Starting July 2026, Pennsylvania’s new Career Education and Work Standards (CEW) will replace the original standards from 2015.
We don’t typically get excited about standards, but the new CEWs came as a pleasant surprise. Perhaps most importantly, the standards mark the closest that the PA Department of Education has come to formalizing a statewide Portrait of a Graduate by introducing “Employability Skills” as a new strand.
This new section explicitly recognizes many of the key skills that industry leaders in our region have highlighted as essential for more than a decade now, including critical thinking and problem solving; oral and written communication; teamwork and collaboration; technology and project management; and entrepreneurial mindset. For K12 teachers, this reinforces the value of project-based learning, real-world applications, and reflection activities that help students connect academic content to future pathways. For school leaders considering a portrait of a graduate profile for your district, the standards offer a solid foundation from which to build. As a plus, the Consortium is well equipped to support educators in making these changes.
In one of the largest shifts, Entrepreneurship as a siloed CEW strand will be retired in July; however entrepreneurial mindset as a skill is all over the new standards, perhaps reflecting the ever more online, start-up minded, influencer world that we now live in. The standards even include a section devoted to students developing their own personal brand as part of their career preparation.
Overall, the new CEWs convey a more holistic view of employment across the grade levels by using focused substrands to clearly call out and scaffold the many elements that comprise working life and the dynamics of a long career. For example, the language of the new standards is noticeably more worker positive, shifting from old strands like Career Acquisition and Career Retention (don’t lose that job!) to 2026’s Growth and Advancement that asks students to actually build their agency for many of life’s transitions, including asking for a raise or even resigning. Social Studies teachers everywhere will be elated to see a substrand just for workers’ rights.
For any of our educator partners who have been engaged in the career readiness initiatives of the past ten years or so, take a look for yourself and we think you’ll agree: The 2026 CEW standards represent a much-needed upgrade that will help guide our students to be ever more prepared for the challenges and joys of life after graduation.
