DISCOURSE: The Economics of Skill Development
By teaching foundational skills in both cognitive and social domains, K-12 schools can prepare students for a lifetime of opportunity
Burning Glass Institute has conducted studies with other organizations that amplify Deming’s analysis and identify foundational skills important across industries and careers. Workers with these skills receive good wages and opportunities for upward mobility. Burning Glass Institute’s analysis of more than 150 million job postings and the case histories of 50 million workers produced 14 foundational skills across three categories:
Human skills include soft or noncognitive social skills such as communications and relationship building.
Technical or cognitive skills include domain knowledge, as well as skills such as data management and analysis.
Business enabler skills include project management and presentation capabilities that help individuals use skills in practical ways.
“The new foundational skills reinforce and amplify domain specific knowledge and technical capabilities,” writes Burning Glass Institute president Matt Sigelman, “and enable workers to acquire, exercise, and leverage technical skills.” Surprisingly, of the 21 million job postings in 2019 that mentioned a foundational skill, more than half did not require a college degree. Seligman continues, “Technical skills [help] students get on a career ladder but . . . foundational skills . . . help them climb.”
This is a key insight, but the K-12 education system has not yet caught up to it. A Burning Glass and American Student Assistance report on middle and high school teachers identified an instructional gap between foundational skills and what is taught in middle and high schools. Each foundational skill was ranked as essential by at least half of teachers, with 92% saying they were essential or somewhat important. But less than half of the teachers said these skills are taught in their school. This instructional gap is greater in schools where most students are Black or Hispanic. What this means is that the workforce has changed in ways that teachers recognize, but schools have failed to adjust to that new situation in the way they prepare students.