Thirty-six states elected governors last week, and nearly every candidate campaigned on good jobs. Delivering on that promise is hard, and it’s getting harder as AI begins to reshape labor markets. But pioneers in states and industries across the country have found an approach that works: Industry says what the good jobs are, and the public system builds the routes that lead to them.
As parents, we often hear our children share what they want to be when they grow up. When they’re little, the answers are enchanting. Ballerina, astronaut…horse. But as they get older, the question evokes more anxiety than imagination. For a long time, parents assumed the next step after high school was college. We can tell a student the test scores, GPA, and extracurriculars a good college expects. But can we tell them how to be competitive for a good job?
That answer is much harder to find. Our economy is full of good jobs that many young people don’t even know about, let alone how to get them.
We’re actually closer to solving this problem than many people realize. But it will take a big shift in the role employers play in how states prepare people for work.
Industries Taking the Lead
For decades, employers have taken a back seat when it comes to career education and training, preferring to focus on recruiting and selecting talent rather than developing it. But as some industries began to face persistent talent shortages, they needed to take a different approach. Take manufacturing. In 2010, Toyota couldn’t find enough technicians who could keep its Kentucky plant running, so it built a program to train technicians itself. That program grew beyond Toyota and is now operated by the Manufacturing Institute to serve the industry as a whole. Today the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education, or FAME, runs 46 chapters in 17 states with more than 450 employers. Local manufacturers band together into chapters, agree on the skills they need, and partner with a community college to teach them.
A similar story played out in Ohio. For years, whenever the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association asked members about their biggest challenge, the answer was workforce. So it brought together more than 45 manufacturers to write down the 400-plus skills their operator and technician jobs require, and the state’s Department of Education and Workforce adopted the resulting skills framework. Now classrooms across the state teach to a single, current picture of the skills the industry needs.
Both groups landed on the right idea: bring employers together to agree on the skills they need, then build training backward from there. But in most states, an effort like FAME has to grow one community and one college partner at a time, because the state has no way to bring an industry’s shared skills into career education statewide. Ohio created that path. The state wrote the industry-identified skills into its career education system itself, letting industry describe the destination and the public system build the routes. That division of labor is worth copying in every state.
Public and Private Sectors Each Have a Job
Many states believe they are aligning career education and training to industry and engaging employers. But they typically don’t get the results they are looking for. That’s because the public sector keeps trying to do a job that ought to be done by industry. Currently, when governments try to understand the good jobs available in their states, they turn to government-collected labor market data and real-time labor market information scraped from the web.
But that data lags behind the economy, missing new roles and the changing skills inside existing jobs. That results in an inaccurate picture that is then used as the basis for designing and funding career education and training programs. The fix is not simply better data. It’s to give the job to someone else. Industry should be the one painting the picture of its talent needs—what they are today and where they are heading—and then our public systems can build backward from that picture of good jobs. Here is how new governors can make that happen.
First, states need to identify the employer groups that speak for each industry. Employer-led groups that companies already trust, such as trade associations, chambers, or employer coalitions, should define their industry’s key jobs and the skills those jobs require. Not the state, and not a special committee appointed to advise. Many such groups already exist. For example, through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management program, employers in dozens of states have organized around shared hiring needs. States should establish a process to formally recognize the groups that can reliably describe, on behalf of their industries, the jobs they are hiring for and the skills those jobs require.
Second, states need to set up their public systems to act on what industry defines. Once employer groups have described the jobs their industry is hiring for and the skills those jobs require, the state can build pathways to them. It can direct funding to high school career courses, community college programs, apprenticeships, and adult training that prepare people for those jobs. It can make sure those programs teach the skills employers identified, as Ohio did when it adopted the skills framework its manufacturers built. And, critically, it can put that same information in the hands of students, families, and the school counselors who advise them, so a student can see what it takes to be competitive for a good job.
That doesn’t mean funding training for any job. States should set the bar for which jobs are sufficiently high-skill, high-wage, and in demand to merit public investment.
Keeping the Promise
Employer groups across the country are already showing that industry can describe the destination. We convened 14 workforce leaders earlier this year to collect the best examples and boldest thinking on how to create excellent talent systems through industry leadership. Their case studies, recommendations, and tools for state leaders are at industryledtalent.org. The governors taking office this winter can make this work the standard rather than the exception. And they need to move quickly, as AI changes what jobs require faster than current training programs can adapt.
If they succeed, then we won’t be so anxious when our children tell us what they want to be when they grow up. We’ll be confident that we can help them get there.
Ashley Carter and Kelly Vedi lead the Industry-Led Talent Initiative. Its principles, case studies, and tools for state leaders are at industryledtalent.org.