Reassurance on AI

The Trump administration’s AI literacy guidance is aimed at workers, employers, education providers, and state leaders. Also, details on $145M in apprenticeship funds, a center that trains machinists and childcare workers, early research on new healthcare high schools, and essays on the AI literacy framework and how to make sense of nearly 2M credentials. (Subscribe here.)

Foundation for AI Literacy

With the freakout over AI’s potential to disrupt jobs and work hitting a fever pitch, the U.S. Department of Labor last week published a guide for AI literacy across workforce and education systems.

The voluntary guidance is aimed at state workforce agencies, community colleges, apprenticeship programs, job centers, and education officials. With a measured, reassuring tone about the technology’s potential, the federal agency is seeking to create a common foundation for guiding AI literacy efforts. 

“As AI adoption accelerates across industries, it is critical that all American workers build the AI skills that will allow them to share in the benefits that AI creates in the economy,” writes Keith Sonderling, the deputy U.S. secretary of labor.

The framework was developed with input from a broad range of experts. It’s designed to be a flexible “starting point,” one that will evolve as AI advances and the labor market shifts. The department is seeking feedback while exploring how to include industry-specific guidance and to share promising AI literacy models.

One of the document’s seven design principles focuses on experiential learning, arguing that AI literacy is best developed through work-relevant experiences. Literacy efforts should be included in registered apprenticeships, CTE curricula, short-term credentials, and reskilling programs, the department says.

The framework also cited the need to close access gaps—like a lack of broadband or digital literacy—as a prerequisite for AI literacy. 

The Trump administration recently promoted the use of funding through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the primary federal workforce system, to help participants develop AI skills. And the Labor Department’s new framework is tied to the broader AI Action Plan and talent strategy from the White House.

The smattering of reactions to the document were mostly positive. The framework offers practical guidance rather than existential hand-wringing, Randy Sparkman, a veteran IT manager who is leading a regional AI task force in Alabama, writes in an essay for Work Shift.

However, others criticized the framework for being too general and boosterish of AI, and largely silent on worker protections.

The National Skills Coalition welcomed the effort and the department’s focus on helping workers to build the foundational and technical skills they need to adapt to rapid technological change. 

To meet the moment, the U.S. needs durable, systems-level policy solutions, says Caroline Treschitta, senior government affairs manager at the coalition. She encouraged the administration to work with Congress on AI literacy, pointing to bipartisan support for helping people train and land good-paying jobs.

The policy focus should include strong career pathway strategies that connect foundational digital skills to industry-recognized credentials, Treschitta says, and developing high-quality labor market data.

The Kicker: “To ensure the framework translates into meaningful impact, we also need complementary policies that strengthen the overall workforce ecosystem,” she says.

Pay-for-Performance Apprenticeship Funding

The U.S. Department of Labor released details about a new $145M pay-for-performance program to expand registered apprenticeships in key fields like shipbuilding, AI, and healthcare—setting a relatively high bar for the kinds of grantees and level of growth it will incentivize.

“In general, we think the department got the structure right, but there are a few elements that will present challenges for prospective grantees,” says John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America, which advocates for apprenticeship expansion.

The program plans to award up to five cooperative agreements that will run for four years. Grantees must be national in scope and will only operate in a coordinating role rather than being allowed to serve apprentices themselves. The vast majority of the award dollars are required to be passed along as incentive funding to a larger group of apprenticeship sponsors, including small and midsize businesses, to defray their costs. 

And those sponsors will only be eligible for incentive funding if they are starting a brand-new program or can show that they are bringing on new apprentices above and beyond 125% of their typical enrollment over the past three years.

“The ‘new apprenticeship’ approach to identifying apprenticeships for funding—while sensible from a value-for-money standpoint—will be operationally challenging and may pose challenges for industries with a more mature apprenticeship footprint,” Colborn says.

Details: Awardees will have some flexibility in how they design the incentive structure for program sponsors who meet the baseline requirements. But they will be:

• Limited to a maximum incentive payment of $6K per apprentice;

• Expected to make initial payments when a sponsor hires a new apprentice and keeps them for at least 90 days;

• Encouraged to provide additional payments for key outcomes, such as program completion.

That is similar to the structure of pay-for-performance programs in states like California, which provides $3,500 per apprentice per year and an additional $1K completion bonus.

“We have always said that the pay-for-success model should be viewed as incentive dollars and working capital for the growth and development of apprenticeship, not as a funding vehicle to cover all program costs,” Colborn says. “From that perspective, we think the grant competition will be a good test of these incentive amounts at a reasonable level of scale.” —By Elyse Ashburn

Training Machinists and Childcare Workers

Childcare is a common challenge for workers in the skilled trades, who often don’t have a typical workweek. Likewise, childcare workers tend to be in short supply, in part because their jobs are difficult and don’t pay well.

