Redefining Readiness to Put Human Development at the Center

Katherine Prince of KnowledgeWorks wrote this piece in 2017 to argue that readiness for the future of work should be built on social-emotional skills as well as test scores. A new section after the text looks at what employers report in 2025 about future of work skills and what CASEL says about teaching those skills alongside artificial intelligence.

Reconsider our measurements of readiness to prepare students for the future

Work is changing rapidly and in ways that can be hard to comprehend. With the rise of artificial intelligence and smart machines and a decline in full-time employment as the primary structure organizing work, the future of the workforce feels increasingly complex and uncertain. As Jason Swanson chronicles, the new era that these developments signal could lead to new job creation, to high levels of job displacement, or to something else we cannot yet see.

To best prepare our students for such an uncertain future of work, we must reconsider our measurements of readiness. No longer can we rely on test scores and international rankings. Instead, it is crucial that we focus on helping young people develop their uniquely human skills and dispositions and develop deep knowledge of their authentic selves.

Without this focus on the inner human core in the K-12 years, rapid skill development and frequent adaptation will be very difficult for people as they navigate the shifting landscape that is the future of work.

Pushing even further, when many tasks that people currently complete can be automated, leveraging our emotion system to interface with the world and connect deeply with other people will represent the uniquely human capacity that cannot be coded for completion by smart machines.

A new foundation for readiness grounded in strong social-emotional skills will help people find their way through this transition time and acquire the skills and knowledge needed to contribute productively in specific contexts. To take a closer look:

• Deep self-knowledge will help people develop visions for their lives and continue to discover their own personal and professional strengths, weaknesses, passions, and emotional patterns.
• Individual awareness will help people recognize and regulate their emotions; understand the triggers that spark them; and shift to more desired, productive emotional states when needed.  
• Social awareness will help people recognize others’ emotions and perspectives, enabling us to build relationships in support of learning, collaboration, and innovation and foster inclusive work environments.

This new foundation for readiness might seem straightforward. At one level, it is. Social-emotional skill development has been receiving increasing attention as an educational priority. But when one really unpacks what this new foundation for readiness could mean for education systems and other learning settings, it has profound implications. Chief among them, education systems will need to establish a new focus on feeling and relating to help young people get ready for future work environments. We need, essentially, to redefine readiness at both the K-12 and postsecondary levels.

Here are seven ways to start preparing students for the future:

1. Teach and integrate skills-based social-emotional curricula: Just as educators scaffold numeracy and literacy across grades, they can guide the development of emotion-based skills and practices over time. In addition, more states can incorporate social-emotional intelligence into educational standards.
2. Nurture aspirational visions: The K-12 years should strongly support self-discovery and experiences that inspire learning. This kind of organic discovery can be encouraged through exposure to big ideas, awe-inspiring questions, and new experiences that help students find purpose, engage in collaboration, and make connections to the broader world around them.
3. Bring ambiguity and uncertainty into the classroom. Looking for ways to bring passion-driven, open-ended projects; peer-based collaboration; and play-centered experimentation and creation into learning environments can help students experience uncertainty, ambiguity, risk, and failure in productive ways.
4. Encourage and support cognitive diversity and flexible thinking. Learning environments need to be psychologically and socially safe, stress-free, and physically supportive. In addition, students need to develop comfort in using thinking frameworks from diverse disciplines to stimulate ideas and identify novel approaches to problems. They also need down-time to relax, daydream, and explore ideas.
5. Use technology to augment human capabilities. When designing curricula and learning activities, educators can use technology to stretch the boundaries of thinking and to push higher-order analysis, synthesis, and creative and generative thinking. Technology should serve not as an endpoint but as means to facilitating deeper thinking.
6. Renegotiate definitions and markers of success. Traditional notions of school success are rooted in an achievement model that includes demonstrations of mastery of discrete bundles of skills and knowledge. To help align definitions and markers of success with the new employment climate, educators can consider shifting achievement metrics and assessments toward a learning model that addresses dynamic, emergent, and continuous learning along with social-emotional development.
7. Seek to cultivate deep partnerships with afterschool, summer, and out-of-school-time learning providers. These programs offer vital support for many learners, helping them develop and practice skills, complete homework, try out new activities, and explore their interests in safe settings. By changing approaches to factors such as time, structures, and graduation requirements and by addressing logistical issues such as liability insurance and transportation, K-12 educators can extend the range of experiences available to help students prepare for further learning, career and life.

