Blind Spot on AI

Students and workers will need help adjusting to a labor market that appears to be on the verge of a historic disruption as many business processes are automated. Yet job projections and policy ideas are sorely lacking. Also, LinkedIn’s unrealized potential on career matching, and the Education Department’s potential final mission.

On the Cusp of a New Industrial Revolution

A growing number of signals suggests that artificial intelligence will soon transform substantial swaths of the labor market, with serious but unclear implications for education and job training.

Academics and employers in recent weeks have begun echoing chatter from the AI labs, arguing that agentic AI now can extend or even replace a wide range of workplace capabilities. Big companies are accelerating efforts to reshape their workforces, while some smaller firms say they are holding off on certain hires while they try to figure out which job roles will shift.

“I feel alarmed,” says Jared Chung, the founder of CareerVillage.org, which uses AI to offer jobseekers free career advice from working professionals. 

The benefits of agentic AI are already clear for a wide range of organizations, including small nonprofits like CareerVillage. But the ability to automate a broad range of business processes means that education programs and skills training for knowledge workers will need to change. And as Chung writes in a must-read essay, we have a blind spot with predicting the impacts of agentic AI on the labor market.

“Without robust projections,” he writes, “policymakers, businesses, and educators won't be able to come to terms with how rapidly we need to start this upskilling.”

In a very rare point of agreement, the Trump White House and the previous administration have said the technology is ushering in a new industrial revolution, one requiring more of a focus on workers.

“There’s going to be a lot of transition in the economy as a result of AI,” Ben Buchanan, who was the Biden administration’s special advisor for AI, said during an interview in recent days with Ezra Klein of The New York Times. (Also a must-read or listen.)

Buchanan noted that Vice President JD Vance last month echoed a phrase President Biden included in an executive order, when Vance told a gathering of European leaders that the “Trump administration will guarantee American workers a seat at the table” on AI policy decisions. 

Klein pushed Buchanan on the apparent lack of ideas about what the federal government should do to help people ride out looming disruptions. For example, Klein cited worries about a hypothetical 19-year-old college student who is majoring in marketing and could have a hard time finding work in a field where AI is automating tasks. 

More broadly, research by the Brookings Institution has shown that with just today’s capabilities, AI is seriously threatening the 19M professionals in office support and administrative jobs that constitute a big chunk of the lower middle class.

On the higher end of the labor market, Amazon just eliminated 14K mostly middle-management jobs, which paid an estimated $200K to $350K a year, as part of a plan to spend $100B this year on AI initiatives. AEI’s Brent Orrell writes that Amazon’s spending “provides a microcosm of how AI investments may become a self-reinforcing cycle.” 

Orrell stresses that worker supports and retraining programs will undoubtedly be needed on a wide scale to buffer the costs of AI. But like his counterparts at Brookings and elsewhere, Orrell acknowledges a lack of specific actions to take amid so much uncertainty about the labor market’s ultimate direction. Klein, for his part, argues that leaders need to get more specific, as vague suggestions about retraining displaced workers ring empty as a likely historic disruption looms.

“Are all these people going to become nurses?” Klein said. “Does everybody move into the trades?”

Buchanan, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, said he believes AI overall will lead to a dynamic economy and more agency for workers. But he shared Klein’s discomfort with potential labor market upheaval, and his dissatisfaction with “stock answers” on retraining.

Congress, he said, would need to act for the government to have a robust role in cushioning blows for workers, and that “was just not in the cards” during the Biden administration. Congress does not appear more likely to get hands-on with solutions in the near future. Certainly not with new money, as Republicans continue to pursue deep budget cuts.

The Kicker: “We need to make sure that individual workers and classes of workers are protected in that transition,” Buchanan said. “I think we should be honest: That’s going to be very hard. We have never done that well.”

—Elyse Ashburn contributed reporting for this article.

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LinkedIn’s Untapped Potential on Upskilling

If the labor market is on the cusp of a major transformation, LinkedIn soon could become a busier place. The Microsoft-owned site offers jobseekers and career changers tools that go well beyond networking.

With more than 1B users across 200 countries, LinkedIn features both recruiting and learning platforms, Lauren Coffey reports for Work Shift. Yet with its broad focus, which includes a growing role as a social media platform, the company so far has failed to be a dominant player in the skills-first movement.

For example, LinkedIn’s online learning arm, which it purchased a decade ago for $1.5B, now seems like a footnote in Microsoft’s lineup. LinkedIn Learning is probably a rounding error for the tech giant, says Trace Urdan, managing director of Tyton Partners, an education consulting firm.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s a meaningful part of their business,” he says, “so it’s hard to think of them as a major learning competitor.” 

