DC: Glad to see some organizations and efforts addressing the learning ecosystems involved. Employers need to be crucial partners in these systems — as with these efforts.
https://t.co/a8hDTQf7pw
— Daniel S. Christian (@dchristian5) November 12, 2026
With thanks to Paul Fain for this resource,
and who also mentioned the First Rung Observatory.
Making Career Connections — from gettingsmart.com by Norton Gusky
For years I shouted out, “Make the Learning Real!” What I didn’t understand is how to make the learning real for students by connecting to careers. In this article I’ll highlight four organizations that I’ve had some connection to in the past three years – Connect the Work by Educators Cooperative, the Consortium for Public Education, the Neighborhood Learning Alliance, and the Pittsburgh Technology Council. While each project is different, they all have had success making career connections for young people in K-12.
The key to success in each of the programs is giving students the opportunities from the earliest age possible to have a meaningful relationship with adults, especially people working in a variety of careers. Students need a variety of experiences and a common language to uncover their strengths, interests and values.
Are We Sending Young People False Signals About Their Futures? — from workshift.org by Emily M. Dickens and Elissa Salas
For years, we’ve told young people that training + credentials = opportunity. And for many pathways, that’s still true. But an AI-disrupted labor market is forcing us to be uncomfortably honest about what has always been a much more complicated equation.
Mixed Signals
Today’s young people need us to be able to say that we don’t fully know what the future of work looks like. Mixed signals abound. For example, at major tech companies, new graduate and entry-level hiring is down roughly 65% compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. So far in 2026, AI has been cited in more than 120K announced job cuts.
On the other hand, major companies including Google and CSX announced plans to hire to meet growth goals. Some of the fastest-growing occupations range across healthcare, skilled trades, and tech. In September, Business Roundtable’s CEO Economic Outlook Index showed a seven-point increase in hiring plans. The messages sent to young people are genuinely contradictory, and we need to help them cut through the noise.
Helping young people develop in this way will require smarter, stronger bridges between the systems that shape our workforce, such as better connecting K-12 classrooms to career pathways, aligning higher education institutions with the evolving job market, and ensuring untapped talent has access to in-demand employment opportunities.
The Faculty Bargain Of 2040: What Should The University And Its Faculty Owe One Another? — from forbes.com by David Rosowsky
What if we stopped reforming the existing faculty career for a moment? What if we started over?
Suppose we were designing the faculty career today for the university of 2040, starting with a blank sheet of paper. There would be no rigid departmental affiliations, ranks, tenure systems, promotion policies, or inherited assumptions. We could keep anything that still made sense. But nothing would be presumed necessary simply because it has been around for decades.
What would we build?
When machines can increasingly perform parts of the work that once consumed enormous amounts of human time, the scarce attributes may shift toward judgment, curiosity, creativity, disciplinary depth, the ability to frame consequential questions, the capacity to connect ideas across fields, and the ability to know when a machine is wrong.
That is not an argument for fewer faculty. It may be an argument for different faculty – and for a faculty employment system capable of recognizing those important (even desirable) differences.
Want to Close the Skills Gap? Bring Learning Closer to Work — from campustechnology.com by Elise Awwad
Key Takeaways
The skills employers say they cannot find are increasingly the skills they expect employees and candidates to arrive with, fully formed, at their own expense.
…
Upskilling or reskilling is often framed as an individual responsibility: a matter of initiative, of staying current. But if employers need these skills, they have a stake in making sure workers have a realistic way to develop them.
As fewer young people choose college, this district wants to ensure they have career options — from hechingerreport.org by Ariel Gilreath
In Niagara Falls, New York, a town with shrinking job options, students are encouraged to consider their careers in ninth grade
At Niagara Falls High School, students are encouraged to consider their careers upon arrival in ninth grade. By 11th grade, every student at the school must pick from one of five pathways, ranging from business and finance to design and engineering. The shift toward career education comes as about one-third of seniors at Niagara Falls High are rejecting college and instead choosing to enter the workforce after graduation, compared with roughly a quarter a decade ago, said Superintendent Mark Laurrie, who retired in June. In a town that’s struggled with population declines, where now-shuttered manufacturing plants once dominated the local labor market, there’s an urgency to prepare high school students for careers.
“It’s important to give them hope for the future with a career pathway — a career, not a job — to have something to aspire to and, hopefully, keep them in the city and in the state,” Laurrie said.
From the LegalTech Fund’s Q2 2026 Update:
Industry Foresight: Following the successful completion of Pathways Phase 1, we launched Pathways Phase 2: The Future of Law in partnership with Harvey and Law.com. Phase 2 brings together a curated cohort of legal industry leaders, innovators, academics, and operators to develop future scenarios and identify the critical legal, regulatory, business, capital, and technology inflection points that may shape the industry through 2040. The resulting framework will serve as a shared strategic tool to help the legal ecosystem navigate uncertainty and prepare for multiple possible futures.
From DSC:
The vision that I’ve been tracking for well over a decade begins with this graphic:
.
Could LearnVector be this next-generation company/platform? Perhaps. Time will tell.
