“Our students are being hired for their technical skills and they’re being fired for their lack of soft skills.”
Over a decade ago, these words introduced me to the world of career and technical education (CTE). They were spoken by my future dean during an interview for the teaching position I still hold today. When hired, I would be teaching general education courses in written and oral communication, two areas that industry partners had stressed needed attention. It would be crucial that coursework cultivate transferable knowledge and broadly integrative skills, not just because those are central to the mission of general education, but because graduates’ professional success so depended on it.
“Soft skills” have been rebranded several times since that interview, and rightfully so. We now refer to them more as what they are. ACTE calls them employability skills because they hold market value across industries. Others may call them career readiness skills, 21st century skills, transferable skills or simply human skills. In my state at the moment, we’re favoring the term “durable skills.”
The name changes, but the list stays the same:
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- Communication
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- Collaboration
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- Critical thinking and problem solving
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- Creativity
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- Adaptability
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- Fortitude
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- Leadership
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- Strong ethics
Writing is a durable skill.
As a writing teacher, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about writing. It’s much more than an output-oriented task. Writing is thinking. It’s a process that forces us to expand on our thoughts, to distill our ideas, to challenge their validity, to identify how they fit in patterns, to analyze how they are informed by context. Writing provides endless opportunity to sharpen our judgment, cultivate creativity, and deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. It’s an active, iterative process. It is trying work too.
Writing is not unique in this way among creative tasks, either. Drawing, as a tool for the draftsperson or the designer, is a way of thinking as much as it is the evidence of thinking (Carr, 2014). And the song of the decade is written a chord at a time. Technical coursework requires and bolsters these skills as well. But in the expressive disciplines, the ability to iterate without costly consequence fosters creative and critical habits that are central to durable skills.
Honoring my mission to service durable skills, then, has meant focusing less on creative products and more on creative processes. But the processes we have historically employed to lead us to creative outputs were upset in November of 2022, with OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT. Seemingly overnight, generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies were mainstream, with the promise to reshape how humans create.
Artificial intelligence changes everything.
Understandably, there is enthusiasm for generative AI across economic sectors because it promises to reduce or eliminate the friction typically associated with creative tasks and in turn boost productivity (Noy & Zhang, 2023). But as educators, our concern must be much broader than our students’ productivity. We must think about the impact on the student as a whole person, and to the extent that we care about durable skills, we should question what is happening when our students use generative AI.
First, we should dispense with the notion that generative AI is just another tool. It is a tool, indeed, but the emphasis on “just” seems to dismiss any critique of how the tool is used — or how the tool uses us. My Bissell vacuum cleaner is just a tool that helps me clean my carpet. My Roomba is a robot that does it for me. The difference is not irrelevant.
“What role should generative AI play in my classroom?”
The answer has to account for the risk of skill erosion. It has to be informed by the reality that platforms like ChatGPT and Midjourney do not have a pedagogical underpinning. They are designed to identify and complete patterns in a manner that creates the most desirable product for the user with the least amount of friction.
That is not to say that AI can’t be leveraged with care. In fact, there is a growing body of evidence that AI holds tremendous promise. Generative AI can be trained to act as a virtual discussion moderator, a Socratic tutor or a learning companion (Ruiz-Rojas et al., 2024). That is, it can be prompted in such a way as to be imbued with a pedagogical purpose.
So, there are certainly benefits. Some ways of interacting with generative AI may erode durable skills, and other ways can solicit cognitive work and develop durable skills. Thus, it becomes necessary to guide the nature of our students’ AI use to safeguard their development.
Brilliant minds are working to train AI platforms with a strong pedagogical stance, with guardrails that protect students, not merely from inappropriate content or harmful bias, but from automation-induced complacency. That, I suspect, is the future. Until those platforms are sufficiently refined, we as teachers must act as the guiding force.
Final thoughts
Our graduates will create precision-engineered parts for advanced manufacturing, sustainable construction projects, efficient electrical systems, and custom welding solutions. They will develop life-enhancing treatment plans and digital designs that solve real-world problems. And they’ll likely have generative AI at their disposal. We can ensure that CTE trains them to engage with it in a way that preserves and amplifies their uniquely human qualities — so that they will be hired for their technical skills and promoted for their human skills.
Matt Wilson is a clinical associate professor in the College of Technology at Idaho State University.
