When hiring managers are asked what is essential in candidates, their responses are informative for candidates and educators. In recent Harris Poll research conducted with Express Employment, hiring managers identified work ethic (60 percent), dependability (59 percent), and willingness to learn (57 percent) as absolutely essential. Many institutions name attributes among their educational goals. Fewer name the professional habits through which those attributes become visible.
In other posts I have argued that employability is made up of skills, attributes, and professional habits. Most of the attention, including much of my own writing, has gone to the first two. This post is about the third. Professional habits are the component institutions are least likely to design for, least likely to explicitly name as an educational goal, and least likely to assess. This gap makes it more difficult for recent graduates to secure employment.
It is important to note that employers do not describe today’s graduates as unprepared across the board. NACE’s Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update found that employers consider new college graduates reasonably well prepared for the jobs they enter, with more than 20 percent saying they are very well prepared. The sharper gaps tend to appear in surveys asking about candidates rather than about graduates already hired. This suggests a design problem in how students are prepared through their education rather than a generational one.
Attributes and Professional Habits Are Not the Same Thing
In Blog 2 of this series, I defined the future of employability as exploring the skills, attributes, and professional habits that enable individuals to gain initial employment, sustain employment as work evolves, and transition to new roles throughout their careers. The three categories do different work, and the difference between the second and third is worth discussing.
An attribute is a disposition. Curiosity, resilience, motivation, and adaptability are standing dispositions of a person. You cannot observe an attribute directly, but you can infer it from observed patterns over time.
A professional habit is a settled pattern of action, often performed without deliberating each time. Examples include confirming what is expected before starting a task, telling someone a deadline is slipping before they ask, arriving at a meeting on time having read the material, and following up without a reminder.
Dependability shows how attributes and professional habits fit together. Dependability is an attribute, and nothing about it is directly observable. What a supervisor observes is a cluster of habits: deadlines met, project status communicated without being asked, commitments kept, problems surfaced early. The attribute becomes visible only through habits.
This also explains why habits are the practical leverage point. An attribute with no habits attached is an unexpressed tendency. And the relationship runs in both directions. A person becomes dependable by developing habits that support the attribute of dependability, and these habits become second nature. Habits are the mechanism through which attributes become both reliable and visible. Design for habits and attributes follow. Design for attributes directly and you get a workshop that changes nothing.
Why This Is Becoming Urgent
Professional habits were never widely neglected because people thought they were unimportant. They were neglected because they formed somewhere else.
That somewhere else was often early work experiences. A first job is the one environment that develops professional habits specifically. Showing up when you would rather not. Telling a manager you are running behind. Taking feedback from a supervisor.
Fewer students arrive at college with work experience. The Center for American Progress reports that the share of employed teens has fallen from 50.0 percent in August 1978 to 30.7 percent as of July 2026. Many students are arriving at college with less exposure to the setting where professional habits form. And while there are other places where these habits form, such as in classrooms, student co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, and athletics, students often struggle to transfer these habits to the workplace.
At the same time, many enrolled students are working substantially. A recent Ellucian survey of more than 2,000 learners found that 56 percent of currently enrolled students reported working full-time, at least 35 hours per week, while enrolled. These are not competing findings. They describe two groups with the same institutional problem. Students who have never worked have had no setting in which professional habits could form. Students who are working are developing those habits, but nothing in their academic program or in their entire educational experience names what they are practicing or connects these habits to their degree. In the first case, the habits do not form. In the second, they form without being recognized, which makes it less likely they will transfer to a professional context.
Additionally, the first rung of the career ladder is changing. An Express Employment–Harris Poll white paper released in May found that more than four in five hiring managers say entry-level jobs require more skills than in the past, and that 79 percent consider entry-level roles essential or very important for developing future talent. Yet 60 percent say it is more efficient to use AI for entry-level tasks than to hire and train a candidate. Positions once designed to provide a first foothold with on-the-job learning are decreasing, and candidates are increasingly expected to arrive ready.
The implication is that graduates now need to enter the workforce with professional habits more fully formed than previous cohorts did, because the opportunities to develop them in entry-level jobs are decreasing.
Why Habits Fall Through the Cracks
Three things explain the gap related to habit development.
First, many institutions never had to design for habits. Because habits formed reliably in early work, institutions never built the capacity to develop them deliberately.
