10/31/2025

Durable Skills, Strong Starts

Here's what employers seek in early-career talent

While technical skills, especially AI-specific capacities, are capturing a lot of headlines right now, durable skills and attitudes, distinctly human skills and attitudes, have always been in high demand, appearing on annual top skills lists produced by LinkedIn, World Economic Forum and other leading organizations. From communication to adaptability, resilience to teamwork, employers and educators alike acknowledge the importance of these durable skills and attitudes to success in early-career roles. For all the attention, though, there is often a lack of clarity about what these skills and attitudes are, how they’re developed, and how they are evaluated in real hiring decisions, especially for early-career roles that require little work experience.

The result is a landscape with many lists but little context. One employer might emphasize critical thinking, another collaboration, while others speak vaguely of "fit." Education providers, meanwhile, grapple with how to teach and measure skills and attitudes that are deeply contextual and often personal. With millions of new graduates and early-career workers entering an increasingly complex and disrupted labor market, the stakes are high for employers looking to build strong teams and for education institutions trying to prepare students for success in their first roles.

This study offers a fresh perspective, going beyond identifying which durable skills and attitudes are “in demand.” In early summer 2025, with support from Western Governors University, UpSkill America had the opportunity to dig deeper into durable skills and attitudes to gain a better understanding of how US employers valued and prioritized these capacities in their early-career hires.

Please select this link to read the complete article from the Aspen Institute.