Durable Skills
A First Principles Approach to Closing the Skills Gap
Workforce Demands (Unmet)
Students enter the workforce without the skills required in the modern economy: Durable Skills. By 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of over 85 million people, causing an $8.5 trillion loss to global GDP (Korn Ferry, 2023). Durable skills depend on foundational skills, including the ability to amass knowledge.
The Skills Gap (Unaddressed)
Students (Unprepared)
Learning is a scientific process, and for students to learn optimally they must be taught (Bjork, 2013: Dunlosky 2021). Students use ineffective techniques such as highlighting and re-reading, with limited success. Such strategies are rooted in the misconception about learning (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).
The Pursuit of Skills
The list of 10 durable skills above was devised by America Succeeds and resulted from the analysis of 75 million job postings across 20 industries. These represent skills employers demand today. While more comprehensive than the list of durable skills it is not a roadmap of what schools must do, but rather a destination of what employers want to hire.
Schools widely recognize the need to build students’ 21st Century skills—critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration. Yet research shows these skills often appear more in mission statements than in classroom practice. Scientific research on this is clear: without the foundational skills that underpin learning, students can’t truly develop the 21st Century skills schools value most.
21st-century skills cannot be developed in a vacuum. Yet 80% of schools attempt them without first building the foundational prerequisites, widening the skills gap.
COGx closes this gap.
Closing the Skills Gap: A Holistic Approach
To prepare students for a changing world, we need to look beneath the surface of “skills” and focus on the cognitive infrastructure that makes them possible. Deep learning depends on a network of processes—attention, working memory, metacognition, executive function, and emotional self-regulation—that work together to build and apply knowledge.
These are not add-ons to learning; they are its engine. When teachers and students understand how these processes interact, they can design learning that sticks—transforming lessons into durable, transferable understanding.
Reframing learning this way moves us beyond the false choice between knowledge and skills. It shows that durable skills—critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication—emerge only when the underlying systems of learning are strong.
If education focuses only on surface-level competencies, we risk repeating the mistakes of past reforms. It’s time to empower educators to develop learners holistically—the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional capacities that make every other skill possible.
Critical thinking is not a set of generic skills that can be applied to any situation. Thinking is tied to the content of thought.