A training institute for the trades in Washington State is taking on both challenges simultaneously, reports veteran education journalist Nirvi Shah for Work Shift.

The Machinists Institute, which manages seven registered apprenticeship programs, is opening a childcare center with unusually long hours. Through a partnership, the institute will provide training to early childhood educators and employ apprentices who are training and pursuing licenses to become early educators.

“We hope this is a model that can be scaled and replicated across Washington State,” Shana Peschek, the institute’s executive director, tells Shah.

Click on over to Work Shift to read the full article.

Early Research on Healthcare High Schools

One of the most ambitious and innovative experiments we’ve written about is the development of 10 new healthcare high schools around the U.S. That project began two years ago with a $250M investment from Bloomberg Philanthropies and has since expanded with two more sites.

An early look at four of those high schools comes from researchers at Harvard University’s Project on Workforce.

The results are preliminary, their report cautions. But the research gives a glimpse of the first cohort of students enrolled at these high schools and how they’re faring, with a look at their career pathways, work-based learning participation, and postsecondary opportunities. The featured schools are located in Boston, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte, N.C.

“We are constantly iterating on this, so it’s very helpful for us to see the data,” says Jenny Sharfstein Kane, the education lead for Bloomberg Philanthropies.

A large majority of students at three of those schools (Charlotte didn’t submit sufficient data) are Black or Latino, a greater share of the student population than is seen in statewide CTE health science programs, but in line with their urban districts. Female students are the majority at all three sites. 

The ongoing research from Harvard is helping to inform the work. For example, Kane says one way they’re trying to address the gender split is by bringing male healthcare workers into the schools to talk about career options. The project plans to continue releasing data as the schools develop.

“We really feel strongly about sharing information in as quick and constant of a manner as we can,” says Kane.

Open Tabs

Short-Term Credentials
The Labor Department announced the availability of $65M to help community colleges develop short-term training programs that seek eligibility for Workforce Pell grants. Awards could be as large as $11M, with the department focusing on applicants that are working on an integrated, learner-centered, and industry-aligned state-level data system. The funding complements the U.S. Department of Education’s $15M in support for scaling talent marketplaces.

Labor Scarcity
Traditional workforce strategies are designed for a world that no longer exists, according to research from Lightcast. Global regions that rely most on immigration will see inflows drop steeply; AI adoption is lowest in sectors facing the most severe labor shortages, like healthcare; and manufacturing hubs may rise not where capital is cheapest, but where education systems, business investment, demographics, and politics support long-term industrial growth.

Entry-Level Jobs
IBM plans to triple entry-level hiring in the U.S. this year, bucking job market trends and expectations. Nickle LaMoreaux, the company’s CHRO, made the announcement last week, saying that IBM changed job descriptions for entry-level roles to account for tasks that AI can handle. The company even plans to increase hiring for entry-level software engineers. However, IBM also cut thousands of jobs last year, in marketing, HR, and other roles.

Pell Shortfall
The Pell Grant program faces a projected $5.4B shortfall in FY 2026, which will grow to nearly $11B next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Congress last year provided a onetime fix of $10.5B for the program. Meanwhile, the National College Attainment Network notes that Pell awards have failed to keep pace with living costs and now cover less than a third of the cost of attendance for an in-state student at a public university.

Accreditation and ROI
College accrediting agencies emphasize student outcomes in their standards and public materials, but their performance expectations remain uneven and at times unspecified, finds a multiyear research project from Ithaka S+R. The nonprofit research group released four related reports and policy recommendations. Few of the studied accreditors’ standards directly require colleges to monitor their students’ postgraduation results.

Robots and Jobs
The adoption of robotics and automation will be a gradual, continuous, and incremental process during the coming decades, according to a paywalled research brief from Oxford Economics. However, self-driving technology is already relatively proven and has the scope to eliminate about a third of transportation and warehousing jobs in the U.S. Other sectors with high vulnerability include manufacturing, accommodation and catering, retail, and extraction.

Job Moves
Annelies Goger has been hired as director of research at UpSkill America at the Aspen Institute. A fellow at the Brookings Institution since 2019, Goger’s research has focused on the future of work, inclusive economic development, and human-centered approaches to policy design.

Jeff Strohl announced his planned retirement as director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Strohl, who previously was the center’s director of research, said he’d stay in his role until a new director is in place.

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