career development

Caring for Patients for 26 Years—and Still Not a Nurse — from workshift.org/ by Colleen Connolly

Arnett’s experience spending decades in a job she intended as a first step is common among CNAs, medical assistants, and other entry-level healthcare workers, many of them women of color from low-income backgrounds. Amid a nationwide nursing shortage, elevating those workers seems like an obvious solution, but the path from CNA to nurse isn’t so much a ladder as it is a huge leap.

And obstacle after obstacle is strewn in the way. The high cost of nursing school, lengthy prerequisite requirements, rigid schedules, and unpaid clinical hours make it difficult for many CNAs to advance in their careers, despite their willingness and ability and the dire need of healthcare facilities.

While there are no national statistics about the number of entry-level healthcare workers who move on to higher-paid positions, a study of federal grants for CNA training showed that only 3% of those who completed the training went on to pursue further education to become an LPN or RN. Only 1% obtained an associate degree or above. A similar study in California showed that 22% of people who completed CNA certificate programs at community colleges went on to get a higher-level educational credential in health, but only 13% became registered nurses within six years.

That reality perpetuates chronic shortages in nursing, and it also keeps hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers locked below a living wage, often for decades.

Celebrating International Day of Persons with Disabilities [Bersin]

On 12/03/2025, in Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), business, career development, corporate / business world, global / globalization, neurodivergent/special needs, skills, society, sociology, surviving, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

Celebrating International Day of Persons with Disabilities — from joshbersin.com by Josh Bersin

Today I want to celebrate the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, an important day that recognizes the needs of millions of people. My perspective, as a professional entering my later years, is that many of us are likely to have disabilities over time, so the more we understand the diversity of disabilities the better for everyone.

First, let me point out that this is a massive population. The US Department of Labor and Census estimates that 11-13% of the working age population has some form of disability (more on what that means below), yet only 5-6% of workers. This points out that the employment ratio (percent of people with jobs) is far lower. People with disabilities are one-third as likely to have a job, which is quite a disparity and loss of economic potential.

Second, people with disabilities suffer a 15% lower average wage.

Josh linked to the item below:

Celebrating International Day of persons with disabilities
International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) is a UN day that is celebrated every year on 3 December.

The day is about promoting the rights and well-being of persons with disabilities at every level of society and development, and to raise awareness of the situation of persons with disabilities in all aspects of political, social, economic, and cultural life. WHO joins the UN in observing this day each year, reinforcing the importance of securing the rights of people with disabilities, so they can participate fully, equally and effectively in society with others, and face no barriers in all aspects of their lives.

At its headquarters in Geneva, WHO organizes an annual IDPD event to educate the public, raise awareness, advocate for political will and resources, and celebrate WHO’s achievements. In 2022, the WHO launched the Global Report on health equity for persons with disabilities. This report sets forth the approaches and actions that countries can take to address the health inequities that persons with disabilities experience.

From DSC:
I just want to add that one of our daughters has some special needs. So Josh’s posting caught my eye. He’s right to point out these things. You and I will likely have a period of disability in our lives. It’s not just relevant for “other people.” (And by the way…in the learning world, practicing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is good for everyone!)

People with disabilities face enormous challenges that neurotypical people never have to deal with. They face unfair wage situations and a lack of opportunities. Our family has experienced — and continues to experience — this firsthand.

So thanks Josh for your posting here.

Agents, robots, and us: Skill partnerships in the age of AI — from mckinsey.com by Lareina Yee, Anu Madgavkar, Sven Smit, Alexis Krivkovich, Michael Chui, María Jesús Ramírez, and Diego Castresana
AI is expanding the productivity frontier. Realizing its benefits requires new skills and rethinking how people work together with intelligent machines.

At a glance

Work in the future will be a partnership between people, agents, and robots—all powered by AI. …
Most human skills will endure, though they will be applied differently. …
Our new Skill Change Index shows which skills will be most and least exposed to automation in the next five years….
Demand for AI fluency—the ability to use and manage AI tools—has grown sevenfold in two years…
By 2030, about $2.9 trillion of economic value could be unlocked in the United States…

Also related/see:

The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation — from mckinsey.com
Almost all survey respondents say their organizations are using AI, and many have begun to use AI agents. But most are still in the early stages of scaling AI and capturing enterprise-level value.

State of AI: December 2025 newsletter — from nathanbenaich.substack.com by Nathan Benaich
What you’ve got to know in AI from the last 4 weeks.

Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.

Could Your Next Side Hustle Be Training AI? — from builtin.com by Jeff Rumage
As automation continues to reshape the labor market, some white-collar professionals are cashing in by teaching AI models to do their jobs.

Summary: Artificial intelligence may be replacing jobs, but it’s also creating some new ones. Professionals in fields like medicine, law and engineering can earn big money training AI models, teaching them human skills and expertise that may one day make those same jobs obsolete.

DEEP DIVE: The AI user interface of the future = Voice — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey
PLUS: Gemini 3.0 and Microsoft’s new voice features

Here’s the thing: voice is finally good enough to replace typing now. And I mean actually good enough, not “Siri, play Despacito” good enough.

To Paraphrase Andrej Karpathy’s famous quote, “the hottest new programming language is English”, in this case, the hottest new user interface is talking.

The Great Convergence: Why Voice Is Having Its Moment
Three massive shifts just collided to make voice interfaces inevitable.

1. First, speech recognition stopped being terrible. …
2. Second, our devices got ears everywhere. …
3. Third, and most importantly: LLMs made voice assistants smart enough to be worth talking to. …

Introducing group chats in ChatGPT — from openai.com
Collaborate with others, and ChatGPT, in the same conversation.

Update on November 20, 2025: Early feedback from the pilot has been positive, so we’re expanding group chats to all logged-in users on ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans globally over the coming days. We will continue refining the experience as more people start using it.

Today, we’re beginning to pilot a new experience in a few regions that makes it easy for people to collaborate with each other—and with ChatGPT—in the same conversation. With group chats, you can bring friends, family, or coworkers into a shared space to plan, make decisions, or work through ideas together.

Whether you’re organizing a group dinner or drafting an outline with coworkers, ChatGPT can help. Group chats are separate from your private conversations, and your personal ChatGPT memory is never shared with anyone in the chat.

I analyzed 180M jobs to see what jobs AI is actually replacing today [Wing Chiu]

On 11/13/2025, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, change, computer science, corporate / business world, leadership, marketing/social marketing, programming, trends, workplace, by Daniel Christian

I analyzed 180M jobs to see what jobs AI is actually replacing today — from bloomberry.com by Henley Wing Chiu; via Kim Isenberg

I analyzed nearly 180 million global job postings from January 2023 to October 2025, using data from Revealera, a provider of jobs data. While I acknowledge not all job postings result in a hire, and some are ‘ghost jobs’, since I was comparing the relative growth in job titles, this didn’t seem like a big issue to me.

I simply wanted to know which specific job titles declined or grew the most in 2025, compared to 2024. Because those were likely to be ones that AI is impacting the most.

Key Sections

Also from Kim Isenberg, see:

October Layoffs Were the Worst in 22 Years and Hit Tech Workers Hard — from gizmodo.com by Lucas Ropek
For coders, October royally sucked.

Enrollment Growth Continues, Bolstered by Short-Term Credentials [Alonso]

On 11/13/2025, in Alternatives, business side of he, career development, colleges, community colleges, credentialing, expectations, faculty/staff, game-changing environment, higher education, parents/guardians, student-related, United States, by Daniel Christian

Enrollment Growth Continues, Bolstered by Short-Term Credentials — from insidehighered.com by Johanna Alonso
Enrollment is up across the board this fall, except for graduate student enrollment, which remained stagnant. The biggest increase was among those pursuing short-term credentials, followed by those earning associate degrees.

College enrollment continued to grow this fall, increasing by 2 percent compared to fall 2024, according to preliminary fall data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The biggest gains came from students studying for short-term credentials, whose ranks increased 6.6 percent, while the number of students enrolled in associate and bachelor’s degree programs rose 3.1 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively. Enrollment also grew faster at community colleges, which experienced a 4 percent increase, than at public (1.9 percent) and private (0.9 percent) four-year institutions.

Total graduate enrollment was stagnant, however, and the number of master’s students actually decreased by 0.6 percent.

Speaking of higher education, also see:

OPINION: Too many college graduates are stranded before their careers can even begin. We can’t let that happen — from hechingerreport.org by Bruno V. Manno

This fall, some 19 million undergraduates returned to U.S. campuses with a long-held expectation: Graduate, land an entry-level job, climb the career ladder. That formula is breaking down.

