Employability Skills:An Update

Employability Skills: An Update

This project has been funded at least in part with Federal funds from the U.S. Department of Education under Contract No. ED-99-CO-0013. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. Digests may be freely reproduced and are available at http://ericacve.org/fulltext.asp.

What skills do employers want? How do these skills match those that youth and adults are developing through their school and work experiences? How can education and training programs prepare individuals to enter a rapidly changing workplace? These and other questions are examined in this Digest that explores skills currently needed for employment.

Since 1986 the authors of no fewer than six ERIC Digests and one Trends and Issues Alert have sifted through an increasingly prolific literature base to investigate the evolving topic of employability skills. The dual challenges of competing in a world market and rapid technological advancements have necessitated a redesign of the workplace into an innovative work environment known as the high-performance workplace. This environment requires a behavior and orientation toward work that go beyond step-by-step task performance. It expects workers at all levels to solve problems, create ways to improve the methods they use, and engage effectively with their coworkers (Bailey 1997; Packer 1998).

Knowledge workers who demonstrate this highly skilled, adaptive blend of technical and human relations ability are recognized by employers as their primary competitive edge. Job-specific technical skills in a given field are no longer sufficient as employers scramble to fill an increasing number of interdependent jobs (Askov and Gordon 1999; Murnane and Levy 1996). Many U.S. and international authors point out the importance of continuously developing skills beyond those required for a specific job, and they identify employability skills that enable individuals to prove their value to an organization as the key to job survival. The volume of major studies undertaken in the past 2 decades to identify and describe employability skills underscores their criticality. (For a listing of some of these authors, organizations, and studies, see the references.)

There are many definitions of the phrase employability skills. The following updated definition is representative of a synthesis of definitions as they have evolved over time:

Employability skills are transferable core skill groups that represent essential functional and enabling knowledge, skills, and attitudes required by the 21st century workplace.