What is skills intelligence,
and why do high schools need it?
Skills intelligence is the organizational capability to make decisions based on real, continuous skills data rather than credentials and self-reported resumes. Enterprise organizations are building it from the workforce side. High schools are being required to demonstrate it through accountability frameworks. The data that powers skills intelligence has to start somewhere. It starts in high school — and right now, almost none of it is being captured.
In June 2026, Alex Laurs, Chief Learning and Development Officer for EY Americas — one of the world's largest professional services organizations — described skills intelligence on the HR Grapevine podcast as "making better decisions based on skills." He framed it as a data layer running across the full talent lifecycle: hiring, development, deployment, and performance measurement. Skills intelligence, in his framing, is what separates organizations that can demonstrate workforce capability from those that can only report on credentials and course completions.
EY's application of skills intelligence informs which organizational capabilities to build, how to design early career programs, which skills are developing across the workforce, and where the gaps are relative to where the business is going. It is, in short, the difference between knowing what your people have done and knowing what your people can do.
Skills intelligence basically means that we can make better decisions based on skills. The more data we have around skills, the better decisions that we can make.
Alex Laurs, Chief Learning and Development Officer, EY Americas · HR Grapevine Podcast, June 2026
For high schools, skills intelligence means something structurally identical: the ability to see which durable skills students are developing across programs, cohorts, and grades — and to use that data to make better decisions about program design, resource allocation, and accountability reporting.
The difference is that enterprise organizations are building skills intelligence from within an existing workforce. High schools need to build it for students who haven't entered the workforce yet. That is not a smaller version of the enterprise problem. It is the foundation that makes the enterprise version possible — and it is the version nobody has built yet.
Right now, every major enterprise investing in skills intelligence is receiving employees who have no skills record from their formative years. EY is spending significant resources trying to understand the skills their people have through assessments, development programs, and behavioral analysis. If those employees had arrived with four years of continuously documented skills data from high school, that investment would look fundamentally different.
| What skills intelligence needs | What most schools currently have | The gap |
|---|---|---|
| Continuous, activity-level skills data | Transcripts (grades, course completion) | Transcripts capture what students studied, not what they can do |
| Skills mapped to outcomes frameworks | Standardized test scores | Test scores capture one day, one format — not developing capability |
| Real-time visibility across cohorts | Annual survey data, self-reported | Surveys are retrospective, low-frequency, and often inaccurate |
| Evidence base for accountability reporting | Participation and completion counts | Participation proves students showed up — not what they built |
| Program-level skills development data | Credential attainment rates | Credentials prove attainment — not the range of skills the program developed |
Two forces are converging that make skills intelligence urgent for high schools in a way it has not been before.
Accountability pressure is increasing. 42 states and DC now include college and career readiness indicators in their school accountability systems under ESSA, according to Urban Institute research. CTE programs under Perkins V are required to demonstrate student outcomes across credential attainment, work-based learning participation, and postsecondary placement. As accountability frameworks shift from counting participation to demonstrating outcomes, schools need data they currently cannot produce.
The skills themselves are changing faster. Laurs noted that the half-life of skills is changing rapidly — a point confirmed by the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, which projects that 39% of core workplace skills will change by 2030. Static transcripts and periodic assessments cannot track development that is moving this fast. Skills intelligence requires continuous, real-time data — exactly what current school infrastructure does not capture.
There is also a less-discussed structural factor. Laurs flagged the risk of cognitive atrophy as AI removes the routine tasks that traditionally built baseline skills in early career employees. The same dynamic is accelerating at the high school level — the casual first jobs and early work experiences that gave previous generations their foundational skills are disappearing. Students are arriving at the workforce with less documented, less demonstrated capability than any generation before them. Schools that can show the skills their students are building through CTE programs, work-based learning, and extracurricular activities will have a meaningful advantage in demonstrating outcomes — both to accountability reviewers and to employers.
Students need skills intelligence at the individual level — a continuous record of what they're building that follows them through every career stage and gives them language to prove capability.
CTE coordinators and administrators need aggregate, anonymous skills data — which programs are producing which outcomes, where the gaps are, and how the picture maps to accountability requirements.
Employers building skills-based hiring systems need candidates who arrive with documented skills records — not just credentials and self-reported resumes. Skills intelligence at the school level is what produces those records.
These three needs are not separate problems. They are the same data infrastructure viewed from three different positions. The student's skills record is the source. The school's aggregate data is derived from it. The employer's hiring evidence is the downstream use. Build the record in high school and all three problems get better simultaneously.
Enterprise organizations like EY are building skills intelligence from within an existing workforce — assessing employees who have been working for years, running behavioral analysis, designing upskilling programs to close identified gaps. That is expensive, retrospective work. It is trying to reconstruct a skills record that should have been built continuously from the beginning.
EY's early career strategy reflects this recognition directly. They are designing programs to compress four years of skills-building experience into a more intentional, documented residency. They are studying what it means to be "experienced" and what foundation needs to be built before AI can augment rather than replace human judgment. These are expensive design problems that become simpler when students arrive with a documented foundation already in place.
Laurs also described EY's shift toward hiring based on potential rather than pedigree — a skills-based hiring approach that requires, by definition, evidence of skills. That evidence cannot come from a credential. It has to come from a record of real experience, translated into professional skills language, built continuously over time. Learning and Employment Records are being built for adults. Skills intelligence infrastructure for high school students is where the record should start.
Students log their real activities — CTE coursework, work-based learning, volunteering, sports, jobs, creative work — in plain language. Volly translates every entry into durable skills language and builds a continuous record the student owns. Schools receive aggregate, anonymous skills data from students who have associated with their program: which competencies are developing across cohorts, where the gaps are, and how the picture connects to career readiness accountability requirements. No IT project. No SIS integration. No additional counselor workload. The data builds as students log. The student's record and the school's intelligence are two views of the same underlying system.
Volly is currently working with early partner schools on the Skills Intelligence data layer. If you are a CTE coordinator, counselor, or administrator interested in shaping what that looks like for your program, the conversation starts below.