Once reliable gateway jobs for college graduates in industries like finance, consulting and journalism have tightened requirements. Many entry-level job postings that previously provided initial working experience for college graduates now require two to three years of prior experience, while AI, a recent analysis concluded, “snaps up good entry-level tasks,” especially routine work like drafting memos, preparing spreadsheets and summarizing research.

Without these proving grounds, new hires lose chances to build skills by doing. And the demand for work experience that potential workers don’t have creates an experience gap for new job seekers. Once stepping-stones, entry-level positions increasingly resemble mid-career jobs.

How Coworking Spaces Are Becoming The Learning Ecosystems Of The Future — from hrfuture.net

What if your workspace helped you level up your career? Coworking spaces are becoming learning hubs where skills grow, ideas connect, and real-world education fits seamlessly into the workday.

Continuous learning has become a cornerstone of professional longevity, and flexible workspaces already encourage it through workshops, talks, and mentoring. Their true potential, however, may lie in becoming centers of industry-focused education that help professionals stay adaptable in a rapidly changing world of work.
.

.

What if forward-thinking workspaces and coworking centers became hubs of lifelong learning, integrating job-relevant training with accessible, real-world education?

For coworking operators, this raises important questions: Which types of learning thrive best in these environments, and how much do the design and layout of a space influence how people learn?

By exploring these questions and combining innovative programs with cutting-edge technology aligned to the future workforce, could coworking spaces ultimately become the classrooms of tomorrow?

Breaking News: Law Firm’s AI Pilot Lets New Lawyers Step Away from Billable Hours [jdjournal.com]

On 11/11/2025, in adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, career development, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, law schools, learning ecosystem, Legal operations, legal reform, legal technologies, legislatures / government / legal, lifelong learning, United States, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Breaking News: Law Firm’s AI Pilot Lets New Lawyers Step Away from Billable Hours — from jdjournal.com

In a groundbreaking move that may redefine how law firms integrate technology training into daily practice, Ropes & Gray LLP has introduced a new pilot program allowing its first-year associates to dedicate a significant portion of their work hours to artificial intelligence (AI) learning—without the pressure of billing those hours to clients.

The initiative, called “TrAIlblazers,” marks one of the first formal attempts by a major law firm to give attorneys credit toward their billable-hour requirements for time spent exploring and developing AI skills. The firm hopes the move will both prepare young lawyers for a rapidly evolving profession and signal a new era of flexibility in how law firms evaluate performance.

A New AI Career Ladder — from ssir.org (Stanford Social Innovation Review) by Bruno V. Manno; via Matt Tower
The changing nature of jobs means workers need new education and training infrastructure to match.

AI has cannibalized the routine, low-risk work tasks that used to teach newcomers how to operate in complex organizations. Without those task rungs, the climb up the opportunity ladder into better employment options becomes steeper—and for many, impossible. This is not a temporary glitch. AI is reorganizing work, reshaping what knowledge and skills matter, and redefining how people are expected to acquire them.

The consequences ripple from individual career starts to the broader American promise of economic and social mobility, which includes both financial wealth and social wealth that comes from the networks and relationships we build. Yet the same technology that complicates the first job can help us reinvent how experience is earned, validated, and scaled. If we use AI to widen—not narrow—access to education, training, and proof of knowledge and skill, we can build a stronger career ladder to the middle class and beyond. A key part of doing this is a redesign of education, training, and hiring infrastructure.

…

What’s needed is a redesigned model that treats work as a primary venue for learning, validates capability with evidence, and helps people keep climbing after their first job. Here are ten design principles for a reinvented education and training infrastructure for the AI era.

Create hybrid institutions that erase boundaries. …
Make work-based learning the default, not the exception. …
Create skill adjacencies to speed transitions. …
Place performance-based hiring at the core. …
Ongoing supports and post-placement mobility. …
Portable, machine-readable credentials with proof attached. …
…plus several more…

Class of 2025 says they see the effects of a tough job market [Moody] + item re: prices for obtaining a degree

On 11/07/2025, in business, business side of he, career development, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, faculty/staff, funding / grants, higher education, parents/guardians, student-related, teaching & learning, United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Net tuition rises at colleges, but costs are far below their peaks — from highereddive.com by Ben Unglesbee
The prices students and their families paid after aid at four-year public colleges and private nonprofits ticked up in 2025-26, per College Board estimates.

