Colleges are experimenting with apprenticeships and stackable credentials to make the route to a counseling career more manageable. Also, an AI roundup featuring takes on regulation from the pope and the president, data on rural divide with AI usage, and an essay about what we’re getting wrong about upskilling workers for AI. (Subscribe here.)

Counseling, One Credential at a Time

A few years ago, students at the Community College of Aurora who wanted to work in behavioral health had one main option: earn an associate of arts degree in psychology and plan to then transfer to get a bachelor’s.

But that wasn’t a good fit for the college’s many students who are working adults going to school part-time. So four years ago, the college decided to unbundle the associate degree into a “certification + degree pathway” that lets students learn in smaller chunks while earning workforce and industry certifications along the way.

“The framework allowed us to be more intentional in our workforce efforts in an area where, historically, folks say, ‘That’s a gen ed track. That’s not workforce,’” says Jennifer Dale, dean of academic success in online and blended learning at Aurora, and a former psychology professor.

The Big Idea: Aurora is one of a number of colleges working to make the costly and inflexible path into counseling more manageable. Reach University and the Healthcare Training Fund just launched the nation’s first Apprenticeship College of Health, which will start by offering apprenticeship degrees in behavioral health. And the College of New Jersey recently launched a master’s-level registered apprenticeship program for clinical mental health counseling, with plans to expand nationwide. 

In Oregon, the labor-management training trust United We Heal took on the task of creating new pathways into the field—building five apprenticeship tracks, ranging from qualified mental health associate to certified alcohol and drug counselor. And in Kentucky, the state’s Community and Technical College System has been building pathways into behavioral health careers for people who are themselves in addiction recovery or reentering from incarceration.

(Read more about these colleges’ work in the full story this week on Work Shift.)

New approaches are much needed, says Anthony Carter, the director of practice improvement and consulting at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. Traditionally, workers in behavioral health need at least a bachelor’s and more often a master’s degree, or even a PhD, to land higher-paying jobs in therapy and social work. Internships, which are required in many programs, are usually unpaid. 

All those steps, Carter says, create big barriers to getting started and advancing. That’s a problem for a field that needs more people. Shortages across the spectrum of behavioral health roles—from addiction counselors to psychologists and psychiatrists—are projected to continue for at least a decade. Forty percent of Americans live in an area without enough mental health workers.

“When we talk about the behavioral health workforce shortage, it’s driven less by lack of interest and more by how we structure entry into the field,” says Antoinette “Toni” Gingerelli, who co-authored a 2022 report for Harvard’s Project on Workforce about peer-support workers. “We’ve really relied on narrow degree-centric pathways that are slow, costly, and misaligned with demand.

“Those pathways exclude many capable workers.”

On the Ground: At the Community College of Aurora today, students in behavioral health can now earn up to five credit-bearing microcredentials that stack up to two associate degrees—one focused on mental health and social work and the other on addiction recovery. The college worked closely with employers to design the curriculum and credentials based on their biggest hiring needs.

“Something that was really important to us was making this a CTE pathway instead of a general education pathway and ensuring work-based learning opportunities and experiential hours,” Dale says.

Almost 400 students have completed microcredentials since the fall of 2023, with many still enrolled to stack their credits into degrees.

The microcredentials allow students to start working in roles like peer-support specialists or behavioral health technicians, and the stackability gives them an incentive to continue their education and move into higher-paying roles down the line. Another advantage of the unbundling approach is that students are getting work experience much earlier than they do in a typical bachelor’s–to–master’s degree track, showing them what it’s really like to work in the field before they invest significant time and money in their education. 

The college’s work dovetails with Colorado’s efforts to build a new learning and skills record system aimed at getting more social workers into much-needed jobs in the state. One area of focus is recognizing the skills developed by professionals in peer-support roles, where lived experience with addiction or other mental health issues is mandatory.

Those peer-support roles play a critical role in the mental health system, says Gingerelli. But making sure they aren’t dead ends takes work. 

Click over to Work Shift to hear from workers, like Nicole Tierney, who got her start as a peer-support specialist, and to read more about how colleges are reimagining pathways into behavioral health. —By Colleen Connolly

The Pope on Retraining Workers

The pope, the president, and California’s governor in recent days all backed some form of regulation for AI. Those moves could add urgency to calls for a safety net for workers who might be displaced by AI adoption.

The 42K-word encyclical letter from Pope Leo XIV takes a step back to raise moral and philosophical concerns about the technology’s impacts on humanity, with significant sections focused on education and jobs. “What are we building?” asks the first American-born pope.

He cites “legitimate fear” about a significant and rapid contraction in jobs, which could deeply impact families, young people, and local economies: “In many sectors, this can already be seen in new forms of job insecurity and inequality, characterized by outsized remuneration for a highly specialized minority alongside declining wages for a large portion of the workforce.”

