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PRINCETON, N.J. – (September 16, 2026) — ETS today announced the launch of the Center for Advancing Human Competencies, a new research center within the ETS Research Institute focused on identifying, defining, and validating the human competencies most essential in an AI era and how are the competencies shaped transforms education and workforce landscape. The Center is the third research center established under the ETS Research Institute this year, joining the Center for Responsible AI in Learning and Assessment and the Center for Policy Research.
“Human competencies and skills are central to nearly every conversation on education and the future-of-work, but too often those conversations rely on assertion rather than evidence,” said Kadriye Ercikan, Senior Vice President of the ETS Research Institute. “With this Center, ETS will apply its core strength in rigorous, evidence-based research to identify, and define, and validate the competencies that matter the most for education and the workforce.”
Closing a Critical Gap in the Future-of-Work Conversation
Human competencies are now a central focus of major education and future-of-work agendas, including those advanced by the World Economic Forum, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and World Bank. Yet many frameworks identify needed skills without validating whether they are the most central skills, whether they are distinct, measurable, developable, or predictive of education and workforce success.
“Everyone agrees that human competencies matter, but few can show which are distinct, how they develop, or whether they predict academic and workforce success,” said Lydia Liu, Associate Vice President, ETS Research Institute. “This Center will bring scientific grounding to the field by testing human essential competencies and establishing the evidence needed to support decisions about readiness, learning, hiring, and advancement.”
The Center is designed with a global footprint, drawing on research partnerships and advisory expertise across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Liu’s more than two decades of international research and partnership experience position the Center to define and validate human competencies across countries, cultures, and labor markets.
A Three-Part Research Agenda
The Center’s work spans K–12 education, higher education, and the workplace through three focused research programs:
Human Competencies in the AI Era: Identifying which competencies rise, fall, persist, or change as AI reshapes education and work; Define the human essential competencies and study their development and prediction of future success
Readiness Science and Expanding Workforce Pathways: Redefining readiness for education, work, and career transitions while developing trustworthy, portable evidence of competencies across education, credentialing, and workforce pathways.
Human Competencies Embedded in Disciplines: Studying how human-AI skills are enacted in STEM and other disciplines to help learners and educators build durable, future-ready skills alongside subject-matter learning.
“The advent of AI pushes us to think harder about what makes us human, and how AI can best augment and complement human capabilities,” said Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills at the OECD. “Research to make those capabilities visible and tangible will be the vital catalyst to develop them successfully.”
Connecting Research to Career Navigation and Workforce Solutions
The Center will build on ETS's extensive body of research on human skills, readiness, and workforce success. By leveraging these foundations, the Center will accelerate the development of a more rigorous science of human competencies and their application across education and workforce contexts.
The Center will also work in collaboration with strategic partners and initiatives across the education and workforce ecosystem, including ETS's leadership as part of the Khan TED Institute (KTI), focusing on competency-based education, and international efforts such as OECD’s PISA VET, focusing on career and technical education (CTE). Through these collaborations, the Center will help ensure that its research is relevant across diverse educational systems, labor markets, and learner pathways.
Why Now
AI is changing which human competencies matter, how they develop, and how they should be measured—often faster than the field can validate claims of what these competencies can predict. The Center will help distinguish durable skills from those becoming automated or obsolete and create trustworthy, portable records of capability that can travel across classrooms, credentials, and careers.
To support this ambitious agenda, the Center is expanding its research team with scholars who have expertise across human-AI collaboration in educational and workplace settings, human-AI interaction, readiness science, education-to-career transitions, and workforce pathways. Through convenings, publications, and partnerships with employers, credentialing bodies, and educational institutions, the Center will help learners, educators, and employers answer a shared question: which human competencies can be trusted, and how do we know?
Learn more about the Center and explore collaboration here.
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About ETS
ETS is a global education and talent solutions organization enabling lifelong learners to be future ready. Our mission — advancing the science of measurement to power human progress — drives our focus on helping everyone, everywhere, demonstrate their skills and chart their path to future readiness for life. We are committed to readying 100M+ people for the next generation of jobs by 2035. We deliver on this commitment through trusted assessments and skills solutions — including TOEFL, TOEIC, GRE, Praxis and Futurenav — and groundbreaking initiatives powered by our Research Institute. With a global footprint including subsidiaries (PSI), offices, and operations in more than 200 countries and territories, we help over 50 million individuals each year measure their proficiency and unlock new opportunities. Learn more at www.ets.org.