From employability to capability: rethinking how we prepare learners for work

Lynette Leith is a Research Further scholar, and the Principal and CEO of Boston College. 

Further education and skills change lives. But in a labour market being reshaped by rapid technological advancement and a generational shift, technical competence and traditional employability alone are not enough.  

Further education (FE) holds an important and valuable space in the country’s education system as one of England's greatest engines for opportunity. Our scale is extraordinary; in 2025, almost three million FE qualifications were achieved. Behind every number is a life changed, a new qualification or career, the confidence to take the next step. 

We should be unapologetically proud of this. We do employability well. We teach occupational skills, academic knowledge, workplace standards, communication and teamwork. We build partnerships with employers, co-creating curricula that help learners prepare for their next steps. As well as apprenticeships, we provide work experience and enrichment, giving opportunities that in many cases would otherwise not have been available to learners.

However, in what is a rapidly changing world, both in terms of the workplace and personal lives we lead, this isn’t enough. While I am proud of and celebrate the remarkable work we already do on employability, alone, it’s become too narrow for the modern world we’re living through today. 

If employability means preparing a learner to obtain and perform a particular role, what happens when that role changes? If employability means preparing learners to enter and retain a job what happens when an occupational discipline or workplace is reorganised around technologies that did not exist when the learner began their course? What happens to our younger generations who see and experience work in a completely different way to the traditional workplace that we ‘teach’?

Employability matters, but learners also need the core capabilities and character to adapt, exercise judgement and flourish. The growing gap between learning and work is no longer about technical knowledge and employability preparedness. It’s a gap in the human capabilities that people need when knowledge, technology and circumstances change.  

The workplace is moving faster than our qualifications

In 2024, more than a quarter of vacancies were affected by skills shortages. In April to June 2026, around 981,000 young people aged 16 to 24-years-old in the UK were not in education, employment or training (NEET). Neither figure can be attributed to education alone – there is no simple cure for structural inequality, ill health, insecure work or weak local economies. But these figures should challenge any complacency about the bridge between learning and sustained participation in work.

For much of our history FE has been expected to respond to the economy. That expectation plays out on policy dynamics and the sector's development: from technical institutes and polytechnics to incorporation, apprenticeships, T Levels and today's focus on local skills needs and devolution. We have continually adapted curricula to support industry, productivity and employment.

The pace and shape of change are different now. AI and big data are among the fastest-growing skills, with environmental stewardship becoming a greater priority too.  But this growth is not simply creating a new list of technical skills; it’s altering how work is organised, how decisions are made, and what and how people contribute to the workplace and worlds around them.

Technical knowledge remains essential. A nurse must learn the highest possible standards of clinical practice, an engineer must master engineering principles, an electrician must work safely and competently. But technical expertise must be accompanied by the ability to interpret unfamiliar information, question the output of technology, work across disciplines, communicate with people, make ethical decisions and continue learning.

Employability and twenty-first-century capability are not the same

Traditional employability does support the development of these skills, but it tends to concentrate on readiness for employment: punctuality, workplace communication, teamwork, job applications and interviews. These skills remain important, particularly for learners new to the workplace. The answer is not to abandon them, but to think more broadly and purposefully about the character that students need beyond them.

Character is our unique humanness; who we are intellectually, our open-mindedness, our perseverance, confidence and adaptability, how we see service and responsibility, and moral qualities like integrity, empathy and fairness.  Character is what turns knowledge into wise action. Wise action that represents who we are. Character is our greatest human power. In a world where these qualities are more important than ever, how do we create learning opportunities that enable learners to draw on their character skills and thrive?

Teaching core capabilities can do this: analytical and critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, complex problem-solving, digital discernment and the ability to learn how to learn. These skills help people transfer knowledge between situations and respond when there is no rehearsed answer.

The language in this space is often blurred. Employability, essential skills, transferable skills, soft skills, life skills and 21st-century skills are often used interchangeably. They overlap, but they are not identical. Calling these ‘soft skills’ understates their importance. There is nothing soft about making a sound decision when information is limited, challenging an unsafe practice, recovering after failure, leading people through uncertainty or listening well enough to resolve conflict.

Put simply, employability may help someone enter the workplace.  Employability is often periodic: it’s usually tested at the point of application or entry, and then we often focus on what the individual cannot do well. Core and character capabilities are developmental. They shape how a person responds across changing environments, relationships and stages of life and are often harnessed from a place of strength rather than deficit. 

This distinction matters because completing a qualification is not the same as being prepared for an uncertain future. 

That is the gap we must address. It is possible to deliver the qualification successfully and still leave too much of the person's development to chance. I’m interested in how we do both purposefully. The answer is not less technical education. Our learners need occupational mastery and the human capabilities to use it wisely. They need digital fluency and discernment, confidence and humility, adaptability and a sense of purpose. They need to know not only how to complete today's task, but how to respond to tomorrow's problem.

In further education, we combine economic purpose with social mission. We give people second chances, first opportunities and routes into professions that sustain our communities. This is why employability has always been central to what we do. But our next task is to make the development of human capability as deliberate and equitable as the development of occupational competence.