Dive Brief:

The average tuition and fees paid by students and their families after aid rose slightly for the 2025-26 academic year but remain well below historic peaks, according to the latest higher education pricing study from the College Board.
At public four-year colleges, net tuition and fees for first-time, full-time students increased just 1.3% to $2,300 from last year, when adjusted for inflation, according to the College Board’s estimates. That figure is down 48.3% from the peak in 2012-2013.
At private nonprofits, net tuition and fees for first-time, full-time students rose 3.7% annually to $16,910 in the 2025-26 year, when adjusted for inflation. By comparison, that’s down 14.6% from the peak for private colleges in 2006-07.

Class of 2025 says they see the effects of a tough job market — from hrdive.com by Kathryn Moody
Young workers have been particularly exposed to the changes brought by artificial intelligence tools, some research has indicated.

The Class of 2025 faced a particularly tough job market, searching for jobs earlier, submitting more applications — averaging 10 applications to the Class of 2024’s six — and receiving fewer offers on average, a National Association of Colleges and Employers study said in a recent report, in partnership with Indeed.

Graduates were more likely to accept those offers, however, even amid uncertainty; 86.7% of those offered a job had accepted in 2025, compared to 81.2% of 2024 graduates.

“Compared to earlier classes, they were more likely to say they were unsure about their plans, and more were planning to enter the military, suggesting they were unsure about private-sector employment,” NACE said in an Oct. 30 announcement regarding the report.

An addendum from DSC:
While we’re talking the workplace, careers, jobs, and such involving higher education, also see:

Careers in Educational Development with Leslie Cramblet Alvarez and Chris Hakala — from intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com by Derek Bruff

On the show today I talk with Leslie Cramblet Alvarez and Chris Hakala, authors of the new book Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center from Routledge Press. The book blends scholarship and personal narratives to explore the career trajectories of the professionals who work at CTLs (Centers for Teaching & Learning). How do academics move into these careers? And what can these careers look like over time?

Leslie Cramblet Alvarez is assistant vice provost and director of the Office of Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver. Chris Hakala is director for the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship and professor of psychology at Springfield College.

I wanted to talk with Chris and Leslie about what they discovered while writing their book. I also wanted to know what advice they had for navigating educational development careers here in the U.S. in 2025, with higher education under attack from the federal government, a looming demographic cliff affecting enrollment and tuition, and a budget situation that for more institutions is not rosy. Leslie and Chris offer advice for faculty considering a move into a faculty development role, as well as for those of us current working at CTLs trying to plan our careers.

The problem with just handing over an army of agents to junior consultants + other items re: AI in general

On 11/05/2025, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, business, career development, change, changing business models, collaboration, emerging technologies, experimentation, leadership, strategy, the downsides of how people use tech, tools, United States, vendors, workplace, by Daniel Christian

KPMG wants junior consultants to ditch the grunt work and hand it over to teams of AI agents — from businessinsider.com by Polly Thompson

The Big Four consulting and accounting firm is training its junior consultants to manage teams of AI agents — digital assistants capable of completing tasks without human input.

“We want juniors to become managers of agents,” Niale Cleobury, KPMG’s global AI workforce lead, told Business Insider in an interview.

KPMG plans to give new consulting recruits access to a catalog of AI agents capable of creating presentation slides, analyzing data, and conducting in-depth research, Cleobury said.

The goal is for these agents to perform much of the analytical and administrative work once assigned to junior consultants, allowing them to become more involved in strategic decisions.

From DSC:
For a junior staff member to provide quality assurance in working with agents, an employee must know what they’re talking about in the first place. They must have expertise and relevant knowledge. Otherwise, how will they spot the hallucinations?

So the question is, how can businesses build such expertise in junior staff members while they are delegating things to an army of agents? This question applies to the next posting below as well. Having agents report to you is all well and good — IF you know when the agents are producing helpful/accurate information and when they got things all wrong.

This Is the Next Vital Job Skill in the AI Economy — from builtin.com by Saurabh Sharma
The future of tech work belongs to AI managers.

Summary: A fundamental shift is making knowledge workers “AI managers.” The most valuable employees will direct intelligent AI agents, which requires new competencies: delegation, quality assurance and workflow orchestration across multiple agents. Companies must bridge the training gap to enable this move from simple software use to strategic collaboration with intelligent, yet imperfect, systems.

