Academic content knowledge matters — but it's not what employers, colleges, and communities say is missing. The gap is in the capacities content alone can't build: thinking through unfamiliar problems, collaborating across difference, adapting when the plan falls apart.

Durable skills are the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities that travel with students across every context they'll encounter. Unlike content knowledge that can stay siloed in a single subject, durable skills compound over time. A student who learns to synthesize information in a history project carries that capacity into a science lab, a job interview, and a civic debate. That's what transfer looks like — and it's the hallmark of meaningful, engaged learning.

Schools recognize these skills matter. The challenge is making them specific enough to teach, track, and build toward intentionally. That's the problem the XQ Competency Framework was built to solve.

The XQ Competency Framework gives you a shared language for the skills your teachers already care about — and the specificity to actually do something with them. It breaks durable skills into 37 competencies, each with component skills and detailed learning progressions so your staff isn't guessing at what "collaboration" or "critical thinking" means in practice.

You don't adopt all 37. Start with the five or six that match your school's priorities. Map them to the curriculum you're already running. Hand your teachers learning progressions they can use to build rubrics and nearly 40 ready-to-use activities they can drop into any content area. The framework isn't a new initiative to roll out — it's a foundation that makes the work you're already doing sharper and more coherent across classrooms.