The future world of work can feel overwhelming and uncertain. But educators can take steps today to help young people develop the foundation that they will need to navigate complexity and find their individual niches in new employment landscapes.

Future of work skills in 2026: what employers report and what schools can teach

Katherine Prince’s article above, written in 2017, proposed that schools prepare students for an uncertain labor market by building self-knowledge, emotional awareness and social awareness. Since then, employers and researchers have published data that allow a check of that proposal. This section reports what a large employer survey says about future of work skills, what CASEL says about the role of social-emotional learning as artificial intelligence spreads, and what a school or district can decide with that information.

What employers say about skills

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 draws on a survey of more than 1,000 employers, representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. The report says analytical thinking remains the top core skill, considered essential by seven out of 10 companies, followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, and then leadership and social influence. AI and big data top the list of fastest-growing skills, followed by networks and cybersecurity and technological literacy. The report adds that creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, and curiosity and lifelong learning are also expected to rise in importance over 2025 to 2030.

The report estimates that job creation and destruction from structural labour-market change will amount to 22 percent of today’s total jobs over 2025 to 2030, with 170 million jobs created and 92 million displaced. On training, employers expect that of a representative 100 workers, 41 will not need significant training by 2030, 29 will be upskilled in their current roles, 19 will be reskilled and redeployed, and 11 will need training that is not accessible to them. Skill gaps in the labour market were the biggest barrier to business transformation, cited by 63 percent of employers. These are employers’ expectations from a survey, which is useful evidence of what hiring managers say they want but is not a measurement of what will happen.

How the findings relate to Prince’s suggestions

Prince listed deep self-knowledge, individual awareness and social awareness as the foundation of readiness. The employer list includes resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership and social influence, curiosity and lifelong learning, which overlap with those three but are not identical to them. The survey also puts analytical thinking and technical skills at the top, so it does not support replacing academic preparation with social-emotional work. It supports doing both, which fits Prince’s own statement that technology should serve “as means to facilitating deeper thinking”.

What CASEL says about skills and AI

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning defines its framework around five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. In comments submitted in August 2025 to the U.S. Department of Education on a proposed priority for artificial intelligence in education, CASEL stated that empathy, collaboration, critical thinking and resilience matter more as AI spreads through schools and workplaces, and that AI should enhance rather than replace the relationships that research links to student success.

This is a position by a research and advocacy organization, so it should be read as an argument and not as an experiment. It does line up with Prince’s 2017 claim that emotional and relational capacities are the ones least easy for smart machines to replace.

Decisions for school and district leaders

1. Decide where each skill is taught. Prince suggests that social-emotional skills be scaffolded across grades the way numeracy and literacy are. A district can map each of the five CASEL competencies to specific courses and grade levels and find where none is taught.
2. Decide how skills will be assessed. Prince argues for shifting achievement measures toward continuous learning. A school that has no way of showing growth in these skills will find them dropped when the schedule gets tight.
3. Decide how technology is used. The employer data place technological literacy among the fastest-growing skills, so social-emotional goals and technical goals can sit in the same project, as long as students are asked to explain their choices and work with others.
4. Decide who takes part in the planning. Employers and families can add to the conversation, since the employer survey is what the skills list rests on. Prince’s seventh suggestion, partnerships with afterschool and summer providers, remains a practical route to include them.

Google Trends data show that interest in future of work skills peaks in September and April, so a district preparing a plan can time its discussion for the start of the school year or for spring budgeting.

For more, see edCircuit’s Social-Emotional Learning Guide.

Further Reading

1. EdSource – California is improving how schools report on college and career readiness for all students
2. WSAW – Schools work to prepare local students for a career in IT
3. Education Dive – Navigating state testing transitions — learning from Indiana’s experience 

More on Social-Emotional Learning