Second, professional habits form only through repetition with feedback. You cannot lecture someone into a habit. This makes habit development a poor fit for course content or a workshop.
Third, and most important, habits are already forming on campus. They are just forming incidentally, and no one is naming them or providing feedback.
Coursework is a serious repetition environment for the development of some professional habits. Meeting deadlines. Coming prepared. Sustaining effort on a long-term project. Producing consistent quality. Four years of assignments is real practice.
Other habits have weak academic analogs or none. Students may not be asked on Wednesday for a status update on a paper due Friday, so students get little practice communicating that something is slipping before they are asked. A late assignment lowers one grade, while late work in an organization may affect a team’s work or its ability to meet a customer’s needs. The analogs to work are strongest where the habit is individual and the standard is explicit, and weakest where the habit is relational and the standard has to be discovered.
Even where practice happens, transfer is not automatic. A student who experienced turning work in on time as compliance with a syllabus requirement has exercised the habit without necessarily being prepared to transfer it to the workplace. This is related to the problem I raised in Five Questions Every Chief Academic Officer Should Ask. Students develop things they cannot name, and they cannot name them because no one named them or provided feedback on whether or not they effectively demonstrated the habit.
What Designing for Habits Requires
For years I told my students that if they were not going to submit an essay on time, they should tell me beforehand. The essay was still marked late, but this was a professional courtesy, so I would not be looking for it. A policy that requires notification and keeps the penalty helps students develop the habit of keeping people who are expecting something from them informed.
Implementing this policy only required a sentence in a syllabus and consistency in applying it.
The employability architecture is where this expectation has to be addressed, because different components develop different habits. Coursework develops individual habits well. Co-curricular roles and group projects add what coursework structurally cannot: interdependence and unstated expectations. If the club treasurer does not book the room, the meeting does not happen and twenty people are affected. If an athlete is late to practice, it might be difficult for the team to practice effectively. Internships and other work-integrated learning add the supervisory relationship, which differs from a grade in its source and its stakes.
The temptation here is to produce another list of activities. Most institutions can already say yes to the list. The harder question is whether four conditions are present. Is the habit named while it is being practiced? Does anything require a student to communicate the status of a commitment before being asked? Does the student receive feedback on how well they demonstrated the expected habit? And does anyone know where across the architecture these things occur?
It is also important to note that not all students can participate in the institutional activities designed to develop these habits. Club leadership and unpaid project roles assume discretionary time. Students working substantial hours off campus are developing professional habits in a demanding environment, but that development happens where the institution cannot see it and does not count it.
What Employers Owe
Employers have a legitimate interest here, and they should be participants in the architecture rather than recipients of its output. They can tell institutions which habits matter most in their settings and how they are changing.
Employers must also be realistic. No graduate arrives with professional habits fully formed because habits are context-shaped. How certain professional habits are demonstrated on a distributed team may differ from how they are demonstrated in an office environment. A graduate who developed strong habits in one context still must learn how those habits are expressed in a new one.
An employer that eliminates the roles where habits form while expecting job-ready hires is not being realistic. Institutions can establish the foundation; employers build on it within their own context. Both institutions and employers have roles.
The Questions Worth Asking
Three questions are worth putting to your institution.
In what activities must a student communicate the status of a commitment before being asked?
Where does a student have to identify an expectation that no one stated?
Who is tracking which parts of the architecture develop which professional habits, and whether it happens by design or by accident?
The first two questions can be asked of any professional habit. The third is the one most institutions cannot answer. This is where the work begins. Not with a new framework or another list of skills, but with an examination of where professional habits are being developed, whether students are being told what they are practicing, and whether this is being done across the student experience.
This is also why professional habits belong in employability futures work. Attributes are relatively durable. Dependability will matter in any plausible future of work. Professional habits are not durable in the same way, because how a habit is demonstrated depends on how work is organized. Institutions that design for the habits of the present without scanning for how those habits could change will develop graduates for the workplace of today and not necessarily tomorrow.
Professional habits are not one of three co-equal components of employability. They are the mechanism through which attributes become reliable and visible. Attributes deserve their own treatment, and I will take them up in a future post. But institutions preparing students for multiple possible futures of work should start with the component that is easiest to observe, cheapest to develop, and most likely to be left to chance.