After high school, Molly decided to work for a few years before committing to a specific path. Encouraged by her parents, she eventually enrolled in a six-month software coding bootcamp that promised a direct route into a growing field.
But by the time she completed the program, the market had shifted. Many employers did not recognize the credential as proof she could do the job, while AI-assisted coding tools were beginning to take on some of the work traditionally handled by entry-level developers.
This is a very real tension facing young people today. Molly didn’t make a bad decision. She made the decision our conventional wisdom led her to make.
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.
What Young People Actually Need from Adults Right Now
The instinct is to tell young people to wait until the dust settles, or to double down on the credentials that have historically worked. Neither is the right answer. The labor market will keep shifting and, while a credential that connects to real employer demand is one of the most direct routes to economic mobility, in today’s landscape of 1.85M credentials, a credential alone is not enough. We need to advise youth to think about credentials alongside the skills and self-knowledge that will help them succeed even when the market does not look like we predicted or they expected.
The young people who will navigate this labor market most successfully are the ones who pair the pursuit of a credential with the development of durable skills that travel across roles and industries, and the self-knowledge to make confident decisions when their path changes.
That means investing in developing cornerstone power skills like communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration, and it also means helping young people build the agency to navigate what comes next on their own terms. This requires genuine self-knowledge—understanding their strengths, their values, their skills, and their purpose. Those are what help people keep moving forward when they encounter hurdles, so they can build a purpose-filled career.
How We Can Get There—Together
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. Coordination like this is already underway in pockets, but it needs to become the norm, not the exception.
No one sector, no one stakeholder, no one organization can do this alone. We have to work together, across traditional boundaries. Our challenges are interconnected, so our solutions must be as well. That includes enabling self-discovery and developing durable skills as a shared accountability across K-12, higher education, training providers, and employers.
We need to build a training and education system that is honest about uncertainty and accountable for outcomes at the learner level, not just the program level. Programs that consistently produce graduates who struggle to find work should not receive the same investment as programs that deliver. Some states, including New Jersey and Ohio, publish wage and employment data for publicly funded programs, and new federal Workforce Pell rules will require outcome reporting at the national level by 2029. That standard should extend to all programs, regardless of funding source, and it should reach students before the point of enrollment, not after the fact.
The existing tools that measure a credential’s value are mainly targeted at the funders and workforce leaders evaluating programs. But this information also needs to be accessible to the very people making enrollment decisions, like students, parents, guidance counselors, and career advising staff. A young person, like Molly, who is deciding whether a six-month bootcamp is worth their time and money deserves access to quality information about that training program. Think of it as a minimum standard of consumer protection.
Employers have their part to play, too. Skills-first hiring has become a rallying call, and many organizations have genuinely committed to removing degree requirements from job postings. But the harder work—building skills-integrated onboarding, mentorship, and career growth practices—is lagging behind the pledge.
The credential on a resume only matters if the employer’s culture is built to recognize it, and to both hire and develop the person holding it. That means moving skills-first from a hiring policy to a full skills-first talent development strategy that includes clear advancement pathways and manager training that equips supervisors to evaluate performance on demonstrated skills rather than proxies.
And throughout we have to be honest with young people about which credentials and skills we know have staying power, and which ones we can’t fully predict.
The Obligation Is Ours
Molly followed advice that was presented as certain and sound, but the labor market morphed in ways we couldn’t fully see in advance, and faster than the systems guiding her could keep up. As HR leaders, policymakers, training providers, workforce development experts, and funders, we need to ask whether the systems we’ve built are actually serving the young people walking into them. The answer, right now, is, “Not consistently enough.”
We know what we need to do: better connect credentials to jobs, measure their value, and make that information accessible and actionable for the people making education and career decisions—and pair that with an emphasis on building self-knowledge and durable skills that unlock agency and adaptability when the labor market shifts.
The question is whether we’re willing to do it before more young people invest their time and money in a path that no longer leads where they were told it would.
Emily M. Dickens is chief administrative officer at SHRM and a board member of SkillUp Coalition. Elissa Salas is chief strategy officer of SkillUp Coalition.