What stood out to me the most was the quote: “Employability skills may not get a student hired, but lack of them could get a student fired.”
We often over-index on technical certification hours while treating professional behavior like a footnote—or worse, isolating it into its own separate, abstract unit. If a student can pass a credential exam but can't handle team friction or conflict resolution, that credential becomes deadweight. Especially in the trades, your reputation is everything. Unless these behaviors are practiced as daily habits during core technical courses, they don't sharpen into an applied way of living, which ultimately compromises a student’s long-term employability.
These skills must be intentionally paced and assessed, but that is exactly where the work gets messy. It is one thing to write an employability rubric; it is another (and something that is incredibly difficult) to score it without leaning into a teacher’s subjective bias regarding compliance, compliance culture, or "culture fit."
If we treat professional behavior with the same rigor as technical competencies, the assessment begs to be moved away from a gut-check on a student's attitude and toward observable, objective criteria. When grading defaults to a teacher's personal standard of compliance, it risks penalizing students based on communication styles, cultural background, or neurodivergence. To make this equitable, the rubric has to measure applied function under specific workplace conditions—like utilizing an established team protocol to navigate project friction—rather than subjective conformity.
