Calbright doesn’t just emphasize technical skills – it also emphasizes the durable skills employers say make the difference between a successful employee and a worker who might have knowledge but can’t do the job an employer needs now.
America Succeeds, a national nonprofit working at the intersection of education and workforce development to advance economic mobility, has taken notice. It recently published a profile of Calbright’s leading edge approach to teaching durable skills, and the lessons leaders in durable skills training should take from Calbright to teach the industry as a whole.
“Across the country, community colleges are rethinking how they prepare learners for the workforce,” America Succeeds writes. “But too often, ‘career readiness’ still leans heavily on technical training, leaving the skills that matter most in the workplace implied rather than explicit. Calbright College is taking a different approach.”
American Succeeds spoke with Calright’s Lead Faculty Instructor of Career Readiness Ashley Odell and Vice President of Learning and Instruction Shannon McCarty about the College’s model and noted:
“Calbright built multiple cross-functional teams that brought together Learning and Instruction, Student Services and Success, workforce teams, and career services. Together, they created a common language and a coordinated strategy for how these skills show up across programs, supports, and student experiences.
The result is coherence. When Calbright talks about “digital savvy” or “collaboration,” it means the same thing across the institution. That consistency matters for both teaching and signaling to adult learners what they’ll learn, and for employers what skills they’ll gain from Calbright graduates.“
Calbright stands out because the most common problem with durable skills training, American Succeeds leaders note, is “fragmentation.” Different departments and programs within a single institution may use different names and even different definitions for the different durable skills. Efforts to teach durable skills are siloed, with faculty, advisors, and career service teams “offering in parallel rather than in sync. The result is confusion for learners and weak signals for employers.”
But at Calbright, Odell, McCarty, and team have developed a program that ranks among the leaders on durable skills and work readiness nationwide. The profile concludes:
“Calbright’s work reinforces several lessons we see across leading institutions:
- Durable skills cannot live in silos. They require coordination across academic programs, student supports, and employer engagement.
- Shared language is foundational. Without it, consistency and credibility break down.
- Integration matters more than intention. Embedding skills into real coursework and experiences drives actual development.
- Signals are the next frontier. If skills cannot be clearly communicated, their value is lost in translation.
Perhaps most importantly, Calbright demonstrates that this work is possible at scale when it is treated as core to the mission, not as an add-on.“