Career Exploration and Skills Matching: Several new AI-powered tools from other organizations seek to help people make decisions about their career options and the training and education they need to break into those roles.

For example, SkillUp Coalition last month introduced an AI agent that offers personalized career navigation to jobseekers without college degrees. The nonprofit worked with AdeptID, Brighthive, and WhereWeGo—all tech companies focused on skills and workforce education—to create its new “human-centered” tool.

SkillUp AI’s training recommendations are pulled exclusively from the group’s curated catalog. Those 4,800 short-term programs are aligned with SkillUp’s quality standards. That means those options are affordable—600 are free, while 2,200 run under $2,500, and no training costs more than $10K—lead to a recognized credential, and improve a jobseeker’s odds of securing a living-wage career.

The training and jobs catalog from SkillUp centers on five high-growth industries with viable nondegree pathways, including healthcare, tech, business, skilled trades, and transportation and logistics.

Grow With Google’s new Career Dreamer also is a notable new arrival in this space, in part because it taps Google Gemini to help users navigate job searches and explore career possibilities. The company says the tool is an early-stage AI experiment that uses the technology to generate insights based on labor market data and information users provide.

Aaron Wade, a creative technologist at Google, says the plan is to expand Career Dreamer based on user feedback. “At this stage, we are still learning what users are most interested in—what features resonate, what kinds of insights they find most valuable, and how they engage with the tool,” he says.

Career Dreamer currently recommends Google Career Certificates and a few Google Cloud Skills Boost resources. But Wade says those materials are meant to be a starting point rather than a comprehensive road map.

“In many cases, Career Dreamer will also inform users that they may need to explore additional industry-specific resources, formal education, or hands-on experience to fully prepare for a given role,” says Wade.

The Education Department’s ‘Final Mission’

After being confirmed by the Senate on Monday, the first act by Linda McMahon as education secretary was to send an email to the Education Department’s staff members about the task of eliminating bureaucratic bloat at the department quickly and responsibly.

One of three “convictions” she cited in her message was that “postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with workforce needs.”

However, congressional Democrats and other critics say the DOGE-led $881M cut to the department’s Institute of Education Sciences will make it harder to track the effectiveness of education programs, including their alignment with the labor market. 

“To solve problems, we need to understand problems. To understand problems, we need trustworthy data,” six education researchers wrote for the Brookings Institution.

In an article for Education Next, AEI’s Rick Hess wrote that some of the IES cuts were dumb or ham-fisted. But he also said we’re drowning in education research of dubious relevance. “While your mileage may vary” about the eliminated IES contracts, Hess wrote, “I feel comfortable saying the lion’s share deserved to be pulled.”

Open Tabs

Stagnant Hiring
The hiring rate has declined more for young college graduates in recent years than for Americans at any other education level, Roge Karma writes for The Atlantic, citing an analysis from ADP Research. This group also has a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. Citing a “Big Freeze” in hiring, Karma writes, “Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place.”

Place Bound
Rural Gen Zers are much less optimistic than those living in urban areas about landing a good job (by 19 percentage points) or being able to earn a college degree (16 points), according to a Gallup survey. More than three-quarters (77%) of Gen Z respondents say they would like to move to a different town, state, or country if they had the opportunity. Yet rural Gen Zers who want to move are more likely than their urban peers to want to stay closer to home.

Advanced Manufacturing
TSMC says it will spend $100B on three new semiconductor fabrication plants, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D team center—all located in the U.S. The Taiwan-based company’s announced investments are in addition to $65B it’s spending on semiconductor manufacturing operations in Phoenix. TSMC said the expanded investment would support 40K construction jobs while creating tens of thousands of high-tech roles in chip manufacturing.

Credentials of Value
Roughly 44% of working-age Americans in the labor force hold degrees, certificates, or industry certifications and earn at least 15% more than the average high school graduate, according to the Lumina Foundation. The foundation wants that share to rise to 75% by 2040. “We need stronger connections between academic programs and job opportunities while ensuring students develop critical thinking skills,” writes Jamie Merisotis, Lumina’s president and CEO.

Learning and Employment Records
A coalition of 12 national associations has agreed to core principles for learning and employment records (LERs)—with the end goal of improving alignment between education and work, encouraging lifelong learning, and supporting skills-first hiring. The LER Accelerator coalition is supported by Walmart and includes many of the country’s most influential postsecondary organizations, such as the American Council on Education and AACRAO, an organization of college registrars.

Supporting Success
Nonprofit student success programs face major scaling challenges even when they’ve proven effective, according to a new survey and report from the National College Attainment Network and America Forward. Only 24% of the surveyed organizations receive public funding—far below the national nonprofit average—limiting their ability to support students through college and into careers. The report calls for increased government investment and stronger infrastructure, including data systems, to expand these programs’ reach​.

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