Sep 25th, 2025 – By Rebecca Taylor, CCO and Co-founder of SkillCycle
Durable skills are capabilities that help employees succeed, regardless of how industries or technologies evolve. Foundational strengths like adaptability, communication, and problem-solving aren’t secondary priorities; they are essential as workplaces change.
Expanding your team’s long-term capabilities involves handling today’s challenges and building a workforce ready for the future. These skills aren’t as basic as they seem. According to the HR resource Training Industry, some people may not yet have a growth mindset regarding durable skills — but those who do reap great rewards.
Nurturing these long-lasting employee skills is one of the best ways to foster innovation, boost resilience, and drive lasting success.
Let’s look at why durable skills are worth more attention than they’re getting and explore:
Durable skills, often called human or soft skills, encompass critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence. Employees with strong human skills bring flexibility and problem-solving capabilities that allow organizations to pivot quickly and meet new demands.
These types of professional skills highlight the various traits you need to collaborate with others and succeed in the workplace, such as:
Unlike technical skills, which may become obsolete with changing tools or technologies, durable skills remain relevant across roles and industries. They’re the cornerstone of effective workplace teamwork, leadership, and adaptability. They’ll serve your employees and your organization well today and in the future, no matter how your business changes.
For example, an employee adept at collaboration can bridge departmental silos, enhancing communication and efficiency. Similarly, a team member with strong cognitive flexibility can easily navigate complex situations, finding innovative solutions to unexpected challenges.
When hiring and developing employees, applicants should undergo more than a cursory skills assessment. The most valuable strengths desired to build a capable workforce will help teams adapt to change and drive meaningful results.
We’re in an era in which automation and AI are transforming how most organizations conduct their businesses. According to McKinsey, as generative AI leads to the rapid reshaping and creation of roles, durable skills will be a longer-lasting currency.
The need for manual labor (and the required skills for this type of work) will decrease. However, the need for durable skills, such as the ability to collaborate (especially remotely) and solve problems, is rising.
Why? These skills help people succeed in nearly any job. Let’s say you hire a graphic designer who will need a solid set of technical skills. At the same time, they will also need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively. If they run behind on a project and don’t let stakeholders know, they’ll lose trust in your organization’s ability to deliver a successful outcome.
As automation takes over repetitive tasks, employees need competencies that machines can’t replicate, such as empathy, communication, and creative problem-solving. These capabilities enable teams to navigate ambiguity, foster innovation, and maintain strong connections in hybrid or remote environments.
Most importantly, durable skills directly impact business outcomes. Teams with strong foundations in communication and collaboration are more likely to solve problems effectively and spark innovation.
Conversely, a lack of soft skills often leads to high turnover and disengagement, which erodes company performance. Investing in these critical abilities creates a resilient workforce, reduces hiring costs, and strengthens employee loyalty.
Building soft skills within your teams starts with intentional strategies and actionable steps to create a continuous learning culture.
Here are three ideas you can try to foster these competencies in your employees:
1) Create opportunities for practical skill-building
Durable skills develop through practice and application, not theory alone. Provide employees with opportunities to apply their growing proficiency in low-stakes environments before scaling to higher-pressure situations.
For example, organize team challenges or role-playing exercises to simulate scenarios requiring negotiation, problem-solving, or collaboration. These exercises build confidence and create a safe space for experimentation and learning.
2) Invest in coaching and mentorship
Coaching and mentorship programs are powerful tools for developing employee skills. Pair employees with experienced mentors who can model behaviors like adaptability, empathy, and effective communication.
Encourage regular one-on-one coaching sessions to provide personalized feedback and set development goals. This structured guidance helps employees internalize these capabilities and apply them consistently in their roles.
3) Integrate skill development into everyday workflows
Embedding durable skills into day-to-day activities reinforces their importance. Encourage team members to practice active listening during meetings, collaborate across departments on projects, or take initiative in solving cross-functional challenges.
Leaders should model these behaviors by demonstrating emotional intelligence, embracing ambiguity, and offering constructive feedback. This integration makes skill-building a natural part of your team’s work environment rather than an isolated activity.
Prioritizing these approaches will help you create a stronger, more adaptable workforce and better equip it to meet evolving business demands.
Building professional skills in your employees requires intentionality and a long-term vision, especially those intended to hold value over the long term. You can start by incorporating these competency and skills assessments into hiring practices and performance reviews.
For example, interview questions designed to evaluate problem-solving or adaptability can help identify candidates with these traits. Similarly, performance evaluations prioritizing communication, teamwork, and leadership help reinforce the value of durable skills within your organization.
