a difference.
Rugby’s work reinforces a central truth: durable skills do not develop by chance. They grow when schools design intentionally for them. Whether in a rural town or a major city, preparing students for an uncertain future begins with making these skills central to how learning happens.
What These Schools Have in Common
Brooklyn STEAM, Launch, and Rugby are doing very different things in very different contexts. A career and technical hub in New York, a green-careers charter school in Brooklyn, and a rural agricultural district in North Dakota would seem to share little.
A closer look, though, reveals that each is operating with the same underlying design logic. America Succeeds’ The Path Forward: How Schools Actually Help Learners Develop the Durable Skills They Need for School, Work, and Life, a 16-month study of twelve diverse high schools and profession-based programs, identified three core principles that appear consistently in schools where durable skills actually develop:
- Clearly identifying, communicating, and assessing target skills. Successful schools create explicit, visible frameworks that make skills concrete and trackable, giving students, teachers, families, and partners a shared language for what’s being developed.
- Creating authentic, interest-driven experiences. Skills develop through genuine use in real-world contexts with actual stakes, where work serves real audiences and real purposes beyond grades.
- Fully integrating skill development into curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Rather than treating skills as supplements to content-focused instruction, these schools reorganize learning so that content is learned in service of building capabilities.
All three principles are visible across the schools profiled above. Brooklyn STEAM’s four interconnected outcomes (industry skills, professional skills, social capital, and self-direction) make capabilities concrete and trackable, while project-based learning anchored in authentic community problems provides genuine practice integrated across the model. Launch organizes everything around the Future9 Competencies and threads them through academic classes, pathway immersions, and community partnerships, so students like those working with the Billion Oyster Project develop competencies in contexts with real ecological and civic stakes. Rugby’s Career Connected Learning design provides the integrating frame, the Cooperative Work Experience program provides the authentic context, and the North Dakota Career Development Content Standards provide the shared language students use to track their own growth.
The RPC also identified four amplifying factors that, when present, deepen the impact of the three core principles: progressive complexity that matches challenge to readiness over time, sustained relationships that create the psychological safety required for authentic risk-taking, structured reflection that transforms experience into transferable learning, and attention to students’ cultural and community context. Rugby’s beginning-middle-end-of-year reflection cycles and its grounding in agricultural and community life illustrate two of these amplifiers in action. Brooklyn STEAM’s pathway-based progression and Launch’s community partnerships illustrate others.
The RPC’s central finding is that these principles are not a menu. Schools that develop durable skills well are the ones where all three principles work together coherently, reinforced by the amplifiers, sustained over time. That’s what separates “we do project-based learning” from “our students develop the capabilities that employers and postsecondary institutions are looking for.”
The RPC also documented something striking. When the principles and amplifiers come together, students don’t just develop skills. They develop three beyond-skills outcomes that traditional schooling rarely produces: agency to direct their own learning and lives, professional identity grounded in demonstrated capability, and informed vision for the futures they choose to pursue. Natalya’s debt-free trajectory to Dell, the Launch student designing a vegetable-oil bus, and the Rugby seniors presenting community-retention proposals to civic leaders all show what those outcomes look like in practice.
Beyond the Schoolhouse
The schools profiled above are doing exceptional work. But schools cannot solve this problem on their own. Two pieces of infrastructure beyond the classroom determine whether what students develop will actually translate into postsecondary success, employment, and economic mobility.
The first is policy. State decisions about graduation requirements, accountability systems, learner records, and credentialing shape what schools can prioritize and how durable skills get recognized. America Succeeds’ 50-state policy scan, Beyond the Portrait: How States Turn Vision into Infrastructure for Student Success, documents where states are on these questions. Some states have moved significantly. Most have not. The schools doing this work well are often doing it in spite of, not because of, the policy environment around them.
The second is signal trust. Even when students develop durable skills, employers need to be able to recognize and rely on the evidence of those skills. The current credentialing infrastructure was built to signal degrees and certifications, not capabilities. Closing the gap between what young people can do and what employers can trust requires work on both sides: helping schools produce richer evidence of student capabilities, and helping employers get better at reading that evidence. This is a core focus of America Succeeds’ workforce strategy and a place where the field has significant room to grow.
The Path Forward
The schools leading this work share a common conviction: preparing students for an uncertain future means equipping them with skills that endure.
The path forward is clear, and it is collective. Schools must move beyond treating durable skills as supplementary and make them central to the student experience. This means making skills visible and trackable, creating authentic experiences where capabilities develop through genuine use, integrating skill development into everything rather than treating it as an add-on, and amplifying that work through progressive complexity, sustained relationships, structured reflection, and attention to students’ contexts.
Schools cannot do this alone, though. States must build the policy infrastructure that allows this work to scale. Employers must learn to read the evidence of these skills with rigor and confidence. Funders, researchers, and intermediaries must invest in the conditions, not just the outputs.
The future of work is already here. The question is whether the broader field will rise to meet it.
