As artificial intelligence reshapes school, work, and life, uniquely human contributions have become essential. Skills for the Future is a joint initiative between ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to shift the focus in education from time-based learning to competency-based learning.
To ensure that essential skills are effectively integrated into core academic subjects, and translate into meaningful credentials that postsecondary education institutions and employers recognize and value, educators need shared, science-based definitions: What do these skills look like as they develop? What conditions support their growth? How do we know when a student has reached proficiency?
The Skills Progressions developed by the Carnegie Foundation and ETS offer research-grounded definitions of three capabilities essential for success in school and career: collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
- Collaboration explores how students move from basic participation in group work toward the ability to integrate diverse perspectives, navigate conflict constructively, and build the trust that allows teams to accomplish more than individuals can alone.
- Communication traces growth from foundational message-making toward more sophisticated adaptation across audiences, contexts, and modalities, including the active listening and comprehension that make genuine exchange possible.
- Critical thinking maps the development of students’ capacity to seek and evaluate information, construct evidence-based arguments, reason logically, and reach well-founded conclusions even in the face of complexity or ambiguity.
Each Progression describes how a skill develops in sophistication over time, moving through four levels—Exploring, Analyzing, Integrating, and Extending—with subskills and indicators that offer increasingly specific descriptions of what students know, understand, and can demonstrate.
This work draws on decades of evidence from the social and developmental sciences, refined through feedback from educators, postsecondary education leaders, and employer partners. It reflects a commitment to building what the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching calls a “new architecture for high school,” one grounded in broader goals for student success, learning experiences rooted in the science of how young people develop, and signaling systems that provide meaningful, actionable information to students, families, and educators.