Principal Research Scientist

Principal Research Scientist

The ETS Research Institute invites applications for a Principal Research Scientist position to lead and contribute to a research agenda focused on human capital development, workforce readiness, and economic mobility in an AI-enabled world. We seek scholars whose research advances understanding of how skills, competencies, and other forms of human capital are developed, measured, and rewarded, and how they influence educational attainment, labor market success, and economic mobility in an economy increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

Particular areas of interest include understanding and measuring the skills and capabilities that drive success in education and labor markets, including how advances in AI are reshaping skill demand, workforce readiness, and pathways to opportunity, and generating evidence on the effectiveness of educational and workforce development pathways, including competency-based education (CBE), career and technical education (CTE), and other approaches designed to promote skill acquisition, employment, earnings growth, and long-term economic mobility.

The successful candidate will join a collaborative team of researchers developing innovative frameworks, assessments, and evidence to better understand how human capabilities contribute to individual, educational, and labor market outcomes. This work seeks to inform educators, employers, policymakers, and workforce leaders as they navigate a rapidly changing economy and create pathways to opportunity for diverse learners and workers.

Primary responsibilities include:

• Leading and refining a research agenda on academic and workforce readiness science and the expansion of workforce pathways, setting priorities and directing a multi-year program of work.
• Advancing the science of readiness for education, work, and upward mobility — examining how skills and other forms of human capital shape educational attainment, labor market success, productivity, earnings growth, and economic mobility in an economy increasingly influenced by AI.
• Investigating how skills, competencies, credentials, and educational experiences predict educational attainment, employment, earnings growth, productivity, workforce participation, and economic mobility.
• Advancing research and measurement across competency-based education (CBE) and career and technical education (CTE), and other workforce development pathways, studying how skills are acquired, recognized, rewarded, and translated into educational and labor market opportunities.
• Designing and validating measures and indicators that translate evidence of human capabilities into trusted signals of readiness and investigating how those signals predict educational attainment, workforce participation, productivity, earnings, and career advancement.
• Designing and leading research evaluating the development, measurement, and economic value of academic, occupational, and durable skills using quantitative, qualitative, experimental, quasi-experimental, or mixed methods approaches.
• Building measurement approaches for recognizing and combining evidence of skills gained across multiple learning and work settings into trustworthy, portable forms.
• Generating evidence on the educational, workforce, and societal impact of skills, credentials, and assessments, and identifying opportunities to modernize assessment systems in support of workforce development, economic opportunity, and social mobility.
• Studying how technological changes, including advances in artificial intelligence, are reshaping skill demand, workforce readiness, learning pathways, and opportunities for economic advancement.
• Leading proposals, publications, convenings, and partnerships with internal and external collaborators to support and fund the research agenda.
• Mentoring junior staff, postdoctoral fellows, and interns, and supporting a collaborative research culture.

Preferred candidate possesses several of the following qualifications:

• Expertise in research on educational attainment, workforce readiness, human capital development, education-to-work transitions, economic mobility, or human capability assessment.
• Familiarit…