Getting to Work

With AI’s job impacts looming, a broad commission of experts say the U.S. needs to go big with a coordinated plan for educating and training workers. Also, a research brief on the transformational workforce effects of CHIPS, and new guidance from the feds gives apprenticeships more flexibility while clarifying states’ authority. (Subscribe here.)

Time for Bold Strategies

Politicians are too distracted by partisanship to craft a coherent plan for workforce development. Meanwhile, the gap between what people learn and what the labor market demands is growing, and most Americans no longer believe their children will have a better life than they do.

Those are the stakes laid out by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on the American Workforce, which this week made its case for a national talent strategy.

“Our country really needs this,” Bill Haslam, a former Republican governor of Tennessee and the commission’s co-chair, said at an event in D.C. “We have a crisis in front of us in not preparing people for the world that’s coming.”

The nonprofit BPC and its president and CEO, Margaret Spellings, created the commission early last year to answer questions about the federal government’s role in the looming transition to an AI-enabled world. Deval Patrick, a former Democratic governor of Massachusetts, is the commission’s co-chair.

BPC tapped 24 commissioners, ​including senior federal and state officials and leaders in education, technology, and industry. The group held meetings with 52 experts from all those sectors to discuss K-12 education, postsecondary pathways, workers, and supports for them.

Talent strategies aren’t carried out in D.C. And the first charge of the commission’s report is to transform the federal government’s role from a “fragmented obstacle” into a “coherent strategic partnership with states that enables the development of local talent and engagement with the private sector.”

The commission’s blueprint calls for the creation of a cross-agency federal talent advisory council, with a mandate for coordinating with governors, state workforce boards, and industry leaders. Likewise, the feds should develop a talent data system to track learner and worker progression from K-12 through employment. 

Improvements to education-to-work data systems should include:

• Allowing state agencies to get wage and employment data from federal tax information.

• Collaborating with states to enhance unemployment insurance wage records.

• Creating a modernized state block grant program that builds on longitudinal datasets and workforce data quality initiative grant programs.

The commission also backs skills-first strategies for workforce education and training, including skills frameworks and learning and employment records. Examples the report cites as promising include the Alabama Talent Triad, the Lifelong Learning Passport from the Learning Economy Foundation, and California’s development of a cradle-to-career data system.

Another key plank of the blueprint is a redesign of education systems around learner and worker needs, with clear pathways from high school through training to good jobs. And it calls for upgrading benefits and supports for working families to remove barriers that prevent people from working, training, and advancing.

The commissioners acknowledged that working through extreme partnership won’t be easy. Policy discussions these days look nothing like the bipartisan energy Haslam tapped into more than a decade ago with Tennessee’s groundbreaking tuition-free community college push.

Yet the event struck a hopeful tone, with speakers suggesting that state and city governments could make progress even as bipartisan cooperation is virtually nonexistent in Washington.

“We have to ignore the fringes and pay attention to the 80% of people who are in the middle,” said Mattie Parker, the Republican mayor of Fort Worth, Texas.

The commission also argued that many of its goals could be accomplished without much new money. The federal government spends more than $250B annually on 150+ education, workforce training, and childcare programs across several agencies, according to the report. It called for more creative, coordinated, and flexible uses of that funding.

“You can’t know if it’s not enough money” until a coherent strategy is in place, said Patrick.

AI is driving much of the urgency around the commission’s work, and some of the optimism. The U.S. needs a new “grand bargain” between the public and private sectors to help avert AI-driven mass unemployment, Gina Raimondo, the U.S. secretary of commerce during the Biden administration, wrote this week in The New York Times.

Yet at the event, Raimondo echoed several other speakers by saying that anxiety about the tech could fuel support for apprenticeship and many of the strategies championed by the commission.

The Kicker: “How about we use the shock of AI to finally make some of this happen at scale?” Raimondo said.

CHIPS Shows the Way

Raimondo played a big role in the complex execution of the CHIPS and Science Act, which has been led by the Commerce Department.

That work shows that strategic public-private investments can transform workforce development systems, with payoffs that persist even amid a volatile economy and partisan politics, writes Lavea Brachman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in a research brief published by Work Shift.

“These programs are pioneering new innovations and collaborations,” she writes, which are “pushing their impact beyond the semiconductor sector with significant repercussions on training in advanced industries broadly.”

Click over to Work Shift to read the brief, which is the first of a three-part series.

Federal Guidance on Apprenticeship

The U.S. Department of Labor issued guidance this week that provides more flexibility around the length of registered apprenticeships and how they recognize prior experience, while also telling some states to stop impermissibly giving advisory councils the authority over approving programs.

