Employability skills are required. Proving them is the hard part.

A CTE director sits down to prepare for a state monitoring visit and pulls up the program of study documentation. The academic content is easy to show. The technical skills have a credential attached. Then comes the line about employability skills, the collaboration, problem-solving, and communication a program is supposed to be building alongside the technical content, and there’s nothing concrete to point to. The teaching almost certainly happened. The evidence of it didn’t get saved anywhere a reviewer can see.

That’s the quiet gap in a lot of Perkins V compliance work. The law is clear that employability skills belong in every program of study. It’s much less clear, in practice, how a program is supposed to produce evidence of them on demand.

What Perkins V actually asks for

The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, better known as Perkins V, defines its purpose in part as developing the academic knowledge and technical and employability skills of career and technical education (CTE) students. A “program of study” under the law has to incorporate academic, technical, and employability knowledge and skills together, not treat employability skills as a side conversation.

States and local recipients report annually on core performance indicators tied to concentrators, and those reports get reviewed against the level of performance a state and its local programs have agreed to. None of that changes the underlying practical problem: employability skills are a required part of the program, but there’s no standard, built-in mechanism for capturing evidence that they were actually developed, the way a credential or a test score captures evidence of technical and academic skill.

Why this evidence usually goes missing

Most CTE classrooms are, in practice, full of employability skill development. Students work in teams, troubleshoot problems that don’t have a single right answer, present findings to a group, and adjust after something doesn’t work the first time. The instruction is happening. What’s missing is a habit of capturing it as it happens, in a form a coordinator can actually retrieve months later for a monitoring visit or a program review.

Without that habit, the only evidence a program can offer is anecdotal. A teacher can describe, from memory, a great group project from earlier in the year. That’s not the same as being able to show a reviewer the actual student reflection recorded the day it happened.

Building an evidence habit into work that’s already happening

The fix isn’t a new curriculum unit on employability skills. It’s a documentation habit layered onto project work a program is already doing. When students finish a group build, a design challenge, or a work-based learning placement, a quick capture, a short recorded reflection on how the team divided the work, a photo with a caption describing a problem the group solved together, a note on how a student adjusted after feedback, produces real evidence of communication, collaboration, and adaptability without adding a new lesson plan.

In Book Creator, that capture becomes a page students (or a teacher, for younger or less independent groups) add right after the experience: a photo or short video plus a brief reflection tagged to the specific employability skill it demonstrates. Because Book Creator combines text, image, audio, and video on the same page, a student who can explain a group decision clearly out loud but struggles to write it up in polished paragraph form doesn’t lose that evidence to a writing barrier that has nothing to do with the skill actually being measured.

Aggregated across a semester or a program, those individual captures become a real evidence file, organized by skill, that a director can pull for a monitoring visit instead of reconstructing one under deadline pressure.

What this looks like at reporting time

Instead of a director explaining employability skills development in general terms during a review, the program has a folder of dated, specific student evidence: a recorded team debrief here, a written reflection on a design failure there, each one tied to a named skill. That’s a materially stronger position to report from, and it’s evidence that was nearly free to produce because it was captured the same day the learning happened, not reconstructed later.

Because this evidence file contains identifiable student work, treat it the way you’d treat any other student record. Follow your district’s data-sharing and consent policies on what can be shown to a state reviewer or an outside evaluator, and check whether de-identified excerpts satisfy the requirement before sharing anything more.

Where this connects

This same capture habit supports the documentation programs need for CTE credentialing more broadly. See our post on documenting project-based learning for CTE credentials for how the two connect, our post on the STEM portfolio built from seven challenges for ready-to-use activities that generate this kind of evidence as a natural byproduct, and our post on work-based learning documentation for the same approach applied to internship and job shadow placements.

For the current federal guidance on Perkins V accountability and core indicators, see the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education resource, the primary federal source for how these indicators are defined and reported. Advance CTE’s Perkins V resource hub is also a useful reference for how states are implementing these requirements in practice.