Every introduction of automation and AI should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining, and participation of workers, Leo writes. That means proactive policies and investment in “accessible education and retraining, so that the professional mobility demanded by the digital economy does not become a harsh selection between those who are able to update their skills and those who cannot.”

The AI executive order President Trump issued this week calls for Big Tech to voluntarily share frontier models with the feds before publicly releasing them.

While experts called the order narrow and relatively toothless, it’s still a significant shift for a White House that has resisted any policy brakes on AI’s development. Indeed, Trump drew criticism from some tech-industry voices and conservatives who called the order an intrusive approach to AI governance that is unlikely to remain voluntary and poses a risk to U.S. dominance.

The Trump administration so far has stuck with its message that AI will drive a jobs boom, pushing back on worries about automation and the labor market. Yet Trump’s AI action plan calls for the U.S. Department of Labor to potentially tap discretionary funding to pay for “rapid retraining for individuals impacted by AI-related job displacement.”

An executive order from California Governor Gavin Newsom goes further in directing state agencies to prepare for potential AI-driven workforce disruption. 

The first-of-its-kind order from a U.S. governor calls for expanded workforce training and data systems, as well as exploring severance standards, employment insurance, transition support for displaced workers, and other policies. It also seeks the creation of a single online platform for Californians to access government services.

For example, Newsom tasked the state’s Employment Development Department to partner with local workforce boards to develop an AI playbook to expand dislocated worker strategies for occupations exposed to AI. Within three months, the department also must launch a dashboard showing AI’s impacts across various sectors using unemployment insurance data.

The Missing Rung: Policymakers are struggling to figure out how workforce systems can adapt to teach in-demand skills in the age of AI. But that’s solving for the wrong problem, Kathleen Bolter, principal for the Policies for Place initiative at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, writes in a new essay for Work Shift.

The traditional focus on upskilling assumes the main problem is a shortage of skilled workers, when in many high-paying sectors the bigger problem is a shortage of entry-level opportunities. To keep entry-level jobs open, she says, the public sector will need to share some of the risk with employers, such as through contract-to-hire apprenticeships and training programs that provide ongoing support for new hires.

Urban-Rural Divide: New data from Microsoft finds that 31.3% of working-age Americans now use AI tools. 

However, just 16.2% of people who live in rural counties and 21.8% in micropolitan counties use the technology. Usage is significantly concentrated around large metropolitan areas (32.9%), tech corridors, and university-center communities.

The AI Diffusion Index can be broken down by state and county, with data on industry association with AI usage. In Illinois, for example, counties with larger concentrations of knowledge-intensive work tend to have higher AI usage. The strongest positive industry relationship appears in professional and technical services, followed by services overall, company management, healthcare, information and media, and finance.

Open Tabs

AI Safety Net
The OpenAI Foundation is committing an initial $250M to grants, open calls, and institutional partnerships focused on AI’s economic impacts. The investment will fund independent measurement and forecasting, supports for workers during near-term disruption, and new approaches to organizing post-AI political economies and sharing economic gains. The foundation is one of the world’s largest, with roughly $130B in assets. It previously committed to spending $1B over the next nine months.

Skilled Trades
BlackRock announced a $25M RFP for its $100M philanthropic effort to build and strengthen the U.S. skilled trades workforce, with a goal of reaching 50K workers over the next five years. The investment corporation tapped Jobs for the Future to administer the RFP, through which the BlackRock Foundation will award grants of $500K–$1M per award. The announcement follows the rollout last month of a $30M skilled trades pipeline program focused on Texas.

Scaling Apprenticeship
Just 1,200 students have participated in the CareerWise Colorado youth apprenticeship program, which launched in 2016 and whose founder envisioned 20K students participating in the first decade, Jason Gonzales reports for Chalkbeat Colorado. Reasons cited for the low uptake are no surprise, including businesses finding they’re not well equipped to work with teenagers and school officials struggling to convince families of the value of apprenticeships.

AI and Upskilling
The U.S. Economic Development Administration will direct $25M toward industry-driven partnerships to upskill workers in AI technologies. The money from the division of the Commerce Department isn’t new, writes New America’s Shalin Jyotishi. Funding is being made available through the wind-down of three previous programs from EDA, which envisions grants of $1M–$8M for workforce programs that use sectoral partnerships.

Scaling Apprenticeship
The U.S. Departments of Education and Labor recently announced that 21 states submitted combined plans for WIOA and Perkins-funded CTE programs, up from nine in 2024. This approach will help streamline workforce planning and better align valuable credentials with in-demand jobs, the feds said. Whether those benefits materialize is unclear, writes New America’s Morgan Polk, citing a 2025 survey that found mixed results for combined state plans.

Job Moves
Molly Kinder has left her role as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kinder’s research on the future of work and AI and labor policy included a multiyear project on the impact of genAI on work and workers.

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