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The world of work continues to change, but the skills students need to succeed across college, careers, and life remain essential. Employers need people who can communicate effectively, collaborate with others, solve problems, manage themselves, adapt to changing circumstances, and work effectively with people from different backgrounds and perspectives.
These are Durable Skills, sometimes called 21st century skills, employability skills, and other names, they are the transferable skills that students can carry with them from the classroom to college, training, the workplace, and throughout their careers.
Massachusetts has identified five core Durable Skill areas that are essential to college and career readiness: Self and Social Awareness • Self-Management • Communication • Collaboration • Problem-Solving
Students develop these skills through a wide range of experiences in classrooms, Career Technical Education programs, extracurricular and community activities, career-connected learning, and work-based learning. Just as importantly, students need opportunities to recognize the skills they are developing, reflect on their progress, and identify areas for continued growth.
Massachusetts' My Career and Academic Plan (MyCAP) provides a student-centered process for connecting these experiences to each student's future goals.
Through My Career and Academic Plan MyCAP, students engage in ongoing college, career, and life readiness activities that help them understand who they are, explore possible pathways, build the skills they need for the future, and make informed academic and career decisions.
Durable Skills are an important part of that process. As students participate in learning and career-connected experiences, they can use My Career and Academic Plan MyCAP to identify the Durable Skills they are developing, assess their growth, and reflect on how they have demonstrated those skills in authentic situations. These reflections help students make their learning visible, connecting what they have done to what they have learned about themselves and what they want to do next.
Over time, students can capture these reflections and evidence of skill development in their plans, helping them build a fuller picture of their strengths, experiences, interests, and areas for continued growth.
In this way, My Career and Academic Plan MyCAP helps students move from simply participating in experiences to intentionally learning from those experiences.
Work-based learning (WBL) provides a particularly powerful opportunity for students to develop and demonstrate Durable Skills in authentic settings.
Through internships, cooperative education, apprenticeships, career-connected projects, and other workplace experiences, students have opportunities to communicate with supervisors and colleagues, collaborate as part of a team, manage responsibilities, respond to feedback, solve real problems, and adapt to workplace expectations.
Work-based learning creates a cycle of practice, feedback, reflection, and growth:
Experience → Practice Skills → Receive Feedback → Reflect → Identify Growth → Plan
Massachusetts' Work-Based Learning Plan, available through Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority MEFA Pathway , strengthens this process by providing students and employer partners with a common framework for assessing and developing skills during a work-based learning experience.
Students and employer partners can use the Work-Based Learning Plan to identify strengths, discuss progress, provide feedback, and establish areas for continued skill development.
The assessment is an important source of learning and reflection. Students can bring feedback from their work-based learning experience into their My Career and Academic Plan MyCAP process, reflecting on what they learned about themselves, documenting evidence of their Durable Skills, identifying areas they want to strengthen, and considering how the experience informs their future academic and career plans.
Together, My Career and Academic Plan MyCAP, work-based learning, and the Massachusetts Work-Based Learning Plan create a connected process for skill development: Students develop skills through experiences; they demonstrate those skills in authentic settings; they receive feedback and assess their progress; they reflect on and document their growth through My Career and Academic Plan MyCAP; and, they use what they have learned to inform their next steps.
This process helps students become active participants in their own college and career readiness—able not only to demonstrate important skills, but also to recognize, describe, and provide evidence of the skills they have developed.
Students develop an understanding of themselves and others and learn how to work effectively with people from different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.
Students can:
Students learn to manage their time, responsibilities, behavior, and work while demonstrating reliability and professionalism.
Students learn to exchange information and ideas clearly and effectively with different audiences and in different settings.
Students learn to contribute effectively as members of a team and work with others toward shared goals.
Students learn to analyze challenges, consider possible solutions, and take appropriate action.
Last Updated: September 8, 2026