We usually begin conversations about employability when the clock is ticking during university applications, internships, or the hunt for a first job. The questions are urgent: What skills do they have? Are they ready? Can they adapt? Yet, this focus on the later years hides a deeper contradiction. The habits that define professional excellence, curiosity, self-efficacy, and collaboration are not suddenly "switched on" at age eighteen. Often, when parents visit us, there is a rush to tick the boxes shared by career counselors. But the problem runs deeper than a checklist. Students are frequently "credentialed" but not ready; they lack the curiosity, the exposure and the hands-on experience that converts information into capability.
The High Cost of the "Preparatory" Phase
Between the ages of 15 and 18, students are often trapped in a "preparatory" bubble. These years are framed merely as a bridge to "serious learning" later on. This creates a frantic scramble to develop portfolios and hunt for recommendation letters that often lack relevance. In this environment, the emphasis remains on coverage, correctness, and assessment.
But we are overlooking something critical: this stage is not just preparatory; it is formative. This is the cognitive inflection point where students stop being passive learners and begin forming beliefs about failure, effort, and their own agency. When success is defined narrowly by "the right answer," students optimize for safety. They become hesistant to try and depend on external validation.
Where Capability Becomes Visible
Early signals of employability rarely scream; they whisper. We see curiosity when a student ventures beyond the rubric, and problem-framing when they stop asking "how" and start asking "why."
I recently watched this in action with a winter intern working on a space rover project. He 3D-printed six different chassis, unable to hit the exact dimensions. In a traditional classroom, six "wrong" prints might be seen as six failures. But here, he leaned into his team, negotiated ideas, and eventually implemented a fix using spacers.
This is where true collaboration is born in the messy intersection of negotiation and shared contribution. This intern wasn’t just building a rover; he was building persistence and judgment. These traits don't appear on a report card, yet they are the foundations of future readiness.
The Lab vs. The Classroom
The challenge is that traditional environments often reward replication over reasoning. You can know a formula without understanding a trade-off; you can learn a concept without developing judgment. Without opportunities to build, test, break, and improve, students never develop an intuitive understanding of systems.
This is why the Lab of Future (LOF) is not just a supplement to education, it is the missing link.
At Lab of Future, we believe profile building doesn't start at eighteen, it starts at six. We don't treat employability as a destination, but as a by-product of how a child learns. By fanning the "little embers" of a student’s interest and building them layer by layer, we shift the focus from performance to process.
In our Lab, learning is structured around real-world technological and engineered systems. Robotics, AI, and coding are not taught as isolated subjects, but as tools to test assumptions. When a student works in an environment like LOF, they move beyond the theoretical. They experience engineering as an iterative cycle of design, failure, and refinement.
Fostering the Skills of Tomorrow
By removing the constraints of the traditional classroom and replacing them with the "Lab" environment, thinking becomes visible. Here, students accumulate experiences, not just information. They learn:
● Systems Thinking: Understanding how one change affects the whole. ● Resilience: Seeing a failed 3D print as data, not a dead end.
● Agency: The quiet, powerful shift where a student begins to see themselves as a capable problem-solver.
If you remove this "Lab" element from the educational journey, the path to employability remains incomplete. We would be attempting to retrofit skills onto learners whose relationship with learning has already been stifled by the fear of judgment.
Future-Facing: Capability over Specialization
As careers become less predictable, the most valuable advantage a learner can have is not early specialization, but early capability.
The question we should be asking is not how we prepare students for jobs later, but how we shape their relationship with learning now. Employability is not something we suddenly introduce at the edge of adulthood. It is quietly formed years earlier through curiosity, creation, failure, and reflection and at the very moment a student realizes they have the power to build the future.