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Future skills frameworks are everywhere. Most never leave the workshop.

Ervy Team

Jun 3, 2026

5 min read

What counts as a future skill

Why most future skills frameworks fail

How to map where your team stands today

What a framework needs to survive contact with a real company

The SOULWORXX framework, now inside Microsoft Teams

Where to start

Common questions

What counts as a future skill

Why most future skills frameworks fail

How to map where your team stands today

What a framework needs to survive contact with a real company

The SOULWORXX framework, now inside Microsoft Teams

Where to start

Common questions

Walk into any L&D planning session and someone will bring up future skills. The capabilities your people need for the next five years, not the last five. There's usually a framework involved: a neat diagram of competencies and categories, built in a workshop, dropped into a deck.

Then nothing happens.

The framework gets a slide and maybe a mention at a town hall. It lands in a shared drive and stays there. Six months on, nobody can tell you whether the team got any closer to those skills, because nobody ran it as anything more than a poster.

A future skills framework is only worth building if your team uses it. Most never get that far. Here's why, and what it takes to run one that holds up.

What counts as a future skill

Future skills are the capabilities that stay useful as work changes. Not a specific tool or a certification, because those date fast. The broader competencies underneath them: the things that still matter when the tools move on.

The same themes keep surfacing across the research and the practice. Adaptability. Digital fluency. Critical thinking. Working well with people you rarely sit next to. The self-direction to keep learning without being told to. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs work points at much the same cluster, year after year.

The exact list shifts depending on who you ask. What matters is having a structured way to name these skills, see where your team sits, and close the gaps. That's the job of a framework. A good one turns a vague worry ("are we ready for what's coming?") into something you can measure and act on.

Why most future skills frameworks fail

Three reasons, and none of them are the framework's fault.

It lives in a document. The framework gets built, formatted, and filed. Nobody opens a PDF twice. If the only place your future skills exist is a shared drive, they're not part of how anyone works.
Nobody measures anything. A framework tells you which skills matter. It doesn't tell you where your team stands on them. With no baseline, you're guessing, and you've got nothing to show the person who asks whether any of this is working.
The follow-through is missing. Naming a gap is the easy part. Closing it takes learning that reaches people and gets finished. Most frameworks stop at the naming and call it a strategy.

How to map where your team stands today

Most companies have a framework and no data. They can name the skills that matter and have no idea how their own people score against them. That gap is what quietly stalls the whole thing.

Mapping it doesn't have to be elaborate. A structured self-assessment against each competency gives you a starting picture. Add manager input where it counts and you've got a baseline. The exact scores matter less than having a baseline at all, because that's what lets you re-measure later and show something actually moved.

The mistake is treating assessment as a one-off. Skills aren't a box you tick in January. You want a read you can take again in six months without building a project around it. If checking where your team stands is a heavy lift, you'll do it once and never again, and you're back to guessing.

What a framework needs to survive contact with a real company

The fixes follow straight from the failures. A framework has to live where people already work, not in a folder they open once. It has to tell you where the team stands, because a framework with no measurement is a wish list. And the learning attached to it has to get finished.

That last one is the quiet killer. Industry completion rates for traditional corporate training sit around 20%. Four in five people start a course and drift off before the end. You can have the best framework going, but if the training built on it never gets completed, nothing changes. Get those three things right and the framework earns its keep. Miss one and you're back to the poster on the wall.

The SOULWORXX framework, now inside Microsoft Teams

This is the part that prompted the post. We've teamed up with SOULWORXX, a Swiss coaching agency that specialises in future skills, and built their framework straight into Ervy.

SOULWORXX have spent years working out which skills hold up as work changes, and structured the answer properly: 15 competencies across 5 categories. Now available in Ervy.

Inside Ervy, the framework becomes a course that lives inside Microsoft Teams, so your team works through it without leaving the app they're in all day or signing into anything new. Once everyone's been through it, you get a clear picture of where the team sits across the 15 competencies and where the biggest gaps are.

Where to start

The SOULWORXX framework is available exclusively for DACH companies, built into Ervy and ready to run. If you want the framework, and a clear read on where your team lands across it, reach out to Kristaps.

Future skills frameworks are everywhere. Most never leave the workshop.

Table of contents

Table of contents

What counts as a future skill

Why most future skills frameworks fail

How to map where your team stands today

What a framework needs to survive contact with a real company

The SOULWORXX framework, now inside Microsoft Teams

Where to start

Common questions

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