The shift is happening subtly, but it’s happening. Workers are learning to prompt agents, navigate AI capabilities, understand failure modes and hand off complex tasks to AI. And if they haven’t started yet, they probably will: A new study from IDC and Salesforce found that 72 percent of CEOs think most employees will have an AI agent reporting to them within five years. This isn’t about using a new kind of software tool — it’s about directing intelligent systems that can reason, search, analyze and create.

Soon, the most valuable employees won’t just know how to use AI; they’ll know how to manage it. And that requires a fundamentally different skill set than anything we’ve taught in the workplace before.

AI agents failed 97% of freelance tasks; here’s why… — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey

AI Agents Can’t Actually Do Your Job (Yet)—New Benchmark Reveals The Gap

DEEP DIVE: AI can make you faster at your job, but can only do 2-3% of jobs by itself.

The hype: AI agents will automate entire workflows! Replace freelancers! Handle complex tasks end-to-end!

The reality: a measly 2-3% completion rate.

See, Scale AI and CAIS just released the Remote Labor Index (paper), a benchmark where AI agents attempted real freelance tasks. The best-performing model earned just $1,810 out of $143,991 in available work, and yes, finishing only 2-3% of jobs.

Is An Internship In College More Important Than The Degree Itself? — from forbes.com by Brandon Busteed

While confidence in higher education has eroded and more Americans are questioning the importance of a degree, the demand for internships among college students is skyrocketing and the odds of getting an internship at a major company are now lower than getting into the Ivy League. This begs the question: are we at a point where an internship is as valuable – or perhaps more so – than a degree itself?

While concerns about degree ROI were on the rise, the value of internships and other work-integrated learning opportunities was becoming increasingly apparent. New research and analysis have shown us how valuable it is for a student to have an internship during college: it doubles the odds they have a good job waiting for them upon graduation and doubles their odds of being engaged in their work over their lifetime. Although there are some variations in those outcomes by choice of college or academic major, those variations pale in comparison to the impact of having an internship. In short, a collegiate internship experience is a more important indicator of these outcomes than alma mater or major.

Is Your Institution Ready for the Earnings Premium Buzzsaw? — from ailearninsights.substack.com by Alfred Essa

On Wednesday [October 29th, 2025], I’m launching the Beta version of an Education Accountability Website (”EDU Accountability Lab”). It analyzes federal student aid, institutional outcomes, and accountability metrics across 6,000+ colleges and universities in the US.

Our Mission
The EDU Accountability Lab delivers independent, data-driven analysis of higher education with a focus on accountability, affordability, and outcomes. Our audience includes policymakers, researchers, and taxpayers who seek greater transparency and effectiveness in postsecondary education. We take no advocacy position on specific institutions, programs, metrics, or policies. Our goal is to provide clear and well-documented methods that support policy discussions, strengthen institutional accountability, and improve public understanding of the value of higher education.

But right now, there’s one area demanding urgent attention.

Starting July 1, 2026, every degree program at every institution receiving federal student aid must prove its graduates earn more than people without that credential—or lose Title IV eligibility.

This isn’t about institutions passing or failing. It’s about programs. Every Bachelor’s in Psychology. Every Master’s in Education. Every Associate in Nursing. Each one assessed separately. Each one facing the same pass-or-fail tests.

Ground-level Impacts of the Changing Landscape of Higher Education — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Glenda Morgan; emphasis DSC
Evidence from the Virginia Community College System

In that spirit, in this post I examine a report from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) on Virginia’s Community Colleges and the changing higher-education landscape. The report offers a rich view of how several major issues are evolving at the institutional level over time, an instructive case study in big changes and their implications.

Its empirical depth also prompts broader questions we should ask across higher education.

What does the shift toward career education and short-term training mean for institutional costs and funding?
How do we deliver effective student supports as enrollment moves online?
As demand shifts away from on-campus learning, do physical campuses need to get smaller?

Are we seeing a generalizable movement from academic programs to CTE to short-term options? If so, what does that imply for how community colleges are staffed and funded?

As online learning becomes a larger, permanent share of enrollment, do student services need a true bimodal redesign, built to serve both online and on-campus students effectively? Evidence suggests this urgent question is not being addressed, especially in cash-strapped community colleges.

As online learning grows, what happens to physical campuses? Improving space utilization likely means downsizing, which carries other implications. Campuses are community anchors, even for online students—so finding the right balance deserves serious debate.

Learning Ecosystems

Celebrating International Day of Persons with Disabilities [Bersin]

Ground-level Impacts of the Changing Landscape of Higher Education [Morgan]

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