What is the Framework?
Employability skills are general skills that are necessary for success in the labor market at all employment levels and in all sectors. The framework distills a common set of employability skills, drawn from multiple sources, that can be easily accessed by state policymakers, local program administrators, and instructors to inform instructional design and assessment. The framework can also be used to trace the skills back to the organizations or agencies that identified them and to understand the relationships among the different sets of skills.
Connections Among Employability, Academic, and Technical Skills
In tandem with academic and technical skills, employability skills are critical to college and career readiness. Employability skills are often integrated into academic and technical skill instruction, as illustrated by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Common Career Technical Core. In fact, many of the broad categories of employability skills included in the framework are addressed to some degree in both of these sets of standards.
This table shows the overlap of skills included in the Employability Skills Framework with those identified in the Common Core State Standards and Common Career Technical Core. While not all framework skills map to standards in each core area, educators have various options for integrating employability skills into their academic and technical skill instruction*.
| Employability Skills | Common Core State Standards |
Common Career Technical Core |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Applied Knowledge | Applied Academic Skills | X | X |
| Critical Thinking Skills | X | X | |
| Effective Relationships | Interpersonal Skills | X | X |
| Personal Qualities | X | ||
| Workplace Skills |
Resource Management | ||
| Information Use | X | X | |
| Communication Skills | X | X | |
| Systems Thinking | X | ||
| Technology Use | X | ||
Note: The "X" marks indicate that at least one of the skills in the Employability Skills Framework category appears in the standards.
* Information on the relationship of employability skills to the Common Core State Standards is based on the results of an analysis conducted by Achieve, Inc., which reviewed the match between the CCSS and the Hewlett Deeper Learning Standards and the Career Cluster Essential Knowledge and Skills Statements. For more information, see Achieve's analysis at www.achieve.org/Skills-CCSS.