Per Matt Tower via The EdSheet Vol. 38 dated 7/31/26:
Steward Stories: How Heart of Oregon Corps Turns Service into Careers — from gettingsmart.com by Karen Pittman and Merita Irby
Our “Steward Stories” series captures lessons learned from interviews with leaders of mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries. An ecosystem steward is a boundary-spanning leader who goes beyond traditional out-of-school time (OST) system building to weave together the diverse people, places, and possibilities that shape a young person’s daily life. Rather than managing a single isolated network, stewards collaborate across K-12 schools, youth development programs, and workforce systems to build vibrant, equitable learning ecosystems. They drive systemic change from practice to policy by creating purpose-built intermediaries, developing scalable cross-system training tools, and championing “Future Features” of learning. These core priorities include promoting learner agency, institutionalizing “unwalled” schools that connect community resources to formal education, broadening the definition of educators to include informal mentors, and normalizing pathways for students to receive school credit or credentials for out-of-school learning.
The starting points, paths, and targets set by these stewards are as varied as the conditions and opportunities present within their communities. But they share similarities in vision and approach. Learn More Here.
Learning ecosystems may be found anywhere, but it takes careful stewardship to help them thrive.
— Shift, Remake Learning
Reconnecting Professional Learning — from elemenous.substack.com by Lucy Gray
Reflections from My Wednesday ISTE Panel
At ISTE this year, I facilitated a Wednesday morning panel on professional learning. The session I organized was titled, The Future of Professional Learning: Connecting Educators Across Borders. I was joined by fellow Apple Distinguished Educators Tami Brewster, Bethany LaDue Nugent, Marcus Borders, Jason Krug and global educator Julie Meltzer. Our focus: How do we move professional development away from isolated, one-time experiences and toward something more connected, meaningful, and human?
…
The panel was grounded in a few simple but powerful ideas: professional learning should nurture, guide, and empower. It should be relevant, contextual, reflective, and sustained. It should recognize educators as capable professionals, not as people who are broken and need to be fixed. Too often, professional development is still designed around deficit thinking. Too often, teachers’ needs are not the starting point, and sessions become dry, one-directional experiences where information is delivered at them rather than built through conversation and collaboration, with little choice, little personalization, and little connection to the realities of their classrooms. Our panel served as a call to action to re-think professional learning.
We explored six different approaches to professional learning, and while each model was distinct, a clear through line emerged: relationships matter most.
Also from Lucy Gray, see the following for some nice tips and resources:
“Teachers ban it. Employers demand it.”
Also relevant/see:
The Shifting Career Ladder — from nafez.substack.com by Nafez Dakkak
AI is changing how work works and quietly removing the pathways through which young people learn to become experts.
AI is reshaping how people build skills, enter professions, and move along the career ladder and through the labour market.
In this conversation, I sit down with Matt Sigelmen founder of LightCast and now the President of Burning Glass Institute. Matt has dedicated his career to understanding the labor market and helping society improve the connections within in it.
Matt and I explore why people and opportunities are often only “a few skills apart,” why entry-level work may be losing its traditional role as the first rung of expertise, and why schools, universities, and employers now need to rethink the pathways that turn potential into mastery.
Educators need to be deeply aligned with what these changes are, and they need to shift the AI discourse from “how” questions to “what” questions. What do we need to teach? What do we need to keep in the curriculum?
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Entry-Level Work: A Framework for Safeguarding and Reinventing Early Career Pathways — from the World Economic Forum (weforum.org) and PwC
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how organizations hire, develop and advance talent, and this is most visible at entry-level. Globally, more than one in three young workers are employed in occupations with medium to high exposure to AI-driven task change. How these roles evolve will have significant implications for organizational performance, workforce participation and economic mobility.
Will learning curated by employers replace degrees? — from universityworldnews.com by Louise Nicol
If universities do not future-proof their offer through deeper and more credible partnerships with employers and industry, what exactly prevents employers from educating and training people themselves?
This is why the future of higher education depends on far deeper and more operational partnerships with industry. Not symbolic advisory boards or occasional guest lectures but genuine co-design of curricula, shared ownership of applied projects and clear accountability for graduate capability.
Universities that integrate live industry problems, cross-faculty collaboration and work-based learning into the core of their programmes make themselves harder to replace. Those that acknowledge the existence of external learning platforms and deliberately build them into a broader educational journey strengthen rather than weaken their position.
The real risk for universities is not replacement but marginalisation. Employers will not abandon universities out of hostility or ideology. They will do so pragmatically if universities fail to add distinctive value beyond what employers can now deliver themselves.
From DSC:
Following are several companies that are using AI to connect people to work. That’s a significant piece of my Learning from the Living [AI-Based Class] Room vision.
These companies were listed on an article entitled,
“Can AI be an effective career coach?”
— from achievepartners.com and Ryan Craig
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OpportuNext from Signal49 Research is a free-to-use career tool created in partnership with the Future Skills Centre. Using big data, it matches a person’s skills with viable career paths — often including some you have not considered.
What AI-Enabled Education Actually Looks Like When It’s Working for Workforce Students — from gettingsmart.com by Stephen Griffin
Key Points
The second is portable competency records. Learning and employment records — AI-enabled documentation of what a student knows and can do, expressed in language employers recognize — are the infrastructure that makes credentials legible across the education-to-employment continuum. When a student can show an employer not just “completed Supply Chain Management 101” but “demonstrated proficiency in inventory optimization, route planning, and logistics software at the industry-recognized level,” the credential stops being abstract. It becomes evidence. Building these records requires investment in tools, yes — but more importantly, it requires faculty, workforce development staff, and employer partners to agree on what competency actually looks like before the technology is ever purchased.