The overarching aim of the guidance is to make it easier to scale apprenticeships and reach the president’s goal of 1M apprentices a year. It comes after a year in which the number of new apprentices flatlined.

State Role: In the 29 states that register apprenticeships themselves, rather than relying on the federal Office of Apprenticeship, the authority to approve programs has long been assigned to the state apprenticeship agencies, not advisory councils. But the rule has been loosely enforced and at least a handful of states give councils more power, which the Labor Department says has resulted in slow and inconsistent approval processes in those states. 

Josh Laney, a vice president at the Competency-Based Education Network and head of the federally backed National Project on Apprenticeship Standards and Interoperability, says one issue has been that advisory council members—often a mix of employers, labor representatives, and community leaders—have valuable expertise, but also often vested interests. Ensuring they aren’t in a program approval role is a much-needed move, he says.

Flexibility: Other parts of the new guidance provide more flexibility around the length of competency-based and hybrid apprenticeship programs, lift the 50% cap on how far into a program an apprentice can start based on experience and demonstrated skill, and set clearer standards for measuring completion rates.

Laney welcomed additional flexibility for competency-based programs, but with caution. “If registration agencies don’t watch carefully, we’re going to get a flood of sponsors registering programs that really should not be apprenticeships just so they can access the funding,” he says.

On the whole, experts on apprenticeship say that the changes are a mixed bag and a lot will hinge on implementation. Organizations like Apprenticeships for America would like to see a more comprehensive approach to reform.

“Overall, there is some good progress here,” says Harry Leech, vice president at AFA. “But it’s not possible to modernize a system through piecemeal subregulatory guidance—we need Congress to act to reauthorize the National Apprenticeships Act and create the conditions for scale.”

Scale: The number of new apprentices actually declined slightly last fiscal year—about 315K started apprenticeships, compared to 317K the year before—marking the first drop since 2020, when the pandemic halted many new enrollments, according to new federal data.

More learners stayed in their apprenticeships, however, with the number of cancellations dropping and completions growing more slowly. As a result, the total number of active apprentices climbed 5% to just over 702K by the end of the fiscal year. Federal apprenticeship data has significant limitations, including inconsistencies in how states report, but it can still be useful in discerning general trend lines. 

Leech says the flatline wasn’t surprising, given upheavals in federal staffing and contracts, a drop-off in entry-level hiring, and construction slowdowns in many regions of the country. Federal investment also hasn’t increased.

“The administration has not requested additional funding for apprenticeship,” Leech says, “so it’s not surprising that we haven’t seen significant growth in 2025.” —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Workforce Pell
The U.S. Department of Education issued proposed rules for the extension of Pell grants to short-term programs through Workforce Pell, with comments open for 30 days. The rules closely follow the framework agreed upon by the negotiating committee in December and include completion, job placement, and wage requirements while delegating a lot of decision-making and program oversight to governors and state workforce boards.

To help states build the data infrastructure to do that work, a coalition of 20 national organizations just released a Model Workforce Pell Data Framework.

AI and Jobs
A new measure of AI-driven job displacement risk from Anthropic combines theoretical LLM capability and observed usage data. The most exposed occupations include computer programmers, customer service reps, and financial analysts. Workers in heavily exposed roles are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher paid. Systematic increases in unemployment have not occurred, the report says, but AI remains far from reaching its potential.

Shrinking Workforce
The U.S. labor force participation rate is down to 62%, finds the latest federal jobs report. Updated Census data resulted in a decrease in the population level for men in their prime working years and an increase for women over age 65, driving down the labor force participation rate. The data adjustments are understated, writes Ron Hetrick, Lightcast’s principal economist, as many immigrants have left the labor pool while the population ages.

Data Centers and Unions
OpenAI has partnered with North America’s Building Trades Unions to promote apprenticeship for the AI construction boom. The partnership seeks to ensure that AI infrastructure projects support union jobs, expand apprenticeships, and create local economic opportunity. NABTU said the collaboration also would cover policy development, labor standards, project safety, and responsible AI infrastructure expansion.

Workforce Tool
Career Explore Northwest is a broadcast campaign and an interactive online resource that helps young workers explore careers and see the pathway to enter them, Nick Beadle, a former Labor Department official, writes in his newsletter. “Young people might feel more comfortable with a job if they see someone who looks like them doing it or if they can verify with the worker that they really make the salary the employer says they do.”

College Transition
Braven, a nonprofit that works on closing the gap between college and careers for low-income and first-generation students, is a grantee of the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding platform housed at TED. While the award amount wasn’t disclosed, Braven says it will cover roughly a quarter of the group’s five-year plan to work directly with 50K students and to enable 650 colleges to provide world-class career preparation.

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