The skills our workforce needs most are the ones we're least prepared to build.

Increasingly, as you talk to employers about their early career talent, many point to a clear and emerging gap in the core skillsets young people are bringing through the door. These employers are hiring the same credentialed graduates with strong GPAs and campus leadership records as they always have — but increasingly, these candidates are struggling once they are actually inside the organization: overwhelmed by ambiguity, slow to adapt, and underprepared for the messiness of real work.

The skill gap employers are recognizing isn't easily definable. It's not a technical skillset. It's certainly not something that is "soft." It's something harder to name — the ability to sit with uncertainty, to learn in real time, to recover from failure without losing momentum. It's the ability to quickly pivot, adapt, and excel in the face of constant change. Perhaps they are best called "resilience skills."

Many blame the COVID pandemic for hindering the development of these skills among our newest workforce entrants. Others call it a failure of our educational institutions — who are increasingly reluctant to let students fail. But no matter the impetus, what is clear is that young talent is lacking these skills at a time when they are becoming more important than ever.

As AI increasingly absorbs the technical tasks that once defined white collar work, the skills that remain critical for humans to possess— critical thinking, ambiguity tolerance, problem solving, intellectual curiosity — may be the only reliable assets we can build our workforce around. These are the durable core of what makes a professional valuable in a rapidly changing environment. That's why it's incumbent upon employers and higher education institutions alike to make an intentional effort to develop these skills — before and after talent enters into their careers.

The growing resilience divide

The AACSB, which tracks business education trends globally, found that resilience, adaptability, and an agile mindset represented the single largest year-over-year increase in what employers said they needed from graduates heading into 2026. But while employers are saying they are struggling to find these skills among young talent, there is an increasing divide between the skills employers say they need and the skills talent thinks they have. And when the skills in question are so abstract, the question of whether someone possesses them — and to what degree — becomes inherently more subjective.

Data from NACE's Job Outlook 2024 paints a striking picture of that gap:

• Roughly 81 percent of young professionals rate themselves as highly proficient in critical thinking. Only 56 percent of employers agree.

• Nearly 80 percent consider themselves strong on professionalism and work ethic; barely half of employers share that view.

• On leadership readiness, the divide is sharpest: 66 percent of young professionals say they're ready to lead. Only 31 percent of employers do.

The divide is stark and compounded by the fact that most employers lack a systematic way to assess for these skills — let alone develop them. And educators don’t have a clear way to measure if they are building these skills in the first place. The classroom tends to reduce ambiguity: students are rarely given a problem without all the information needed to solve it. The workplace specializes in creating exactly that kind of uncertainty. That structural mismatch breeds frustration in both directions — employers who feel their hires aren't ready, and young professionals who believe they are performing well but aren't being recognized accordingly.

Bridging that disconnect requires shared definition of what "good" looks like — one that's transparent across employers, students, and educators alike.

The AI Accelerant

While resilience skills have always mattered, the rise of artificial intelligence has sharpened the urgency considerably. The half-life of technical skills — the time before a specific competency becomes outdated or automatable — is shrinking rapidly. In that context, resilience skills offer something rare: durability. A workforce that knows how to learn, adapt, and navigate uncertainty doesn't become obsolete when the tools change.

For years, schools made significant investments in STEM — coding programs, data analytics curricula, computer science pipelines. Employers followed suit, offering incentives for employees who built proficiency in tools like PowerBI or mastered data workflows. These are precisely the skills AI is now replicating at scale, raising real questions about the return on those investments. The organizations best positioned for what's ahead are those shifting focus toward the kind of foundational human capabilities that AI cannot commoditize.

What's also new is how broadly these skills need to be distributed across the workforce. Resilience skills were always recognized as critical for leaders, consultants, and those working in high-ambiguity environments. They were often less critical for roles with predictable, operational day-to-day tasks. That distinction is dissolving. In an environment defined by continuous reskilling, shifting job responsibilities, and AI-driven role redesign, everyone across the enterprise needs the capacity to adapt — not just those at the top of the org chart.

A shared accountability

So whose job is it to actually build these skills?

It's a question without a clean answer — and that may be part of the problem. As discussed at April’s Great Lakes Human Capital Network panel on ‘Closing the Workforce Resilience Gap,’ it's everyone's job, and no one is doing enough.

"I don't think one sole stakeholder is responsible for it," said Erin Cook. "It's a little bit of everybody."

Parents shape the earliest dispositions toward challenge and recovery. K-12 schools lay the groundwork. Colleges and universities — to varying degrees of success — are supposed to develop the intellectual agility that the workforce needs. Employers receive the talent, assess it, and are then responsible for continuing to develop it. Managers play perhaps the most proximate role of all — modeling how to handle adversity and creating environments where it's actually safe to fail.

And ultimately, individuals bear some responsibility for seeking out the experiences and feedback that build these muscles.

Jessica Hall, Director of Industry Partnerships at Denison University put it simply: "Careers are going to be so fluid from here on out." Her institution has moved toward building resilience skills not as a one-time intervention, but as an ecosystem — woven through curriculum, early experiential learning, alumni engagement, and co-curricular programming. The idea is that by the time a student enters the workforce, navigating ambiguity feels practiced rather than foreign.

The problem is that this accountability is diffuse enough that it often falls through the cracks. No single institution feels fully responsible, and as a result, too many young professionals enter the workforce without the foundation they need — and too many employers are left trying to build that foundation on the fly.

Closing that gap will require closer collaboration between all these stakeholders, and everyone – from schools to employers – making investments to build a workforce that is ready for anything.