The U.S education and training system has been quietly transformed over the past generation.
Credential Engine calculates that nearly 1.9M unique credentials are offered by more than 134K providers, with $2.34T invested annually in education and workforce development.
These offerings include traditional high school diplomas and college degrees, technical training credentials, industry certifications, badges, apprenticeships, and combinations hard to imagine a few decades ago.
Yet, for many students, workers, families, and policymakers, the system is more opaque than transparent, more confusing than empowering. We’ve built more pathways, but not the infrastructure to help individuals understand and navigate their way through those pathways.
That’s why the idea of a talent marketplace deserves attention. Talent marketplaces do more than match people to jobs. They help people see nearby opportunities, identify missing skills, find a relevant course, credential, apprenticeship, internship, or project, and chart the next step forward.
Ryan Craig, managing director at Achieve Partners, calls them “GPS for careers,” a navigation layer connecting a fragmented education and workforce system.
That infrastructure also requires something less tangible than programs or policies, but no less important. It includes the relationships, networks, trusted information, stable work conditions, and institutions that help people understand their options, make decisions, and move forward.
Call it social capital. Or, more broadly, social wealth. Whatever the label, its absence is increasingly visible.
Two recent analyses confirm this approach.
One from the University of California, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, documents how participation across multiple education and training options for 15- to 25-year-olds has increased significantly over time. But it’s grown without creating ways for individuals to navigate those options.
A Harvard Project on Workforce report sharpens the point. Mobility increasingly depends not only on skills or credentials, but on a person’s ability to interpret information, build networks, find guidance, and make decisions under uncertainty.
Stanford University’s Mitchell Stevens puts the problem plainly when he contrasts learning ecology with learning anarchy. In an interview, he comments that today “learning is more an anarchy than an ecology” since the word ecology implies “interdependence and interconnection,” which we don’t have.
“Right now there’s just a bunch of stuff,” he says. “Taming that anarchy” is the work ahead.
In a simpler system, navigation was easier, if also more constrained. The traditional model of graduating from high school and going to work or enrolling in college, earning a degree, and then going to work provided a clear, if imperfect, script. Today’s system offers more freedom but less guidance.
Learners must choose among dozens of options, often with limited information and uneven support. Families must interpret complex signals about cost, quality, and outcomes. Workers must decide whether to stay in a job, change employers, return to school, or retrain for a new field. Employers send mixed messages about what they value. And the institutions that should help connect these pieces operate apart from each other.
Real Options Require Relationships
The result is more opportunity on paper, but less clarity in practice. This isn’t only an information problem. It’s a relationship problem. Research shows that who you know can matter as much as what you know. Networks provide access to information, opportunity, and trust, helping people navigate complexity and reduce uncertainty.
But access to networks is uneven. Family and friends are the most common sources of career information, but those networks often point people toward a limited set of familiar jobs and industries. Cross-sector and cross-income relationships, with teachers, supervisors, mentors, or hiring managers, are less common, especially for students from low-income families, but often decisive. In an AI-mediated hiring world, referrals and internal endorsements can determine who gets an interview.
So expanding pathways, while necessary, isn’t sufficient. Without the relationships and institutional structures that help people use them, pathways widen gaps rather than close them.
Consider youth apprenticeships, one of the most promising but still underused models in U.S. education and training. This earn-and-learn approach allows students to earn wages, gain experience, and build relationships with employers while they learn.
Those relationships matter. They provide not just skills but signals or evidence to future employers that a student can perform in a real-world setting. They also provide networks that open doors to further opportunities.
In that sense, apprenticeships do something that much of the education system struggles to do. They embed social capital directly into the learning process.
But apprenticeships remain small. And more broadly, the system lacks consistent ways to connect students and workers to the relationships that support opportunity.
Part of the problem is institutional. Schools are primarily designed to deliver instruction, not build networks. Employers often see training as a cost rather than an investment. Workforce organizations operate in parallel rather than in partnership with education systems.
Part of the problem is economic. Wages, schedules, and commutes shape whether people have the time and mental space to pursue training, search for better jobs, or make a career move. A living wage, predictable schedule, and supportive supervisor are not just job-quality issues. They are also navigation issues.
And part of the problem is civic. The “third places” that once helped knit communities together, local organizations, civic groups, informal gathering spaces, have declined in many areas. Those places often served as connectors, linking people to information, opportunities, and one another.
What Can We Do?
Rebuilding that connective tissue is not easy. But it’s essential. Here are seven guideposts for doing what’s required.
First, treat career navigation as infrastructure, not as an optional service. Advising, mentoring, coaching, labor-market information, and employer connections should be funded and organized as core parts of the education-to-work system.
Second, make career information usable. Students and workers do not need more dashboards that they cannot interpret. They need trusted institutions—schools, community colleges, workforce boards, libraries, nonprofits, and employers—that can translate labor-market signals into plain English.
Third, build networks intentionally. Work-based learning, apprenticeships, internships, mentoring, alumni networks, and employer projects should become regular features of high school, college, and workforce programs.
Fourth, professionalize career coaching. Coaches need manageable caseloads, better training, digital tools, and access to current labor-market information. They should not be expected to solve housing, childcare, transportation, and career planning problems alone.
Fifth, teach navigation skills directly. Students and workers need practice with career mapping, job search, interviewing, networking, self-advocacy, and adapting when plans change. These are not “soft” skills. They are survival skills in a volatile labor market.
Sixth, improve job quality, so people have room to advance. Employers should clarify advancement pathways, offer predictable schedules, support supervisors as mentors, and recognize that workers cannot plan for the future if they are constantly scrambling in the present.
Seventh, align education and workforce systems around mobility. The goal should not be isolated programs, but connected routes that help people move from learning to earning and back again as their lives and the economy change.
The U.S. has begun the work of expanding its education and training system. It’s created more pathways than ever before, an achievement worth recognizing. The next challenge is to make those pathways usable.
Opportunity isn’t only about what exists. It’s about what people can access and whether they have the support they need to navigate their way forward.
Bruno V. Manno is a senior adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute and leads its Pathways to Opportunity What Works Lab.