Community Colleges Are on the Front Lines. It’s Time to Give Them the Infrastructure to Succeed.

Community colleges serve more than 40% of all undergraduate students in the United States. They are the primary gateway to economic mobility for adult learners, veterans, first-generation students, and communities of color. And they sit, structurally and geographically, closer to regional employers than almost any other part of the education system.

That position makes them uniquely valuable. It also makes the gap they are being asked to close more visible than anywhere else.

The Gap Is Not About Will

Employers are telling community colleges, loudly and consistently, that they need graduates who can communicate clearly, think critically, collaborate across difference, and adapt when conditions change. Eight of the ten most-requested skills in today’s job postings are durable skills. Yet most community colleges have no shared framework for defining these skills, no practical tools for teaching them inside technical programs, and no credible way to signal mastery to the employers waiting on the other side of graduation.

That is not a failure of will. It is a failure of infrastructure.

What We Heard from the Field

America Succeeds spent the past two years working alongside twelve community colleges across seven states through a national Community of Practice, convened with support from Trellis Foundation, to understand what it actually takes to embed durable skills into continuing education programs. We did not go in with a solution to sell. We went in to listen.

What we heard was consistent across institutions, geographies, and student populations. Faculty value durable skills. They already develop them, often intuitively, as a natural part of technical instruction. But they have no shared language for what they are doing, no practical method for making it explicit, and no tools designed for the reality of a continuing education environment, where adjuncts carry much of the load, time is scarce, and traditional professional development models simply do not fit.

Eighty-nine percent of survey respondents from our Community of Practice identified faculty training as critical to durable skills integration. The same group told us that what works is short, modular, and built around trying something rather than absorbing theory. Cross-departmental roundtables where faculty trade advice on real lesson plans. Brief asynchronous modules that can be completed between classes. Industry panels where instructors hear directly from employers about what durable skills actually look like on the job. Not because faculty lack expertise, but because they need practical entry points that respect the expertise they already have.

The professional development piece is necessary but not sufficient. Faculty also need content they can use, material designed to make durable skills explicit inside the technical instruction students are already receiving, not added on top of it as a separate layer. Real-world scenarios grounded in the industries students are entering. Structured reflection exercises that help students connect what they practiced in a classroom to what they will be asked to demonstrate on the job. Assignments built around problems employers actually face.

The Hardest Problem: Signaling

A student can develop genuine durable skills through a rigorous community college program. But if those skills cannot be communicated in a way employers recognize and trust, the economic value of that development never fully reaches the student. Right now, most durable skills credentials are either nonexistent or so inconsistently defined that they carry little weight. A badge that signals completion but not proficiency tells an employer almost nothing. A transcript that implies skills were developed but offers no evidence of mastery invites skepticism rather than confidence.

What makes a durable skills credential credible is not the technology used to issue it. It is whether employers helped define the proficiency standard it represents, and whether the evidence behind it reflects performance in conditions that resemble real work. That requires bringing employers into the process earlier than most colleges currently do, not as validators after the curriculum is built, but as co-designers of what proficiency looks like from the start.

What Getting It Right Looks Like

The colleges that are getting this right are doing something structurally different. They are treating durable skills integration not as a project with a start and end date but as a feature of program design. Faculty share a common framework. Assessment is embedded in applied tasks rather than administered separately. Employer partners help define proficiency up front and recognize it in graduates. Students can name the skills they are building and point to evidence of their development. And the whole system is designed so that when the champion who started the work moves on, the work continues.

Getting from the current state to that future state is not a single leap. It is a sequence of moves: building readiness and shared definitions, designing assessment approaches with employer input, piloting in a few sections before scaling, and embedding credentials into program workflows so they are built in rather than bolted on. The colleges in our Community of Practice moved through these phases at different speeds, and most found themselves looping back as they learned. That is not failure. That is what genuine implementation looks like.

The Infrastructure the Field Needs

The broader lesson is this: community colleges cannot close the durable skills gap alone, and they should not be expected to. They need a shared framework grounded in employer demand. They need practical tools designed for their context. They need employer partners who show up as co-designers, not occasional guests. And they need infrastructure that makes the skills students develop legible to the people who do the hiring.

The demand is already there. The willingness is already there. What has been missing is the scaffolding to turn good intentions into consistent outcomes, and consistent outcomes into credentials employers trust.

That is the work. And it is work worth doing.