6 Developed in collaboration with experts in career development and talent attraction, the NACE Career Readiness Competencies are unique in that they focus exclusively on core, or transferable, skills. These eight competencies are applicable to career-oriented jobs for two- and four-year graduates, across the spectrum of industries, company types, and job level. Core skills Indeed, as our economy has shifted toward a service economy where information is paramount, interpersonal skills and other core, or transferable, skills have become of key importance. Demonstrating the importance of core skills, in a survey of 343 C-level executives conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 72% of respondents cited critical thinking/problem-solving and 63% cited collaboration/teamwork as skills that are most important in their workplace. The first hard skill, technical skills associated with job, was tied in third, endorsed by 54% of respondents. Reading for information, ranked 8th, was endorsed by only 10% of respondents, and applied mathematics, ranked 11th, was endorsed by 5% of the executives in this sample (Labi, 2014). These results suggest that on average employers recognize higher value in core skills compared to the hard skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. These results are very similar to those reported by the NACE in the 2019 Job Outlook survey of 172 employers of similar size and similar industries as in the survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Technical skills are only the 10th most endorsed skill; the top 9 were all core skills, e.g., communication, problem-solving, teamwork, initiative, work ethic. Based on these and other surveys conducted around the country, it is evident that core skills are in high demand. Core skills are defined as skills that can be transferred across jobs and include both skills and personal attributes. The skills and traits that are included vary by author, but there is much overlap across the definitions. They usually include interpersonal communication skills, critical thinking and problem-solving, an ability to work in teams or collaborate, and cultural awareness. For example, in a 2006 survey of 431 respondents that represented a workforce of over 2 million employees conducted in partnership by the Conference Board, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families, and Society for Human Resource Management, respondents indicated that core skills were more important in entry-level employees because job-specific hard skills can more easily be trained on-the-job. In this order, the soft skills that employers cited as most important were: oral communication, teamwork/collaboration, professionalism/work ethic, written communication, critical thinking/problem-solving, ethics/social responsibility,
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