Helping Students See Where Their Skills Can Take Them

By Alex Barrios, President and CEO, Educational Results Partnership

Across the country, school systems are asking an increasingly important question: How do we ensure students leave high school prepared not only to continue their education, but also to understand the skills they have developed and where those skills can lead in the labor market?

That question is becoming more urgent as employers increasingly hire based on skills and students face a growing number of choices about college, training, credentials and employment.

“I don’t know what I want to do and I don’t want to spend a lot of money figuring it out.”

Two years ago, as Educational Results Partnership (ERP) began developing what would become Skills Currency and SkillSight, we held listening sessions with high school seniors and school counselors. We wanted to better understand what information students needed to make decisions about life after graduation.

That student’s comment captured a concern we heard repeatedly.

Another student told us, “I personally don’t know what jobs I would be good at.” A third said, “I don’t feel that I’m developing job skills in my classes.” Students wanted to earn enough to support themselves. They wanted to understand what employers were looking for and how to make practical decisions about their futures.

Those concerns extend beyond the students we spoke with. A 2025 ACT study of 4,367 high school juniors and seniors found that 45% had career options in mind but had not decided which occupation to pursue.

Recent research also points to a broader disconnect between education and employment. Battelle’s 2026 Applied Workforce Survey found that 80% of high school educators were confident that today’s curriculum prepares students to apply their skills in real-world settings. Only 46% of corporate decision-makers and 46% of HR decision-makers shared that confidence.

That does not mean students are failing to develop valuable skills in school.

In fact, students spend thousands of hours reading, writing, analyzing information, solving problems, conducting research and building capabilities that employers value. The challenge is that students often lack a clear way to identify those skills, understand their value in the labor market and see where they could lead.

Our listening sessions helped us focus on that problem.

Creating a common language between education and employment

The need for that connection is becoming increasingly important as employers change how they evaluate talent.

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook 2026 survey, 70% of participating employers now use skills-based hiring, up from 65% the previous year. Among employers using the approach, 71% use it at least half of the time.

At the same time, reliance on GPA as a screening tool has declined sharply. In 2019, 73% of employers surveyed by NACE screened candidates by GPA. In the 2026 survey, just 42% did.

Employers are increasingly asking not simply, What credentials do you have? but also, What can you do?

Yet education and employment largely lack a common language for answering that question.

Schools collect extensive evidence of student learning through coursework, grades and assessments. Employers describe jobs in terms of the skills and capabilities needed to perform them. Until those two sets of information can be connected, it is difficult for students to understand how what they have demonstrated in school translates into value in the workplace.

ERP developed Skills Currency to help create that connection. At its core is an algorithm that translates academic evidence into workforce-relevant skills and aligns those skills with occupational requirements and labor market demand.

That common language creates another important opportunity.

Much of the discussion about the divide between education and employment has historically relied on perceptions—what educators believe students are prepared to do and what employers say they need. By translating educational achievement and occupational requirements into a common skills language, Skills Currency can begin to measure how closely the skills emerging from education align with skills in demand in the labor market—and where meaningful gaps may exist.

What does that mean for an individual student?

Consider a student who may not perform well across every subject and therefore has a relatively low overall GPA, but consistently performs well in English Language Arts.

That consistent academic performance can reveal strengths in skills valued by employers, including critical thinking, problem solving, and judgment and decision-making.

Instead of seeing only an overall GPA, SkillSight helps the student and counselor see those demonstrated strengths and explore occupations where they are valued.

The profile provides a starting point for an occupational and career path based on demonstrated strengths.

Through SkillSight, students can explore occupations that align with their skills, learn what those jobs pay and understand what preparation may be required to pursue them.

Because labor markets differ from one community to another, SkillSight can also help students explore how their demonstrated strengths connect to occupations and opportunities in the regions where they live.

And that last piece matters.

A strong skills match does not always mean a student is immediately eligible to be hired. An occupation may require a certificate, credential, degree, license, apprenticeship or approved training program. SkillSight can help students distinguish between the skills they have already demonstrated and the additional preparation they would need before pursuing that occupation. It also shows them the first job they can get straight out of high school with just a diploma to determine if this is the career path they want to pursue in the long-term.

That information can help students identify their top skills matched to local labor market demand and provide a more efficient pathway from where they are today to where they want to go.

But not every strong occupational match requires additional education or training.

If a student has demonstrated skills that align with occupations they can pursue immediately after high school, they deserve to know about those opportunities too. A student should be able to see both: Here are occupations you may be able to pursue now based on your current skills, qualifications and regional demand, and here are longer-term opportunities that also align with your strengths but require additional education, training or preparation.

That allows the student—not a system—to decide whether the right next step is employment, college, technical training, an apprenticeship, another pathway, or some combination of those options.

This is what we mean by skills-based career guidance.

The goal is not to tell a student what they should become. It is to give them better information about what they have already demonstrated, where those strengths have value, and what it would take to pursue opportunities that match them.

For a student worried about spending years and thousands of dollars figuring out what they want to do, that information matters.

It can also improve the efficiency of talent-to-job matching. Employers can better understand where students with foundational skills they need may exist, while students can identify employers and occupations that value strengths they have already demonstrated.

What we are learning from students

ERP began piloting SkillSight with high school seniors in Rowland Unified School District in California and is now working with districts in both California and Texas to explore how skills-based career guidance can support students in different communities and labor markets.

In Rowland Unified, ERP provided personalized skills profiles to 1,038 graduating seniors. Following implementation, 298 students participated in a survey about their experience.

The results were encouraging:

83% reported a better understanding of their strongest skills.

82% reported a better understanding of which jobs aligned with their skills.

75% felt more confident that they could provide value to an employer.

Those findings speak directly to the concerns students raised when we began this work.

Students wanted to know what they were good at. They wanted to know what jobs matched those strengths. And they wanted to understand whether what they were learning in school actually had relevance and value in the workplace.

K-12 schools are already doing the hard work of educating students and helping them prepare for life after graduation. SkillSight does not require another assessment or ask educators to create another program. Instead, it seeks to create additional value from information schools already collect and from learning that is already taking place.

Counselors and families remain essential to helping students make decisions about their futures. SkillSight gives them another source of information to use in those conversations—one grounded in evidence of the student’s demonstrated strengths and connected to the realities of the local labor market.

Students deserve to leave high school understanding more than the courses they completed, the grades they received or the test scores they earned.

They deserve to understand what they can do, where those skills have value and what opportunities are available to them next.

As a nonprofit, Educational Results Partnership offers SkillSight at no cost to participating school district counselors and administrators. We are working with districts in different regions to help students understand their demonstrated skills, explore local and regional employment opportunities, and make more informed decisions about what comes next.

If your high school or district would like to try SkillSight, email outreach@edresults.org. We would welcome the opportunity to show you how it works and discuss how to bring these insights to your students.