VIETTESOL INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION 2025

In today’s rapidly evolving job market, both English proficiency and human skills are essential to employability. Research confirms English as the lingua franca of the workplace, with its importance expected to grow over the next five years. While technical skills remain valuable, human skills, such as collaboration, critical thinking and social responsibility, dominate the list of those skills most sought after by employers. In an AI-driven world, human skills are proving more crucial than ever as a way to futureproof careers. When it comes to preparing English language learners for the workplace, however, we face two main issues: which language skills to focus on and how to integrate the development of human skills? A major challenge facing educators and HR professionals alike is the lack of a standardised framework of human skills to enable the monitoring and assessment of these skills. This session will focus on new resources developed to support educators in plugging these gaps and offering some answers to the current issues. The Skills Development Framework provides an educational framework to support the teaching of human skills, identifying the behaviours expected at different levels of mastery. Global Scale of English Soft Skills translates this framework into actionable objectives for the English classroom. Together, these frameworks provide a foundation for both teaching and assessment, helping educators integrate human skills into English language instruction.