Workforce preparation activities focus on the skills we all need to be successful in the modern workforce. While this may sound broad, these are practical and tangible skills we use every day. Whether you are teaching a lesson, leading an advising meeting, or running a workforce training program, make these skills visible! Calling them out, naming them, and identifying where they appear in our classrooms is part of helping learners attain and retain quality employment.

What are workforce preparation activities?

Workforce preparation activities teach the transferable skills that are critical for finding employment and advancing in a career pathway, while fostering resilience and adaptability in an ever-changing world. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) requires that programs integrate workforce preparation activities at all levels of ABE and ESOL instruction. Adult and Community Learning Services (ACLS) points to several frameworks for this, including Teaching Skills That Matter in Adult Education (TSTM) and the Employability Skills Frameworks. In the Inspiring Career Development and Action (ICA) Curriculum Guide for Adult Educators, we at the SABES Program Support team used these core resources and others to highlight ten key workforce skills (see Appendix 2, p. 200). You can use the ICA terminology and definitions with programs and learners alike to develop a common understanding of these skills.

What does it look like to integrate workforce preparation activities?

Adult education learners and educators practice workforce skills constantly. However, many educators want to know what it looks like to integrate and contextualize these skills explicitly into their teaching and advising practices. Check out the following models and resources to learn how.

Teaching Skills That Matter

The Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM) framework helps adult education teachers intentionally integrate workforce preparation skills into instruction by connecting academic learning to real-world tasks and roles. The framework emphasizes skills such as communication, collaboration, problem-solving, adaptability, self-management, and critical thinking through activities grounded in civics, digital literacy, health, financial literacy, and workforce contexts. The TSTM Toolkit provides lesson plans, classroom strategies, and planning resources that help educators incorporate these skills into instruction in practical and accessible ways. Rather than treating workforce preparation skills as separate from instruction, TSTM supports teachers to embed them into everyday practices so learners can build the transferable skills needed in workplace, academic, or community settings.

ICA Curriculum Guide

This guide contains forty-five lessons that emphasize identifying and strengthening learners' transferable personal and workforce success skills while teaching career awareness and planning skills. Each lesson names two to five skills and shows you where in the lesson these skills are being practiced. The ICA Guide’s Identifying Transferable Skills lesson (Section 2, Lesson 4, p. 60) will support you in delivering a lesson on the skills so that all learners and educators are on the same page.

MassSTEP

MassSTEP programs are built on the Integrated Education and Training (IET) model, which integrates workforce preparation alongside industry, language, and numeracy content. By tying objectives directly to workforce success skills, MassSTEP programs ensure that learners are not learning academic or industry skills in a vacuum. For more information, LINCS provides a repository of curriculum and instructional resources that demonstrate what integrated curricula can look like.

Tips for integrating and teaching the skills

These tips will help you integrate and energize workforce preparation skills, no matter your specific context or setting.

• Clearly define the skills and discuss their importance and application across various life scenarios. Use the list Transferable Personal and Workforce Success Skills Definitions from the ICA Guide (Section 2, Self-Exploration, Jigsaw Activity), or other frameworks, to teach the specific skill vocabulary.
• Teach skills as overlapping and mutually reinforcing rather than in isolation. Show how traits like emotional intelligence and communication combine to support teamwork and problem-solving.
• Connect the skills to careers by showing how they are valued by employers. Guide participants on how to showcase them in resumes and interviews. The Identifying Transferable Skills lesson includes infographics and articles on the importance of these skills in the workforce.
• Use self-assessments and reflections to help learners take ownership of their growth and better retain new skills. This Change Agent article, We All Have Transferable Skills, and the corresponding exercises can help build skill awareness.

Professional Development (PD) for you!

SABES offers a robust suite of PD events that support educators in integrating workforce preparation activities into your teaching and advising. Consider the following:

• Intro to TSTM and TSTM Academy: The TSTM self-paced introductory course provides a foundational overview of the TSTM framework and serves as a prerequisite for those enrolling in the TSTM Academy or as a refresher for those who attended the academy. The TSTM Academy is a PD series designed to deepen teachers' knowledge of the TSTM framework and customized to offer programs the flexibility to tailor the integration of TSTM’s nine transferable skills to their specific curricula and instructional goals.
• Inspiring Career Development and Action (ICA): This collaborative series between the Program Support, English Language Arts (ELA), and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) centers provides teams with a curriculum guide and strategies to develop career-contextualized instruction that can be used immediately.
• MassSTEP Curriculum: Integrated Learning Objectives: This session focuses on creating a Single Set of Learning Objectives (SSLO), ensuring that academic and workforce skills are seamlessly integrated.
• Build or Improve Your MassSTEP Curriculum with a Syllabus: This course supports MassSTEP programs in developing a syllabus that showcases the integration of academic, industry skills, and workforce preparation activities.

Building an Advising Curriculum: This course helps advisors move beyond crisis management toward a proactive, structured curriculum that supports career exploration and workforce readiness.