Upskilling programs are another effective strategy. Training in areas like emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and collaboration ensures that employees continue to grow and evolve alongside the organization. When you focus on durable skills, you create a culture of continuous learning that benefits both individuals and the company.
Finally, leaders must champion durable skills by modeling them in their own behavior. This demonstrates their importance and encourages employees to follow suit. When leaders invest in building these capabilities, they foster a workplace culture that values growth, adaptability, and innovation.
Nurturing durable skills in your teams can drive long-term organizational value, foster innovation, and enhance employee engagement. Investing in these capabilities through coaching, upskilling, or integrating them into your hiring practices equips your teams to tackle whatever the future holds. The result? A workforce that isn’t just prepared for change but ready to succeed in it.
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Tie skill work to outcomes so you can defend the investment. LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning research shows L&D priorities center on aligning learning to business goals and using data to show impact on retention and performance. Build a simple loop: define the skill, teach it in the flow of work, measure adoption, and connect it to 1–2 business metrics.
Here is a quick blueprint that uses your durable skills definition in day-to-day decisions:
This turns talk about what are durable employability skills into decisions you can back with data, and it gives leaders a clear story for budgets, promotions, and workforce planning.
If you are defining what are durable skills, start with a short list your whole company can rally behind. Here are durable skills examples that show up again and again in global data:
These strengths sit at the heart of any durable skills framework. The World Economic Forum highlights analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, and leadership among the most in-demand capabilities for the next five years, while America Succeeds and Lightcast show that seven or eight of the ten most requested skills in job postings are durable.
A practical durable skills definition is this: human capabilities that keep their value across roles and over time. Perishable skills are tool or platform specific and lose value faster as technologies change.
Researchers often describe this in terms of a skill half-life. Technical skills can have a half-life near 2.5 years, which explains why many organizations now refresh training more often and anchor development on durable foundations like communication, collaboration, and leadership. Employers also expect 44% of core skills to change within five years, so balancing durable and perishable capabilities is smart planning.
As AI spreads through workplaces, people who thrive are those who combine comfort with the technology and timeless human strengths. It is not enough to know how to use a tool. The real value comes from framing the right problems for AI to solve, interpreting its outputs with common sense, and turning those outputs into clear, persuasive decisions. Teams that can do that get better results from automation instead of being replaced by it.
Companies increasingly need employees who can translate messy, real-world problems into well-posed questions for models, and then explain the trade-offs and assumptions behind the model’s recommendations. That requires communication skills—telling stakeholders what the AI did, why it matters, and when human judgment should override a model. Leaders who can build trust in AI outputs and set guardrails for ethical use will be the ones that scale AI successfully across an organization.
Research from organisations like the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 shows that AI, big data, cybersecurity and technological literacy are among the fastest-rising skills. At the same time, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity, lifelong learning, leadership and social influence remain crucial. Around 39% of key job skills are expected to change by 2030, with an even greater surge in demand for these technical and durable human skills.
The OECD, in Empowering the Workforce in the Context of a Skills-First Approach, finds that 59% of the global workforce will require training by 2030 to keep pace with AI-driven skill demands. Analytical thinking, resilience, adaptability and general digital literacy are rising alongside prompt-engineering, ethical AI governance and domain-specific AI roles.
Durable skills are in high demand because employers need capabilities that survive tool changes and industry shifts. Analyses of millions of postings show that what are durable skills like communication, problem solving, and leadership dominate hiring needs, with seven to eight of the top ten requested skills falling into the durable category.
Yes, durable skills can be taught and improved when learning is tied to goals. The LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report emphasizes aligning development to business outcomes and measuring adoption, which turns durable employability skills from concepts into behaviors people use every day.
Employers care about durable skills because durable employability skills travel across roles and reduce reskilling risk. Studies show employers request these competencies far more often than the top technical skills, which makes them a safe, high-return focus for hiring and promotion.
Examples of durable skills examples in action include a project lead using communication and collaboration to align cross-functional teams, an operations manager applying analytical thinking to cut cycle time, and a sales leader using adaptability and leadership to navigate a new AI-assisted workflow. These everyday wins show why durable skills pay off across contexts.
In automated workflows, the skills that stay relevant are the ones that machines do not replace easily. Expect analytical thinking, leadership and social influence, adaptability, and clear communication to stay central while AI literacy rises alongside them. This blend reflects the WEF skills outlook for the next five years.
