Key points:
- Higher ed’s most consequential work right now is in helping students build durable stills for continued professional success
- Why students feel unprepared for the AI-driven workforce
- How higher ed and lifelong learning can shape a future-proof workforce
- For more news on durable skills, visit eCN’s Teaching & Learning hub
Every few years, a new set of skills migrates to the top of employers’ hiring wish lists, and higher education scrambles to respond with retooled curricula, rebranded programs, and freshly minted credentials designed to close whatever gap the labor market has most recently identified.
The current cycle is, in one sense, no different. According to ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Global Talent Shortage survey, artificial intelligence tops the list of competencies employers most want in new hires, and institutions across the country are racing to meet that demand with AI literacy courses, technical boot camps, and workforce-aligned pathways that signal, however breathlessly, that higher education has kept pace with the moment.
Even as employers push for greater AI adoption, they’re asking for something just as important: communication, professionalism, and adaptability. Not technical certifications or platform-specific expertise, but the very human competencies that cannot be automated away. Ultimately, these are the skills whose value will compound over the arc of a career rather than depreciating with the next software release. As the debate over AI’s potential and pitfalls intensifies, employers are placing even greater value on human skills—communication, professionalism, and adaptability. Their absence from today’s graduate pipeline reflects not a skills gap, but a failure of institutional design.
The argument here is, in many respects, straightforward in its claim, even if the implications are unsettling. At the exact moment colleges are racing to prepare students for an AI-driven economy, they are under-developing the same competencies that will ultimately determine whether those students thrive in it.
Any serious engagement with this argument requires precision about what durable skills actually are. Too often, the phrase gets flattened into buzzwords that obscure more than they illuminate. Communication, at least in the way employers conceive of it, is not the ability to write a coherent email; it is the capacity to read a room when the energy has shifted, to advocate for oneself in a high-stakes professional conversation without foreclosing the relationship, and to deliver feedback honest enough to be useful and careful enough to preserve working trust.
Professionalism is not a dress code, but accountability under genuine pressure—the judgment to diagnose what a moment requires, the discipline to follow through when follow-through is costly, and a professional identity stable enough to absorb setbacks without defaulting to paralysis or blame. According to data from Gallup, 55 percent of graduates from institutions that prioritize investment strongly agree that their college prepared them well for careers and life after graduation, compared to just 29 percent from institutions that operate without those conditions.
Adaptability, perhaps the hardest of the three to develop with any deliberateness, requires institutions to embrace something they have historically resisted: sustained, supported exposure to ambiguity deep enough that students learn not simply to tolerate open problems but to move productively through them. What connects all three is that none emerge reliably from any single course or co-curricular intervention delivered in isolation. They develop over time, in environments where students are challenged with real stakes, accompanied by people genuinely invested in their growth, and given structured feedback sufficient to translate experience into lasting capacity.
It is against precisely that standard that higher education’s current performance looks most troubling. In a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, just half of employers said college graduates are well prepared in areas like critical thinking and communication, a proportion that has remained stubbornly resistant to improvement despite decades of conversation about workforce readiness and learning outcomes.
The reasons are structural: Higher education has organized itself almost entirely around content delivery, measuring success through credit hours earned and degrees conferred, while the question of whether graduates can navigate a difficult team conflict, recover professionally from a public misstep, or advocate effectively in a workplace where hierarchy is real has remained largely unmeasured and institutionally deprioritized.
Closing that gap requires institutions to invest seriously in what they have historically treated as supplementary: the relational infrastructure through which durable competencies actually develop—faculty mentorship that extends into genuine professional formation, peer learning communities that are structured and sustained rather than accidental, and coaching systems designed to treat student support not as a remedial service but as a developmental resource for every student navigating the complexity of becoming a professional.
The evidence for this approach is neither theoretical nor new. During my years at public Historically Black University Virginia State University, I observed directly what happens when an institution builds its educational model around helping our students build the kind of relational and social capital that allows them to put these “durable” skills into practice. The end result was not simply higher graduation rates, though those followed, but also a different kind of graduate: students who had practiced the competencies employers were asking for in environments that demanded real performance, and who had developed the professional identity that comes from being genuinely known and seriously challenged.
Ultimately, investments in student support are not just about helping to drive short-term increases in retention and graduation. The work being done to help students navigate barriers, build self-advocacy, and develop the professional competencies they will carry into every role they will ever hold, producing measurable gains not only in retention and completion but in the quality of human development that gives those outcomes their lasting significance.
This is also the moment for philanthropic funders to ask a harder question of themselves and of the field. Investment in access and completion has produced genuine good, but completion is a threshold, not a destination, and the question of what graduates carry across it has received a fraction of the resources that enrollment and persistence have commanded. Directing philanthropic investment toward mentorship, coaching, and structured peer projects is not a departure from the workforce readiness agenda most funders already hold; it is the fulfillment of it, the investment that closes the distance between a degree conferred and a graduate genuinely prepared to contribute.
In the AI age, the graduates who will matter most will not be distinguished primarily by their ability to operate sophisticated tools; they will be distinguished by their capacity to lead through uncertainty, communicate with clarity under pressure, and adapt when the plan changes. Those graduates are built in specific kinds of environments by specific kinds of institutional commitments, and higher education’s most consequential work right now is deciding, finally, to treat that building as the core of its mission.
Tonya S. Hall, Ed.D., is Associate Vice President for Development at InsideTrack, a mission-driven nonprofit that partners with higher education institutions to increase student success and career outcomes.
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